Susan Brind Morrow is an author and poet who has written extensively on language and metaphor drawn from the natural world. Morrow has published translations of Greek, Latin, and Arabic poetry and hieroglyphic texts, which she studied as an undergraduate and graduate student in classics at Columbia University in New York. 

Morrow first went to Egypt as an archaeologist on the Dakhleh Oasis Project, and continued to live and study in Egypt and Sudan as a foundation fellow, living with the nomadic population, studying the Arabic language and desert traditions among the Beja with a particular interest in the origin of hieroglyphs in the desert environment. This decade of work became her first book The  Names of Things: A Passage in the Egyptian Desert, one of three finalists for the Pen Award in  1998. Morrow’s analysis, translation and commentary of the hieroglyphic text in the Pyramid of Unis, The Dawning Moon of the Mind: Unlocking the Pyramid Texts, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2015.

Morrow is the author of Water, a book of poetry, pen and ink drawings and watercolors, and a memoir of the Great Lakes region in New York State, Wolves and Honey. 

Morrow’s work has appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times, The Nation, The Seneca Review,  Peripheries: A Journal of Word and Image (Harvard Institute for the Study of World Religions), Best American Poetry and Lapham’s Quarterly. Morrow is a recipient of the 2022 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Morrow is on the editorial board of Lapham’s Quarterly and is a former fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation. Her papers are in the Sowell Collection at Texas Tech University.