Susan Ioannou
Susan Ioannou | |
---|---|
Born |
1944 Toronto |
Occupation | Author |
Alma mater | University of Toronto |
Genre | Poetry, Fiction, Literary Nonfiction, Children's Literature |
Susan Ioannou (born 1944) is a Canadian poet who lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Biography
Ioannou was born in Toronto. As a young child, she wrote fiction, but by her teen years, she wrote more poetry than fiction.[1] In 1966 she received her bachelor's degree and a year later, her master's degree from the University of Toronto.[2]
Ioannou taught English at Bloor Collegiate Institute, for six years during the 1970s.[2] In 1973, she was the Vice-President of the Ontario Council of Teachers of English.[2]
From 1980 to 1989, she served as Associate Editor of Cross-Canada Writers' Quarterly/Magazine, and into the 1990s, led poetry workshops for the Toronto Board of Education, Ryerson University, and University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies. In 1985, she founded the writers' resource Wordwrights Canada, and in 1988, created its poetry course, now the online Lessons in Writing the Poem.
Her poetry has inspired music by contemporary composers, Norwegian Gjermund Andreassen and Canadian Leslie Uyeda.[1]
Work
Ioannou describes her process of writing poetry as "meditative" and that she draws from "details of everyday life."[2]
Her poetry has been favorably reviewed by Mark Cochrane who describes her collection, Clarity between Clouds as a reboot of the "quest for clarity and solidity in a blurry and crumbling posthumanist epoch."[3]
Ioannou's book of poems about minerals and rocks, Looking Through Stone: Poems About the Earth was distributed in Ontario schools as part of a specialist curriculum.[4] Her interest in writing about geology grew when her son was completing his PhD work.[5] Ioannou relates that she spent ten years learning and reading about geology and whenever something interested her, she tried to create a poem based on that idea.[2]
Bibliography
Poetry
- Motherpoems - 1985, 2011 (PDF)
- Familiar Faces/Private Grief - 1986, 2011 (PDF)
- Clarity Between Clouds: Poems of Midlife - 1991
- Where the Light Waits - 1996
- Read-Aloud Poems - 2001, 2011 (PDF)
- Coming Home: An Old Love Story - 2004, 2011 (PDF)
- Who Would Be a God? (with Lenny Everson) - 2004
- Balkan Poems - 2005 (PDF)
- O Canada - 2005 (PDF)
- The Merla Poems - 2006, 2011 (PDF)
- Catalysts & Catastrophes: Feline Poems - 2007 (PDF)
- Looking Through Stone: Poems about the Earth - 2007, 2010 (eBook)
Nonfiction
- A Magical Clockwork: The Art of Writing the Poem - 2000
- Holding True: Essays on Being a Writer - 2008, 2010 (eBook)
- Writing Reader-Friendly Poems Plus Writing Exercises - 2011 (eBook)
Children's literature
- The Hidden Valley Mystery - 2010 (eBook)
- A Real Farm Girl - 1998, 2010 (eBook)
- Polly's Punctuation Primer - 1994, 2010 (PDF)
Fiction
- Nine to Ninety: Stories across the generations - 2009, 2010 (eBook)
References
- 1 2 "Susan Ioannou". Canadian Literature. Retrieved 23 July 2015.
- 1 2 3 4 5 "Susan Ioannou: Biography". Canadian Poetry Online. University of Toronto. Retrieved 23 July 2015.
- ↑ Cochrane, Mark (1995). "The Ordinary Certainties of Life: Excursions in Hometown Ethnopoetics". Essays on Canadian Writing (55): 248. Retrieved 23 July 2015. (subscription required (help)).
- ↑ Werniuk, Jane (June 2007). "Looking Through Stone: Poems About the Earth by Susan Ioannou". Canadian Mining Journal 128 (5): 6. Retrieved 23 July 2015. (subscription required (help)).
- ↑ "Susan Ioannou". Authors Aloud. Retrieved 23 July 2015.
External links
- Susan Ioannou's home page
- Profile University of Toronto Library Canadian Poets
- Ygdrasil Feature
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