Bio

Author of three collections published by Doire Press, 2011, 2013 & 2018, Susan reads a selection from all three books here, at University of Missouri-St.Louis (Feb, 2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vno1MG2pSQE&t=13s . Her poems have appeared, among elsewhere, in: The Cafe Review, Oregan, USA - Gather In, in a Special Irish Edition; Bosom Pals,Ed Marie Cadden (Doire Press, 2017) an anthology entirely in aid of Breast Cancer Research in the National UniversityHospital, Galway and When They've Grown Another Me in Poetry Ireland Review, Dec 2018. https://www.poetryireland.ie/publications/poetry-ireland-review/online-archive/view/when-theyve-grow. In January 2018 her poems were Commended in the Gregory O'Donoghue Poetry Competition.

She has been an invited reader of her poems at local readings in Galway, Cork and Dublin and at festivals, including the Belfast Book Festival, Cuirt International Festival of Literature and Clifden Arts Festival and her poems have been read on radio.

Susan completed her degree in social science and qualified as a professional social worker in Trinity College, Dublin 1975. She was a psychotherapist, trainer, facilitator and occasional consultant to organisations for over thirty years until her retirement in 2012. Drawing together her writing with her earlier skills she has written interviews and facilitated conversations mediated by poetry. She has also published creative non-fiction.

Her workshop Having a New Conversation: About Dreaming was listed on the The Cuirt International Festival of Literature Programme (2015) and she facilitates similar workshops on a variety of themes, discussed through the medium of poetry, regularly and occasionally in local community settings.

While a founding editor of Skylight 47 Susan interviewed: then Ireland Professor of Poetry, Harry Clifton; Kay Ryan, the Pullitzer prize-winning poet and former US Poet Laureate, invited to Ireland by Dromineer Literature Festival - and Dani Gill, who talks about curating The Cuirt International Literature Festival.https://skylight47poetry.wordpress.com/previous-issues/. Susan's interview of Maeve O'Sullivan, appeared in The Honest Ulsterman February, 2018.http://humag.co/features/around-the-world-in-poetry-haiku-and-haibun

Wednesday, 17 October 2018

Doire Press poets on tour: A Crack in Everything/the Irish Times...

It's not everyday the Baldoyle Race Course gets commemorated in the opening lines of poem! A poem that goes on to explore changing landscapes. Thank-you to Ruth McKee wrote the article published in The Irish Times today and to be found at the link below.

I've only begun to allow myself acknowledge my shocked sense of loss when the UK voted for Brexit. A lifetime of divisions finally healing, now cracking... The ruptured landscapes of a divided island, divided family and divided history known personally and collectively. It's quite an amazing moment to be reading in Belfast Central library tomorrow at 3pm - as they celebrate 130 years of making books available and we verge on the edge of we know not quite what politically... I look forward to having an opportunity to voice what these cracks and memories have meant to me in poems such as When the Bombs Went Off.../ in Paris, New York, Gaza, Yemen.... (I wrote 'the poems went off' in error here first!) 'I thought of Belfast...'. Gather In: the oak tree of the poem; Derry, Doire, Doire Press who organised the visit; Ballinderreen where I wrote so many of the poems - town of the little oak, Requiem 2014,  and to hear for the first time my fellow poets - Maurice Devitt and Louis Mulcahy - read from their new books.

  https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/doire-press-poets-on-tour-a-crack-in-everything-1.3665376

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