AnnickPress

Susan’s career as a social misfit began early in life. She was kicked out of her kindergarten class for laughing, and sent to the library to contemplate her heinous crime while seated in the “Thinking Chair”. Susan understood then that books and thinking must be considered dangerous, and they became her favorite forms of escape. Not long afterwards she dropped out of kindergarten for good.

In grade eight Susan won her first poetry competition, with a poem in rhyming couplets about Jackie Kennedy visiting her husband’s grave by moonlight. Her prize was a copy of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. She has gone on to publish countless poems and over 20 books.

Apart from her mother burning her security blanket when she was four years old, her childhood was not a particularly unhappy one. She has struggled all her life to overcome that handicap.

Susan travels widely, both abroad and in Canada, to give speeches, writing workshops, and poetry readings. She draws on her experiences in public schools, psychiatric institutions, and maximum-security penitentiaries. She has held Writer-in-Residence positions at the University of Waterloo and the University of Western Ontario, and was awarded the Presidential Writer in Residence Fellowship at the University of Toronto. Since 1991, Susan has worked on-line with over a thousand high school students across Canada through the Writers in Electronic Residence Program. In 1997-98 she was Chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada.

Susan has been nominated for honors and prizes in five areas: poetry, fiction, non-fiction, children’s books, and as an editor. Four times shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award, she is the recipient of half a dozen Air Canada Frequent Flyer Awards (for points accumulated flying to receptions for prizes for which she has been shortlisted). She has won a National Magazine Award (silver) in 1981, the R.P. Adams Memorial Prize for Short Fiction (USA), the b.p. nichol Poetry Chapbook Award in 1991, and the People’s Choice Poetry Award from Prairie Schooner Magazine, 1994. In 1996 she received the Tilden (CBC/Saturday Night) Canadian Literary Award for Poetry. Also that year she received the Vicky Metcalf Short Story Editor’s Award.

Her most recent work includes writing the script for “Heroines” (Bravo, 2001): Poetic-script for documentary film on Lincoln Clarkes and the heroin-addicted prostitutes of Vancouver's lower east-side which was also broadcast by C.B.C.'s “Rough Cuts” in 2004. She wrote two 15-minute film scripts for the National Film Board’s “Teenagers at Risk” series in 1998 called “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” about teenagers recruited into the sex trade, and “Truth and Betrayal,” about the stress teenagers feel about being expected to keep secrets.

For Annick Press, Susan edited and contributed to the critically acclaimed Nerves Out Loud (2001), a stunning collection of stories by women writers recalling critical moments from their teen years. This anthology won the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award and was short-listed for the prestigious Norma Fleck Award. You Be Me: Friendship in the Lives of Teen Girls, the second book in the series, was published in 2002 and was also short-listed for the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award. Both titles in the series have earned a place on the New York Public Library’s Book for the Teen Age List. Certain Things About My Mother: Daughters Speak (2003) is a powerful profile of teen girls and of their complex and often rewarding relationships with their mothers. Leading and emerging young writers contributed to Perfectly Secret: The Hidden Lives of Seven Teen Girls (2004), the final installment in the series. Perfectly Secret is a heartfelt, honest, and sometimes painful testament that life isn’t always as it appears.

Susan and her husband, Stephen Reid (a bank-robber and author of the novel Jackrabbit Parole) were the subject of a CBC “Life and Times” documentary, “The Poet and the Bandit” in 1999.

Susan makes her home near Sidney, British Columbia, with her two daughters, Charlotte and Sophie, and husband. Here she works as a poet, novelist, columnist, reviewer, editor, and non-fiction writer.