bio
photo © Toan Klein
Born
in 1953 to Canadians living in Baltimore, 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 Ryerson
University, the Lycée Francais de Toronto, the Avenue Road School of the Arts,
and with Writers in Electronic Residence. She and her husband, glass artist Toan Klein, have two
wonderful and talented children, a less talented guinea pig, and
an inconsistently white but excessively charming dog.
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, The Lunch Bunch, will be coming out from Second Story Press in 2009. She's currently looking for a publisher for her second novel, Esther, Star of the Sea. Are you interested?
Her book 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
English Canadian literary criticism and the Raymond Klibansky Prize for
the
best work in the Humanities. She 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, The Journal of Canadian Poetry, Books in Canada and Maisonneuve.
Her hobbies are dance, gardening, knitting and making jewellery.
She has been known to commit the occasional pun.
In her dreams, she plays a mean blues piano and swims with dophins.
Buy her books and you will make her a very happy person.
"Anyone
who has a library and a garden wants for nothing.
"
--Cicero
© Susan Glickman 2007