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 is also a freelance editor of academic books, work 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..  

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. 

Susan has lots of new projects in poetry and prose, for both adults and kids, of which more shall be revealed in the future. She and her husband, glass artist Toan Klein, have have two wonderful and talented children, and an inconsistently white but excessively charming dog. When she is not writing she can usually be found working in the garden, dancing, doing Pilates, knitting (yes, she made the scarf in the photo above) or making soup.

"Anyone who has a library and a garden wants for nothing. "
         --Cicero

© Susan Glickman 2007