Susan Ioannou

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 [3] poetry course, which until 2017 ran online as Lessons in Writing the Poem.

Her poetry has inspired music by contemporary composers, Norwegian Gjermund Andreassen and Canadian Leslie Uyeda.[1]

Ioannou describes her process of writing poetry as "meditative" and that she draws from "details of everyday life."

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."[4]

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.[5] Her interest in writing about geology grew when her son was completing his PhD work.[6] 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]

Of her 2016 poetry collection Looking for Light, reviewer Sharon Berg writes: "She has a grasp of the element of time that stretches beyond her own stand on this earth and her poetry manages both to enlighten and delight us."

• Susan Ioannou's home page
• Profile University of Toronto Library Canadian Poets
• Ygdrasil Feature