Susan Briante is the author of Defacing the Monument, essays on immigration, archives, aesthetics and the state, winner of the Poetry Foundation's Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism in 2021. In addition, she has written three books of poetry, most recently The Market Wonders. Her work can be found in The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Best American Poetry, and The Brooklyn Rail (among many other venues). She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona, where she directs the Southwest Field Studies in Writing Program, which brings students to the US-Mexico border to collaborate with community-based environmental and social justice groups and a member of the Detained Project, a public facing archive that gathers the oral histories of formerly detained migrants and asylum seekers.