About Susan Michele

Susan’s first full-length book, In the Needle, A Woman, was the Winner of the 2024 Donna Wolf-Palacio Prize. The book was published by Finishing Line Press on July 28, 2025. Versions of the award-winning book were finalists for Harbor Editions' Laureate Prize (2021), the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award (2023), the C&R Press Poetry Award (2023), and the Louise Bogan Award (2024).

In 2023, Susan won the Massachusetts Poetry Festival’s First Poem Award for “When My Mother’s Hands Were Called,” which appears in her debut book. A two-time Pushcart nominee, Susan has had poems published or forthcoming in numerous journals including (in alphabetical order): Amethyst Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Cider Press Review, Common Ground Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Glint, Gone Lawn, Gyroscope Review, The Inflectionist Review, Jewish Writing Project, The Macinaw, McQueen's Quinterly, Minyan, Mom Egg Review, Newtown Literary, The Night Heron Barks, Nixes Mate, Of the Book, One Art, Passengers Journal, Pedestal, Redivider, Right Hand Pointing, Sheila Na Gig, Spillway 29, and SWWIM Everyday. In 2022 she was one of eight featured poets in The Aeolian Harp Series. In 2021 and 2023, her poems were finalists for the Millennium Writing Awards and longlisted for the Sappho Prize. Susan’s poems were also included in 2020 Summer Anthology: A Headrest for Your Soul published by Other Worldly Women Press, and in the anthology Corona Global Lockdown, published by Poets Choice. In 2020 Susan received a Parent-Writer Fellowship from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing.

Susan has an M.S. Ed. in Applied Linguistics from Queens College (City University of New York) and a B.A. in English from Indiana University-Bloomington, where her focus was creative writing and journalism, and her mentor was Pulitzer Prize winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa. She holds a post-B.A. certificate in elementary education from the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, and completed coursework for a post-M.A certificate in early childhood special education. For ten years Susan worked as an elementary and ESL teacher in the New York City public schools, where she earned National Board Certification as a middle childhood generalist.

In the 2021 Susan was a guest blogger on the website Motherhood Later than Sooner, where she wrote theater reviews. She is a former staff writer at the Long Island Jewish World and now-defunct North Adams Transcript in the Berkshires. A resident of Ridgewood, Queens for over twenty years, Susan has owned and directed a daycare business that offers a nurturing environment of learning and play for young children under age 4.

Beginnings & Core Values

Susan’s writing is influenced by personal, cultural, and geographical experiences growing up in New York City in the 1970s and 80s. Her mother is a former elementary school teacher who taught her to read at age 3. While growing up, Susan's parents took her on road trips on the East Coast, which exposed her to new environments and ideas.

After studying piano for ten years, Susan was accepted into LaGuardia High School for Music and Art, but attended Stuyvesant High School instead, where she discovered modern poetry and got to meet Allen Ginsberg during a special visit. She loves exploring new places, both domestically and internationally. After graduating high school, she traveled solo across Great Britain without a cell phone, and has visited other countries including Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, The Bahamas, Bermuda, France, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, and Mexico.

Susan has always used writing as a vehicle for personal transformation and creativity. She has performed stand-up comedy, and created and performed a dramatic reading of a one-woman show called “Psychically Seeking Susan,” about her life as a divorced parent.

Personal

Susan enjoys spending time with her two grown children and one teenage daughter, as well as other family and close friends. When not writing, Susan likes to take advantage of living in one of the most diverse and culturally rich cities in the world by visiting museums and restaurants, and attending concerts, film festivals, poetry readings, theater performances, and Yiddish cultural offerings.

She enjoys living in Ridgewood, Queens. Her neighborhood is lined with linden trees, and is within walking distance to an M subway station, cafes, the public library, and two bookstores. In 2023 Susan was selected to study at the Uriel Weinreich Summer program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture, the oldest intensive Yiddish summer program in the world. As an intermediate-level Yiddish language learner, Susan is committed to learning Yiddish, the language of her ancestors.