S.M. (Suzanne) Manizza-Roszak, Dr

I arrived at the University of Groningen in January of 2021 after serving as an assistant professor of English at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina.

I am the author of three monographs in literary studies: Intersecting Diasporas (SUNY Press 2021), Uncanny Youth: Childhood, the Gothic, and the Literary Americas (University of Wales Press 2022), and They Also Write for Kids (University Press of Mississippi 2023). Essays connected with these projects have appeared in Arizona Quarterly, Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Contemporary Women's Writing, Green Letters, Modern Language Review, and Studies in the Novel.

In 2023-2024, I wrote a series of journal articles and book chapters on the social justice implications of rewritings and adaptations in recent Anglophone literature for age-diverse audiences. Covering writers ranging from Philip Roth and Philip K. Dick to YA novelist Elizabeth Acevedo to producers of “genre fiction” like Diana Gabaldon and Val McDermid, these articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Anglia: Zeitschrift für englische Philologie, in Neophilologus, and in volumes put out by Bloomsbury and McFarland. My current research centers on English-language literary representations of Dutch colonial history and its afterlives, beginning with a 2025 article in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction on sanitizing UK- and Australian-authored fictions of the Dutch colonial presence in Suriname and a forthcoming book chapter on Beryl Gilroy's fictionalized retelling of John Gabriel Stedman's autobiographical narrative.

I also write creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. My full-length poetry collection Sicilianas won the Lauria/Frasca Poetry Prize from Bordighera Press and was first finalist for the North American Poetry Book Award, judged by Lisa Russ Spaar; my debut novel, The Poison Girl, was published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2024, and I am currently at work on my first middle-grade novel. My poems have appeared Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, and Verse Daily; my CNF and short fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in ANMLY, DIAGRAM, failbetter, The Journal, Necessary Fiction, ROOM, South Dakota Review, and elsewhere. I am the managing editor of Seneca Review and read submissions of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry for literary magazines including SR and Cutbank.

I hold a PhD in comparative literature from Yale and an MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine. My research and curriculum development work have been supported by the Diversity Research Award from the Children's Literature Association, with SSH Open XS and Impact Explorer grants from the Dutch Research Council, and with the NRO's Comenius grant.