SUSAN MUSGRAVE has been labelled everything from eco-feminist to anti-feminist, from stand-up comedian to poet of doom and gloom, from social and political commentator to wild sea-witch of Canada's northwest coast. In June 1999, TIME Magazine predicted she would become Canada's first Poet Laureate. (They were wrong, but that hasn't stopped her...)

Susan Musgrave's career as a social misfit began early in life. She was kicked out of kindergarten class for laughing, and sent to the library to contemplate her heinous crime while seated on the "Thinking Chair". She understood, then, that books and thinking must be considered dangerous, and they became her favourite forms of escape.

Her first book of poetry was published when she was 19. Of Songs of the Sea Witch, her grandfather said: "Even Shakespeare had to write alot of rubbish to begin with."

Susan has been nominated and has won awards for writing in five different categories: poetry, fiction, non-fiction, children’s books, and for her work as an editor. Four times short-listed for the Governor General’s Award, she is the recipient of half a dozen Air Canada Frequent Flyer Awards (for points accumulated flying to receptions for prizes for which she has been short-listed). She has been twice nominated for the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour. She has won a National Magazine Award (silver) 1981, the R.P. Adams Memorial Prize for Short Fiction (USA), the bp nichol Poetry Chapbook Award, 1991, and the People’s Choice Poetry Award, Prairie Schooner Magazine, 1994. Her poem, “Ice-Age Lingerie” received first prize in the Panty Lines Poetry Contest, 1999. Her children’s book, Dreams Are More Real Than Bathtubs, was selected by the Canadian Children’s Book Centre for Our Choice 1999-2000. She received the Tilden (CBC/Saturday Night) Canadian Literary Award for Poetry, 1996. Also in 1996 she received the Vicky Metcalf Short Story Editor’s Award.

Her most recent books are Cargo of Orchids (a novel, Knopf, Fall 2000), What the Small Day Cannot Hold: Collected Poems 1970-1985 (Beach Holme, 2000), and Things That Keep and Do Not Change (McClelland & Stewart, 1999).

Recently she has compiled and edited the following titles: Breaking the Surface(Sono Nis, 2000: Winner BC 2000 Book Award), Nerves Out Loud: Critical Moments in the Lives of Seven Teen Girls (Annick Press, 2001: Winner, Foremost Magazine Book of the Year Award, New York), You Be Me: Friendship in the Lives of Teen Girls (Annick, 2002), and Certain Things About My Mother: Daughters Speak (Annick, 2003).

Susan Musgrave's home is on Vancouver Island with her two daughters.