Susan Donnelly
Susan's latest full-length book is The Maureen Papers and Other Poems (Every Other Thursday Press 2021). The title poem in the book was a co-winner of the 2019 Samuel Washington Allen Award from the New England Poetry Club. Recent chapbooks include The Finding Day; Sweet Gooseberries, a sequence of poems about childhood, and The Path of Thunder, one writer's experiences finding a path in racially divided America. Susan is the author of three full collections: Eve Names the Animals from Northeastern University Press, Transit and Capture the Flag from Iris Press, and three additional chapbooks.
Her first book of poetry, Eve Names the Animals, won the inaugural Samuel French Morse Prize from Northeastern University (1984). Her individual poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, and many other journals in the United States, as well as in Ireland, England, and France. They are also included in many anthologies and on several websites and blogs. She has been featured several times on Writers Almanac. Susan’s poem “Chanson on the Red Line,” the first poem in Transit, was a Common Threads choice for statewide discussion in 2016. For a video of her reading and commenting on the poem, see Common Threads at the Masspoetry.org website.
The founder of the ongoing group of Boston area poetry colleagues, Every Other Thursday. Susan supported herself for many years as a university administrator, drawing regular sustenance for her writing from residencies at artist colonies such as Yaddo and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She now teaches poetry in both classes and individual consultations from her home in Arlington, Massachusetts. She has a daughter, Rachel Donnelly, a physician; a son, Patrick, an actor, and two grandsons, Aidan and John Patrick Harrison.