Susan J. Atkinson

Susan J. Atkinson is an award-winning teacher and poet. She was born and raised in Northern Staffordshire, England and now makes her home in Ottawa. After fifteen years of being an elementary school teacher, her life has come full circle and she has returned, part-time, to the film industry, often working alongside her filmmaker husband.

Most recently she was named Honourable Mention in The New Quarterly’s 2023 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest and was Longlisted for Exile Edition’s 2023 Ruth and David Lampe Poetry Award. Her long-listed suite, Alice, Circa 1985, will be published as a chapbook, re-titled as Alice In The City, in 2025 by Anstruther Press.

Other awards include first place in The Carleton University Literacy Competition, Honourable Mention in ARC Magazine’s Diana Brebner contest and Notable Mention in The New Quarterly’s 2020 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest.

Her poetry has appeared in such journals as Arc Poetry Magazine, The Antigonish Review, The Dalhousie Review, Grain Magazine, The New Quarterly, Queen’s Quarterly, and Room Magazine.

Atkinson’s debut collection, The Marta Poems was published by Silver Bow Publishing in 2020. Her second collection, all things small, also from Silver Bow, was released in April 2024.

In its earlier stages The Marta Poems received Ontario Art Council Recommender Grant nominations from ARC magazine, Guernica Press, The New Quarterly and Palimpsest Press. In 2016 a suite from the collection was shortlisted for Exile’s Gwendolyn MacEwen Award and also for The Tree Chapbook Contest. Poems also won the Sawdust Series Poem-Off in May 2016.

Atkinson’s second major collection, all things small was also awarded Ontario Arts Council Recommender Grants during its early stages.

In 2015 Atkinson was named one of Ottawa’s Hot New Voices by The Tree Reading Series. She was one of 14 poets featured in the League of Canadian Poets “Tending the Fire” Chapbook, published in April 2020, and one of the Marta Poems was first published in The Heartwood Anthology, by The League of Canadian Poets.

Atkinson also writes poetry and stories for children and is the author of 4 picture books and a short collection of poems, published by Little Witch Press (www.littlewitchpress.com)