Bio | Susan Glickman

SUSAN GLICKMAN grew up in Montreal, the eldest of four children. She began her post-secondary education at Tufts University in Boston, studying dance and drama, spent a year in Athens practicing amateur archaeology and professional tanning, and concluded at Oxford University with a degree in English Literature. She stayed on in England to answer phones and peruse the slush pile at Sidgwick & Jackson’s publishers, returning to Canada in 1977 to become an editorial assistant  with a small left-wing press in Toronto.

This job somehow inspired her to write a doctoral dissertation on Shakespeare’s dramaturgy at the University of Toronto, where she taught English and Canadian Literature and Creative Writing until 1993. Since then she has taught part-time at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies, The Chang School of Ryerson University, the Lycée Francais de Toronto, the Avenue Road School of the Arts, and with Writers in Electronic Residence. She also works as a freelance editor specializing in academic books, a job which keeps her in touch with other people who appreciate semi-colons as much as she does.

Susan Glickman is the author of five books of poetry from Signal Editions of Véhicule Press: Complicity (1983, o.p.), The Power to Move (1986, o.p.), Henry Moore’s Sheep and Other Poems (1990), Hide & Seek (1995) and Running in Prospect Cemetery: New & Selected Poems (2004). Her first novel, The Violin Lover, came out in 2006 from Goose Lane Editions. It was named one of the year’s best novels by The National Post and won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for fiction. Her first children’s book, Bernadette and the Lunch Bunch, came out from Second Story Press in September 2008 and was a starred selection of the Canadian Children’s Book Centre’s Best Books for Kids & Teens: Annual, 2009. The second, “Lunch Bunch” title, Bernadette in the Doghouse, just came out in October 2011, to excellent reviews.

Her literary history,The Picturesque & the Sublime: A Poetics of the Canadian Landscape (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), won both the Gabrielle Roy Prize for the best work of Canadian literary criticism in English and the Raymond Klibansky Prize for the year’s best work in the Humanities. Susan has received Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council and Toronto Arts Council Awards in poetry, fiction and non-fiction, and published essays and book reviews in such periodicals as Brick, Canadian Literature, Essays in Canadian Writing, The Journal of Canadian Poetry, Books in Canada and Maisonneuve.

Susan has lots of forthcoming publications in poetry and prose, for both adults and kids, starting with the third title in the “Lunch Bunch” series, Bernadette to the Rescue, in March of 2012 . Also coming out in spring 2012 will be Susan’s sixth collection of poetry, The Smooth Yarrow, with Signal Editions of Véhicule Press. Fall 2012 should see the publication of Susan’s second novel, The Tale-Teller, with Cormorant Books.

Yes, it’s a crazy year ahead!