Suzanne Buffam was born in Montreal, raised in Vancouver, and currently lives in Chicago. Her first collection of poetry, Past Imperfect, was published by House of Anansi Press in 2005 and named a 2005 Book of the Year by Toronto's The Globe and Mail newspaper. Past Imperfect won the League of Canadian Poets' Gerald Lampert Award in 2006. Her second collection of poetry, The Irrationalist, was published in 2010 by House of Anansi Press in Canada and Canarium Books in the USA, and was named a finalist for the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her work appears in several international anthologies and publications, including Poetry, Jubilat, A Public Space, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Books in Canada, Prairie Schooner, and Breathing Fire: Canada's New Poets; and has been translated into French, German, Spanish, and Slovenian. She won the 1998 CBC Literary Award for Poetry and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She received an MA in English Literature from Concordia University in Montreal and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Chicago.

[BCBW 2012]