Susan Perly has worked as a radio producer at CBC. In the early ’80s her Letters from Latin America for Peter Gzowski’s ‘Morningside’ reported from locales such as El Salvador, Guatemala and Chiapas. During the Iran-Iraq war she broadcast Letters from Baghdad. She also produced many documentaries for ‘Sunday Morning’ during that time.
Perly’s short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and in the anthology Hard Times. ‘Jesus and the Toucan’ won second prize in the CBC Literary Competition in 1988 and was dramatized with Don Francks. It was her story, ‘1956: an excerpt’ (about Thelonious Monk and Glenn Gould), which led to the use of jazz as both subject and model in her writing. She has performed parts of Love Street with jazz musicians in Toronto.
Susan Perly lives in Toronto with her husband, the poet Dennis Lee.