Ilyse Kusnetz, who held the Sue Luzadder Chair in Communications at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida, died at her home in Orlando on September 13. She was 50 years old and had suffered from cancer.
A native of Baldwin, New York, Professor Kusnetz was a graduate of the University of New Mexico. She held a master’s degree in creative writing from Syracuse University and a Ph.D. in feminist and postcolonial British literature from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
Professor Kusnetz was the author of Small Hours (Truman State University Press, 2014), a poetry collection that won the 2014 T.S. Eliot Prize. An earlier book was The Gravity of Falling (La Vita Poetica Press, 2006).