Susman Named Poet Laureate of Burtonsville

Montgomery County resident Katherine “Katie” Susman has always had a love for words. Now she’s using her passion to enhance the lives of the people in her community.

On Thursday, Susman was named Poet Laureate of Burtonsville, MD, and received fellowship funding from the Academy of Old Line Poets.

Susman burst onto the Burtonsville literary scene in 2020 with her epic poem in limerick form, Jingles for Jeffrey's, consisting of 10 books with over ten thousand lines of verse. Nominated for a Pulitzer, judges singled out classic stanzas like:

There once was a woman from Burtonsville, 
With cheese drips from her mons to the Jeffrey's grill,
She said, in a fit, as she burned off her clit,
With my vag as a side you will eat well.

"Jingles for Jeffrey's got us through Covid," said Maryland Governor Wes Moore. "I read it to my kids every night."

Two years later, Susman silenced critics who said Jingles was her magnum opus, when she released Davido & Linette, a 4,042-line, 29,551-word play written mostly in iambic pentameter. 

Two single folk, him beneath her dignity,
In fair Burtonsville, where we lay our scene,
Fall in love despite his simplicity,
Where dominant ladies make men cuckqueans.

Though their tumultuous six-week marriage ended in an annulment, Susman credits Maryland politician Robin Ficker for influencing her writing career and inspiring Ficker Licking Good, which received the Maryland Art Council's Praisner Award in 2023.

Your wrinkles, they tell a story of trolling and losses,
Of a life spent mocked and political albatrosses,
Yet your eyes, dimmed with age, and red around the rim,
Still somehow create a warmth in my quim.

Susman says she will use the fellowship funding to pay expenses while she works on her next poetry collection, tentatively titled Paradise Posturepedic, about the first Burtonsville mattress salesman's apostasy.