About

Susan Donnelly was born and raised near Boston, Massachusetts, a member of a large extended family whose spirit and histories are integral to her writing. She received a BA in English from Mt. Holyoke College. Her first book of poetry, Eve Names the Animals, won the inaugural Samuel French Morse Prize from Northeastern University; its title poem has been included in the Norton Introduction to Poetry since the 1996 edition.

Susan is the author of three full-length poetry books: besides Eve Names the Animals, she has published Transit and Capture the Flag with Iris Press. She has also written six chapbooks, the most recent of which is The Finding Day, (Every Other Thursday Press, 2019). The Path of Thunder (Cervena Barva Press 2017), came out a few years ago, and is a compilation of her poems written over years on the subject of race in America. Another new chapbook is Sweet Gooseberries (Every Other Thursday Press 2015), a sequence of poems on childhood. She has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Poetry East,The Sun, and in many other journals, textbooks and anthologies, in the U.S. and abroad.

Susan’s poem “Chanson on the Red Line” was chosen for statewide discussion by the Massachusetts Poetry Festival Common Threads Program in 2016. Her poetry also appears on several websites, including Writers Almanac, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner’s FUSION issue on “Aunts”, and at masspoetry.org as a Poem of the Moment (July 2015). Many individual blogs discuss Susan’s poems such as “Inoculation,” “Moondog” “The Bloody Mary” and others.

Susan has been a fellow at The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. A founder of the 35-year-old workshop of poetry colleagues, Every Other Thursday, she lives, writes and teaches poetry in classes and consultations from her home in Arlington, Massachusetts. She acted as judge of the Town of Arlington Poetry Contest in 2016. Susan gives regular readings of her work in libraries, cafes, schools, craft breweries and other venues in the Boston area.

Books, the kind in which I usually read a few pages a morning, tend to pile up at one end of my breakfast table. On this MARCH morning I’ll describe the current stack, before I may return some to the shelf to allow for substitutes. But I’ll keep David Surette’s collection Stable here a bit longer, to enjoy and learn from his intense, funny, and loving poetry about animals. Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Pictures From the Gone World, his early poems in a pocket-sized book I ordered from the Grolier, is a delight. I’ve also been rereading Obama Inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander’s American Sublime. George Saunders’ unique short stories have a place at the table, in his collection Tenth of December. Finally, a Christmas gift: Brandon Stanton’s photo collection Humans of New York. And having been a human in New York during some important years in my life, I love this boisterous appreciation.

A note from JANUARY: Charles Simic’s The Life of Images, a collection of his essays and reviews, is on the table now. along with Arthur Sze’s translations of Chinese poems, The Silk Dragon, and beneath them a beautiful poetry anthology edited by Kate Farrell, Time’s River, the Voyage of Life in Art and Poetry.

I don’t usually read fiction in the morning. But this week I’ve reread a story in The Complete Short Stories of Natalia Ginzburg, the distinguished Italian writer. “German Soldiers Pass Through Erra,” written in 1945, is a powerful account of people in a remote village caught in the immediate aftermath of war. Somehow it’s Eboli, and “The Lottery”, and mostly Ginzburg at her gentle, specific and laconic best. We care about this handful of villagers we meet in a few pages – and it hurts when we lose them.