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 and was published in 1985. Its title poem has been included in The Norton Introduction to Poetry, Norton Introduction to Literature and several other anthologies and textbooks. Her second book, Transit, was published by Iris Press in 2001. She has three chapbooks: tenderly pressed, a memoir in poetry and The Ether Dome (Every Other Thursday Press 1993 and 2000) and a chapbook in the Greatest Hits invitational series (Pudding House Publications 2000).
Her poems have been published in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry and other journals in the United States, as well as in Ireland, England and France. They appear in many anthologies, most recently in The Book of Irish-American Poetry From the Eighteenth Century to the Present, Ed. Daniel Tobin (Notre Dame University Press, 2007), and on several websites. A poem from Transit has been featured twice on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac.
Donnelly has been a fellow at The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. A founder of the 29-year-old workshop of poetry colleagues, Every Other Thursday, she lives, writes and teaches poetry in Cambridge, Massachusetts.