Susan Donnelly was born and raised near Boston and lived in New York City and Orange, New Jersey for several years before returning to the Boston area in 1975. Her first book of poetry, Eve Names the Animals, won the inaugural Samuel French Morse Prize from Northeastern University and was published by its press in 1985. The title poem of that collection is included in The Norton Introduction to Poetry and The Norton Introduction to Literature, Sixth Editions. Donnelly has also written two chapbooks, tenderly pressed, a Memoir in Poetry and The Ether Dome (Every Other Thursday Press, 1993 and 2000).

She has published in many magazines, anthologies and textbooks, including The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Massachusetts Review, The Louisville Review, Oxford American, Vital Signs (University of Wisconsin Press 1989) and Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, Drama and the Essay (McGraw Hill, 1995). Her poetry has been published in Ireland, England and France, recorded on the CD "One Side of the River" (Say That! Productions 1997), and been set to music by composer Joelle Wallach and performed at Lincoln Center. The title poem of Transit won the 1999 Jim Wayne Miller Prize in Poetry from the Kentucky Writers' Coalition and was published in Wind. Donnelly's poetry also appears online at several websites, including Atlantic Unbound and the Poetry website.

She has been a Fellow on several occasions at colonies such as The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony. She has received two Hazen Fellowships in Poetry from Mount Holyoke College and a Professional Development Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. The founder of the 21-year-old writers workshop, Every Other Thursday, she lives, writes and teaches poetry in Cambridge, Massachusetts.