Susan Donnelly is the author of three full poetry collections and five chapbooks. She was born and raised near Boston, Massachusetts, a member of a large extended family whose spirit and histories are integral to her writing. Her first book of poetry, Eve Names the Animals (1985), won the inaugural Samuel French Morse Prize from Northeastern University. Its title poem has been included in The Norton Introduction to Poetry since 1996, and has also appeared in several other anthologies and textbooks. Her books Transit and Capture the Flag were published by Iris Press in 2001 and 2009. Her two newest chapbooks are Sweet Gooseberries (2015), a sequence of poems on childhood, and The Path of Thunder (2017), poems about race in America.
Her poems have been published in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry and many other journals in the United States, as well as in Ireland, England and France. They appear in many anthologies, textbooks, syllabi, websites and blogs. Three poems are included in the anthology The Book of Irish-American Poetry, 18th Century to the Present (Notre Dame University Press 2007). Poems from both Transit and Capture the Flag have been featured several times on Poetry Daily and in Garrison Keillor’s Poets Almanac. The opening poem in Transit was chosen for statewide discussion in 2015 in the Common Threads program from the Massachusetts Poetry Festival.
Donnelly has been a fellow at The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. A founder of the 37-year-old workshop of poetry colleagues, Every Other Thursday, she lives, writes and teaches poetry in Arlington, Massachusetts.