Essayist Suzanne Maria Menghraj writes about art and wilderness. She teaches courses in writing and arts criticism at New York University. Suzanne is also an advocate whose approaches to social justice have taken a number of forms over her career, from justice reform facilitation at the Vera Institute of Justice to her role as a former board member of the Center for Urban Pedagogy. While it is at NYU that she fully formed an identity as a champion of the underrepresented, her work in creating opportunities for public and inclusive discussion about race and other constructs shows a vigorous commitment to broad and creative civic engagement around pressing social justice issues. In recognition of this commitment and her long-standing work with the university's Opportunity Programs for students from low-income families, Suzanne was the 2018-2019 recipient of the NYU Center for Multicultural Education and Programs’ Angela Davis/W.E.B. Du Bois Faculty Nia Award.

Former chair of Critical Creative Production in NYU’s Global Liberal Studies program, Suzanne has over the course of nearly nineteen years at NYU served in various university leadership roles, including Liberal Studies Steering Committee co-chair, Faculty Assembly chair, Writing Curriculum chair, and Global Inclusion co-chair. She has brought to campus several talks and panels, including one on engaging community members in urban design and another on how visual and textual languages collaborate to address complex issues such as migration. While based at NYU Florence, she served on the campus equity committee and moderated a public discussion on the experiences of West African migrants in Italy. She has also led the design and organizing of a series of ongoing community and public discussions on Black lives as they are lived around the globe.

Suzanne’s interests in civic engagement are evident in her writing and other creative work as well. “Northern Range,” the short film she developed as a 2020 Brooklyn Public Library creative-in-residence, offers insight into her approach to writing about Trinidad., her family’s homeland. The film was projected onto the library’s facade at Grand Army Plaza in August 2020. Suzanne was also a participant in the library’s 2020 Night of Philosophy and Ideas and its Whispering Libraries project—recordings of Suzanne reading from her writing on race and migration were broadcast from libraries throughout Brooklyn. She recently contributed an essay on race-based jokes in twentieth-century Italian film and literature to The Languages of Discrimination and Racism in Twentieth Century Italy: History, Legacies and Practices, a book to be published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2021.

Suzanne is a former contributing writer for Guernica, a journal of global arts and politics. Her recent writing has appeared in People Holding, Punctuate, Writing on the Edge, and Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment, which awarded her essay “Usciolu” a nonfiction prize. As an essayist and wanderer, she often grapples with her place as a woman of color in the world: much of her writing focuses on fields of inquiry that have, historically, been closed off to Black women. But her work persistently reaches beyond the bounds of her own experience to engage others’ experiences and perspectives. An ongoing text-and-image project imagines personal and public archival materials—photographs, letters, recordings, slave registries, ship manifests, and maps—as traces of both forced and chosen global migration to Trinidad. Through her writing and candor as through her teaching and leadership, Suzanne brings NYU, New York City, and the wider world vital opportunities for open discussion about race, migration, being, and belonging.

Prior to joining NYU’s faculty in 2007, Suzanne taught at Columbia University and served as director of Columbia’s Writing Center and assistant director of its Undergraduate Writing Program. Earlier in her career, she worked in the national consulting division of the Vera Institute of Justice, where her efforts focused on facilitating criminal justice reform. She has since collaborated with several justice reform institutions, as well as such arts organizations as the Bronx Museum of the Arts and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The daughter of a Trinidadian immigrant and first-generation Trinidadian-American former Catholic nun, Suzanne grew up primarily in the Bronx and in Queens. Though New York City has been home to her for most of her life, she has also spent several years living and working in Italy. She is an avid trekker: she often hikes in the Adirondacks and Catskills, and has done solo treks of the Pyrenees’ GR10 and Corsica’s GR20, as well as treks throughout Italy, whose mountains she especially loves. Suzanne is also a longtime, long-distance cyclist. In 1998, she cycled from Seattle, Washington to Washington, DC in 48 days as part of the GTE Big Ride, a fundraiser for the American Lung Association. She is currently a hospice volunteer for VNS Health.

Suzanne earned her MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University and her BA in English literature from Cornell University. She currently lives in Brooklyn.