Susan Connolly was born in Drogheda, Co. Louth, Ireland, in 1956. She studied Music and Italian at University College, Dublin. Her first full-length collection For the Stranger was published by the Dedalus Press in 1993. Other short collections include her sequence Boann in How High the Moon (1991), Race to the Sea (1999) and Winterlight (2002). Collaborations with artist and photographer Anne-Marie Moroney include Race to the Sea, Ogham: Ancestors Remembered in Stone (2000) and Winterlight. With Anne-Marie Moroney she co-authored Stone and Tree Sheltering Water (1998), an exploration of sacred and secular wells in Co. Louth. The publication of this book was sponsored by the Heritage Council of Ireland.

Susan Connolly was awarded the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in Poetry in 2001. In the same year she received a Publications Grant from the Heritage Council of Ireland for A Salmon in the Pool, a literary and place-names map of the river Boyne from source to sea. She has received bursaries from the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annamakerrig.

The poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin has written: "Connolly in her work explores the significance of place through layers of time, resonating with history, folklore and archaeology."

Several of her poems have been set to music by the composer Michael Holohan and have been performed in Ireland and abroad. A 40-minute programme about her poetry Touched by Winterlight was broadcast on ABC National Radio (Australia) in October 2005.

Her poems have been published in journals and magazines throughout Ireland and the U.K. and are included in the Field Day Anthology, Vol IV, Voices and Poetry of Ireland, Forgotten Light: An Anthology of Memory Poems, and Thornfield.