Suzanne Underwood Rhodes is an award-winning poet, a teacher of poetry, and the Arkansas Poet Laureate. A native of New York, she lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and has published several poetry collections, including the award-winning Flying Yellow (2021) and most recently, two chapbooks, The Perfume of Pain (Kelsay Books) and Flyways, a limited edition, hand-stitched book co-authored with Gerald Sloan. Her poems appear regularly in journals and anthologies such as Atlanta Review, Slant, Christian Century, Alaska Quarterly Review, Dappled Things, Mid/South Anthology, and Southern Voices: Fifty Contemporary Poets. (For a complete list, see About.) 

She received a Practicing Artist fellowship and grant award for 2023-24 from Artists 360, a program of Mid-America Arts Alliance with support from Walton Family Foundation and won the 2025 Individual Artist for the Governor's Arts Award sponsored by Arkansas Arts Council and was a resident artist at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

She taught creative writing and literature at King University, and teaches virtual poetry workshops through the Muse Writers Center in Norfolk, Virginia, as well as to women residents of the Magdalene Serenity House in Fayetteville whose poems she has published in a book, Today There Have Been Lovely Things. Twice a month she and poet friends take poetry and fun to residents in memory care at Butterfield Trail Village in Fayetteville. Her project "Poetry on Purpose" drew ideas from the tremendous work of the Alzheimer's Poetry Project.  

Thank you for visiting my website. In my role as the Arkansas Poet Laureate, appointed in January 2022 by Governor Asa Hutchinson, I have so many wonderful opportunities to share poetry throughout my state and beyond, through workshops, readings, and projects to bring the transformative power of poetry to young and old.

I'm available for readings and workshops, so feel free to contact me at s.underwood.rhodes@gmail.com. And, if you're a writer looking for an editor, please check out my independent editorial practice here on the website.

Most of the photos on this website were taken by my late husband, Wayne Rhodes, a professional photographer who specialized in landscape and nature photography.

What Poets Are Saying About Flying Yellow

"This is one of the richest poetry collections I have read in a long time. Here are the intense images of a 1960's childhood, vivid narratives of family stresses and joys, and a panoply of voices--from colonial American women to a very pregnant Mary. These poems excite the spirit with revelations of the holy that one encounters in the most unlikely places, which of course is where the holy often appears. It is impossible to read these poems passively. Instead, one luxuriates in their explorations of the beauty and the ambiguities and the mysteries of life fully lived."  -Jill Peláez Baumgaertner, Poetry Editor, Christian Century

"Once in a very long while, if you're lucky enough, a voice reaches out to haunt you in what the poet names a "syntax that gives shape to every scream." Here, in an American idiom we can follow and trust, Suzanne Rhodes manages to reveal a Presence that lives within and beyond us. In poem after poem after poem, she shows us with the spiritual insight and wit of a George Herbert, a broken world which, resurrected, can flame out in a music which, even as it burns, lifts us into a liminal space beyond anything we might ever have expected." -Paul Mariani, University Professor Emeritus, Boston College, poet and biographer

Flying Yellow is available at Paraclete Press, Amazon, and other major distributors. Coming soon on Audible!