Susan Ioannou

Susan Ioannou (born October 4, 1944) is a Canadian poet who lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Biography Ioannou was born October 4, 1944, to Frank and Margaret Thomas. As a young child, she wrote fiction, but by her teen years, she wrote more poetry than fiction. In 1966 she received her bachelor's degree and a year later, her master's degree from the University of Toronto. While attending the University of Toronto, she received the school's Nora Epstein Foundation award for poetry.

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."

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

In 1990, Ioannou received the Memorial Award for nonfiction from the Media Club of Canada and, in 1997, the Okanaga Short Story Award, as well as several grants from the Ontario Arts Council.

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."