The Reindeer Camps

A winner of the Minnesota Book Award in fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, Barton Sutter’s latest collection details life on the Canadian border, presents portraits of northern plants and animals, rejoices in marriage, and traces the ancient ways of Siberian reindeer herders. The late Bill Holm called it ＂unlike anything Sutter (or anyone else) has done before.＂ Sutter’s poetry reminds us that other cultures have survived for millennia by living closer to the ground.

Born in 1949, Barton Sutter was raised in Minnesota and Iowa. He retired from the University of Wisconsin-Superior in 2011 and now lives in Duluth, Minnesota.

Born in 1949, Barton Sutter was raised in tiny towns in Minnesota and Iowa. He earned his B.A. from Southwest Minnesota State University and his M.A. from Syracuse. For ten years, he worked as a typesetter, then taught at various colleges for the next twenty-five, retiring from the University of Wisconsin, Superior, in 2011. He lives in Duluth, on a hillside overlooking Lake Superior, with his wife, Dorothea Diver.

The author of seven books, Barton Sutter has earned the Minnesota Book Award for poetry with The Book of Names, for fiction with My Father’s War and Other Stories, and for creative non-fiction with Cold Comfort: Life at the Top of the Map. Among other honors, he has won a Jerome Foundation Travel & Study Grant (Sweden), a Loft-McKnight Award in poetry, and the Bassine Citation from the Academy of American Poets. In 2006, he was named the first Poet Laureate of Duluth.

Sutter has read his work in a wide variety of venues--from Sandstone’s Quarry Days to the City College of New York, from Bayfield’s Big Top Chautauqua to Pittsburgh’s International Poetry Forum. He has written for Minnesota Public Radio, and he often performs as one half of The Sutter Brothers, a poetry-and-music duo. In recent years, his collaborations with composer Marya Hart--Bushed: A Poetical, Political, Partly Musical Tragicomedy in Two Acts and Pine Creek Parish: A Verse Play with Music--have won standing ovations.