Little more than a year ago, on October 23, 2015, Susan Hicks died tragically after being struck by a speeding car on Forbes Avenue in Oakland while cycling home from her job as Assistant Director for Academic Affairs at Pitt’s Center for Russian and East European Studies.
When I learned of Dr. Hicks’ death, I mourned, as did others who read about her, for the senseless end to a young life, one of unusual accomplishment and promise. I continued to read about Susan with the lingering sense that I’d met her, though I couldn’t place how. When I read that she’d earned a BA at Pitt, with one of her two majors in English Literature, I began to rack my brain. Not until I came across a photo of a younger Susan, her face rounder and her cheeks fuller than in more recent photos, did I realize she’d been my student in a poetry workshop at Pitt 14 years prior.
That class and her role in it began to return to me in fragments. Her critical writing had impressed me, as had her poems—especially a sestina in which she modulated the form, placing some of the repeating words within lines instead of at lines’ ends. I remember that she responded modestly to any praise, that in a group filled with more vocal personalities, Susan remained reserved. I did not get to know her well. It is only in speaking with people about her since her death that I’ve begun to learn what an extraordinary person she was.
A native of Woodbridge, Va., Susan graduated as valedictorian of her high school class in 1999. She entered the University of Pittsburgh the same year on a distinguished Chancellor’s Scholarship, graduating in 2003 (Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa) with a BA in Anthropology and English Literature, along with a certificate in Russian and East European Studies. After earning a master's in Administration and Policy Studies through Pitt's Department of Education, with a thesis based on field work in Eastern Siberia, she completed her PhD in Cultural Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in the fall of 2011. Her dissertation, funded by a U.S. National Science Foundation Arctic Social Sciences Program fellowship, concerned the relationship between indigeneity and shifting sense of ethnic identity among the Sakha (Yakut) in northeastern Russia.
In 2013, at age 32, Susan returned to the University of Pittsburgh as a program manager for the Center for Russian and East European Studies (CREES), after living abroad in Siberia, Mongolia, and Peru, teaching in British Columbia, and supervising groups of American students in Russia. In 2014, she was promoted to CREES' Assistant Director for Academic Affairs.
I set out to learn more about Susan, particularly about the role her literature major may have played in her life. My search opened a window into a large community deeply saddened by her death. Every person I contacted was eager to recount memories of Susan, portions of which I've shared here.
At a one-year memorial this past October, on the packed second floor of the Brillobox in Bloomfield, I met one of that event’s organizers Dawn Seckler—interim Director of CREES and Susan’s friend and colleague. Seckler shared an e-mail she wrote to friends after Hicks’ death, describing the rigor of Susan’s research, her mentorship of students at CREES, and her profound effect on those with whom she worked:
As a cultural anthropologist, Susan conducted her research by living among the people she was studying, and for her, this meant long stretches of time in Siberia, specifically, in Russia's Sakha Republic. Susan already spoke Russian fluently, but to really integrate herself into the indigenous community, she also became one of the very few non-native speakers of Sakha. As a colleague from Yakutia wrote after hearing of Susan's tragic death, “All of Siberia is crying. Susan was ours; our ambassador to the West.”
There are not many 30-something Americans who have spent years living and studying in Siberia and who translated those experiences into a professional career in academia, developing and leading study abroad programs and serving as adviser to undergraduate and graduate students studying Eastern Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union. Susan was a truly unique individual.
Even as an undergraduate, Susan took on the role of adviser and teacher. Another student in my 2001 poetry workshop, Bill Caperton, shot a film of one of his poems for a final project and, in the credits, thanked Susan. I contacted Bill, now a psychologist and musician in Los Angeles. He’d remained friends with Susan after the class and wrote movingly about the loss of his former classmate. While Bill didn’t save the film of his poem, his memory of one scene led him to a reflection on Susan:
I am standing on the ledge of the Mellon Institute library, between large columns, on a foggy and cold evening. Yellowish light. I remember the camera slowly zooming in to focus on the lines of the poem painted on white butcher paper, which I held in front of my chest.
So now I can see Susan's eye focusing on this image, and what comes to awareness is that she brought such attention to her friends, to her work, to our conversations, to the world. In the [poetry] workshop, she was passionately engaged, working to help us other fledgling writers find a richer vein, a clearer diction, the heart of the poem. I remember also a conversation with her perhaps the year after the workshop, after she had travelled to Mongolia and decided to major in anthropology. … I can see now that she moved towards telling other people's stories, helping make sense of how people come to have a sense of their identity. I know personally that this small project, and the time we spent together more broadly, certainly helped me come to deeper sense of myself. I miss her.
Another course Susan took as part of her English major was Introduction to Shakespeare. When she returned to Pittsburgh in 2013, she joined a Shakespeare reading group created by friends Erica Fricke, Health Policy Director at Allies for Children, and Matthew Fagerburg, a Pitt alum and Assistant Professor of Biology at Carlow University. Fagerburg noted, “Susan was always cast in the hardest roles because she inhabited them so fully.”
The group read Shakespeare’s texts in conjunction with watching various adaptations. “We had a blast reading the original text and then ‘revisiting’ it through updated iterations,” writes Fricke, “Taming of the Shrew, followed by the BBC Shakespeare Retold version, followed by Kiss Me Kate … and then we'd always try to find a ‘straight’ version as well. Nothing like watching universal themes expressed in ways specific to an era!”
Another participant in the readings, Jessica Friedrichs, also a Pitt alum who is now an assistant professor of Social Work at Carlow University, wrote to me about the group and about her friendship with Susan:
I met Susan in 2000 through my now-husband, Matt [Fagerburg]. She loved literature. It was a beautiful thing to watch her read Shakespeare. The idea of our group was that the work is more powerful when read aloud. She took that on in an interesting way.
We were reading Hamlet at the time of Susan’s death. She did the “To be or not to be” speech, and her reading was so moving it gave me chills. It was wonderful to hear someone speak the soliloquy who understood so well what it meant. I remember that I’d meant to text her to tell her how much her reading had meant to me, but she was gone the next day. Our group never finished the play.
She was incredibly intelligent—she lived the life of the mind in some ways—yet was also a wonderful, caring friend. She had a way of balancing, and a way of giving you a new, philosophical perspective that could make you think differently about things.
The English department London study group may have been Susan’s first study abroad experience, something that paved the way for her career. We discussed that students often begin by visiting an English-speaking country, and that experience opens their horizons.
When she moved back here she stayed in our house while looking for a place, and we asked her to stay longer, so she lived with us for about a year. It was a turning point for me. We had a small child and I was so happy to have Susan in our lives that I wrote a silly poem about her. She inspired that in me.
Another story Jessica shared is that Susan (who carted a huge library across the country when she moved) bought her niece a book of E.E. Cummings’ poetry for her third birthday. Susan’s brother Michael Hicks, who is also a Pitt alum and an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Miami University of Ohio, noted that, after starting off with the very adult Cummings book, Susan moved on to giving his daughter other wonderful but more age-appropriate literature. Michael wrote to me about aspects of Susan’s relationship with language:
I remember her frustration with anthropologists who could only speak transmission languages (Spanish, for her work in South America; Russian, for her work in the former Soviet Union) and not the actual local languages (Quechua, Yakut/Sakha, respectively). Given that the various folks typically spoke the transmission languages as fluently as they did their local languages, what bothered Susan wasn't that anthropologists couldn't communicate with them, but that their communication was always going to be from the outside, because the events that constitute the lives of these communities are often carried out in the local languages.
This is an instance of a general point, which I think speaks to how Susan's interest in language worked: she was primarily interested in the way linguistic practice manages to form communities, both at the micro level (sharing poetry with friends) and at a more macro level, helping to constitute political wholes.
Among English department faculty, Professor Michael West worked most closely with Susan and remained her friend until the time of her death. A part of the Pitt faculty since 1974, West is known for advising undergraduates on pursuing graduate studies and for mentoring students in writing prize-winning essays.
I've taught many courses in Irish literature and first met Susan as a student in a University Honors College seminar on the subject. She wrote a wonderful paper: “Headstrong Women and Timid Men: Social Marginalization of Males and Female Empowerment in O’Connor’s Ireland.”
Anthropology was her chief intellectual interest. We were studying the short stories of Frank O’Connor in some depth. She knew of an anthropological study by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland, that examines the curious fact that whereas in most populations women outnumber men in incidents of schizophrenia, in rural Ireland there are more male schizophrenics than female. Caught in the pull between conflicting ideals—being the forceful male breadwinner while being restrained (sexually, certainly) by Catholic Church policies in the 1930s—Irish men might ultimately wind up lapsing into one form or another of mental illness. With this sort of seminal aperçu about Irish culture, Susan integrated a reading of 12 or so stories by O’Connor that in various ways exemplified what Scheper-Hughes was talking about. It is the best paper I’ve ever read from that course.
After the course, West worked with Hicks independently to revise the paper for submission to the 2003 Undergraduate Research Symposium, sponsored by the Center for European Studies and CREES, and open to undergraduates from any institution and any major. The panel on which Susan presented featured four student papers dealing with international contexts, and hers won first prize of $300 as the best paper on that panel.
West remained in touch with and continued to advise Hicks during her graduate studies and subsequent job search. When she returned to Pitt to take on her position at CREES, they met occasionally to talk and saw one another at the Undergraduate Research Symposium, at which West’s students continue to present.
I was very pleased that she saw her position as fulfilling—not the least because it gave her an opportunity to teach. By all I could tell she was an impressive teacher, very well regarded by students as well as colleagues. She would tailor-make courses to fit the Center’s needs. She was imaginative in coming up with original pedagogical schemes.We had good discussions—about her career, about what her position enabled her to do to encourage the kind of pedagogy she wanted to see.
I also write and publish in comparative literature. At one point, I was particularly eager for help with some passages where I had to supply the original Russian. Susan had excellent Russian; she helped me transliterate the Cyrillic passages, and I was very grateful for her help. I can attest that she was just a great person—sharp, promising, generous.
I remember about three weeks before her tragic death, we’d met for a drink at The Porch. We’d had a long chat about how things were going and as we parted she hopped on her bike and pedaled off. Her death hit me very hard. I think of the Theodore Roethke poem, “Elegy for Jane (My Student, Thrown by a Horse).” The Susan I mourn was no girlish college student like Roethke’s, but (mutatis mutandis) his poem catches some of what I’ve found myself feeling since her tragic death.
In learning about Susan Hicks, I had also thought of the Roethke poem, particularly the line, "I, with no rights in this matter," as I sought information from people who found it painful to speak about her.
Another friendship formed at Pitt and rekindled when Hicks returned to Pittsburgh was with Katie Matson, also a former student of Mike West. An English major at Pitt, Matson went on to do graduate work in literature at the University of Virginia and is now U.S. Executive Director of Hekima Place, a home for orphaned and vulnerable girls in Kenya. Katie shared memories of Susan at both stages:
Susan was ethical to the point that a more cynical person might have called her overly idealistic, but she was also logical. As a student, when she learned of deplorable factory conditions, she decided to stop buying new clothes and shopped only at second hand stores. Based on conversations with her in recent years, Susan retained those qualities—she stayed very principled but very practical.
She and I both had Chancellor’s Scholarships and were both active in the Honors College. As undergrads, we participated in a Wednesday night poetry series, YARR. It was a way to talk about ideas—to create community through literature. It was still the age of Doc Stewart [the Honors College Founding Dean G. Alec Stewart], a time of sitting around tables debating ideas, passionately; exploring politics, philosophy, literature.
Doc Stewart’s phrase was “Life Above the Neck.” As you get older, it’s easy to lose track of that. Susan never did. Her broad intellectual interests remained central to her life. She was extremely smart, open to life in all its capacities. She loved to learn.
In her job at Pitt she was very passionate about her students. Being in the classroom was important to her, and she worked hard to make that happen. She was hired as an administrator but carved the position she wanted in a short time—creating a new model for being an academic. She wasn’t tenure track. She wasn’t an adjunct. She designed a very dynamic job in which she could teach, mentor, and shape the course her students’ education would take. She was just beginning what I’m sure would have been an exciting and fulfilling career.
For me, though, it’s about the friend she was--someone genuinely interested in other people—who wanted to talk about your interests, who you were as a person.
In addition to her other admirable qualities, Susan was an excellent athlete with a love of the outdoors—not only as a cyclist but as a runner, hiker, swimmer, and more recently, a rower. During 2008 and 2009, she kept a blog entitled Adventures in the Pole of Cold that chronicled her experience in Yakutia conducting research for her doctoral dissertation. Her writing in the blog suggests that her wonder at the natural world rivaled her passion for its people:
The Skies of Yakutia
If there is any reason to come to Yakutia, it is for the sky alone. Even the darkest of days, you can see every ripple in the clouds above you so that it doesn't feel like clouds, but rather giant, soaked cotton balls, wrapping the world in their folds. And even then, the sun usually peeks through in tiny patches.
In the forest clearings, or alaases, these rays of sunshine appear like markers of hidden treasure. Sometimes, I imagine that the geologists who first searched for diamonds here must have followed just these arrows of light in their searches through the Taiga. When there are no clouds, the sky is blue blue blue, like a never-ending roof that stretches above you, convincing you that everything is attainable, that you too could reach the sun if you collected enough feathers.
—Yakutia, August 24, 2008
Olga Mukhortova is a graduate student at Pitt in Slavic Languages & Literatures combined with Film Studies, with whom I’ve been fortunate to work as a Writing Center consultant. In the summer of 2014, Olga collaborated with Susan on a CREES Russian language study-abroad program for ROTC students. Because the defense department would not allow the students to study in Russia, the eight-week intensive program was set up in Narva, Estonia, a 95 % Russian-speaking city very close to the border. Mukhortova, who has continued to teach in the summer program, praised Hicks’ dedication, her organizational skills, and her unique knowledge not only of Russian language and culture but also of the various ethnic identities that comprised the former Soviet Union. Mukhortova’s most enthusiastic praise was for Susan’s ability to inspire others: “She was the main mother—the caregiver to a group of 30-plus students. They put in five hours of class work daily, plus homework and physical training. But Susan made the atmosphere very light. She had this quality of contagious optimism. You’d feel exhausted, but you’d look at her and remember why you were there.”
Susan apparently inspired her ROTC students even in athletic competition. During her time in Narva, she competed in a local beachfront triathlon that included running with a large paddle board, paddling on the board, and swimming in the Baltic Sea. She tied for first place, a feat all the more impressive given that the average water temperature of the Baltic at Narva in July of 2014 was 63 degrees Fahrenheit.
During their time in Narva, one subject Susan discussed with Olga was her experience in Yakutia: “She spent many months, maybe a year, in a village without indoor toilets or hot water. The temperature in the winter could go as low as -60 degrees C (-76 F). This is something not every Russian anthropologist would do. It’s not just about difficulties, you have to completely change your everyday habits. You need really strong guts. And she became very close to the people of the village.
“She had skills to inspire people. I have no doubt she would have had a brilliant career as an academic.”
The number of memorials and honors commemorating Susan attests to the depth of her impact on those who knew her. Dawn Seckler and Katie Matson are among the organizers of The Susan M. Hicks Memorial Fund, "created by Susan's family, friends, and colleagues, [which] seeks to celebrate and continue her passion for international education, by providing support to University of Pittsburgh students studying abroad in Eastern Europe or the countries of the former Soviet Union."
Moreover, the University of British Columbia established the Susan M. Hicks Award for Graduate Research in Eurasia, granted on an annual basis to a UBC Faculty of Arts graduate student planning to conduct research in Eurasia. And Susan was posthumously awarded the University of Pittsburgh School of Education’s 2016 Early Career Award. The University of Pittsburgh Honors College dedicated a student lounge area on the newly renovated 37th floor of the Cathedral of Learning in Susan’s memory, including a painting, Russian Women Dancing, honoring Susan’s love of both Russia and dance.
Beyond academia, the terrible loss of Susan's life may have sped up much-needed action toward redesigning streets in Oakland. ACTION for Safe Fifth-Forbes, a group spurred by Suan's death and organized through Bike Pittsburgh, has advocated for a protected bike lane along Forbes in Oakland between Craig Street and Bigelow Boulevard (Plans are already in place for the lane to extend from Craig to Beeler, and for additional lanes to be added elsewhere in Oakland). At the October 21, 2016 memorial for Susan, City Councilman Daniel Gilman announced that the city had approved the start of the design phase to install a bike lane to be named for Susan between Bigelow and Craig, where a white ghost bike now commemorates her life and death. "We're recognizing that these streets are for everyone," said Gilman. "This city is not just for cars anymore." The presence of more bikes and fewer cars on the road reduces air pollution, noise, and congestion, among other benefits--for all of us. I hope not only for more protected bike lanes, but for a more widespread acceptance among residents that the streets are truly for everyone.
I’m thankful for the generosity of those who shared memories of Susan. Her exuberance for living becomes palpable in their stories. Her model for scholarship—grounded in community, action, and activism—seems inseparable from her investment in the lives of others. Remarkably adventurous in her intellectual pursuits, she was a person deeply, physically connected to the planet and its people.
Northern Lights.
The one good thing about having to leave your house to use the restroom here is that it forces you to go outside occasionally. It's already well below freezing here, so we are not hanging out in the yard late into the evening anymore. But, thanks to the lack of indoor plumbing in Nyurba, I finally got to see the northern lights yesterday night. And it was spectacular. My friends were unimpressed... apparently a comparatively weak show. But, for a person who has never seen them before, it was breathtaking. A line of dancing green clouds lit up half the midnight sky, flickering like neon flames out of the heavens. They flickered and, very slowly, drifted, fading in and out. Now stronger, now weaker, but bright bright green. I watched for around 10 minutes, before I was dragged inside to keep from freezing. When I went out again an hour later, the sky had turned black again.
-Excerpt from Susan Hicks' blog (Yakutia), October 11, 2008.
Susan Hicks is survived by her parents, Julie and Steve Hicks, and her brothers Brian, Michael, and David Hicks.
Thanks to Mike West, Nancy Glazener, Katie Matson, Jessica Friedrichs, Olga Mukhortova, Bill Caperton, Dawn Seckler, Michael Hicks, Erika Fricke, Karen Billingsley, Matthew Fagerburg.
—Barbara Edelman
Barbara Edelman is a lecturer in English at the University of Pittsburgh, where she coordinates the Writers’ Café. Her first full length poetry collection, Dream of the Gone-From City, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press in February of 2017.