Susan McLean is an American poet, a translator of poetry, and a retired professor of English at Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall, Minnesota.She graduated from Harvard University with a BA in English in 1975 and from Rutgers University with a PhD in 1990. Her work has appeared in Kalliope, Atlanta Review, The Formalist, Iambs and Trochees, Arion, Measure, The Classical Outlook, Literary Imagination. She writes in the field of formalism. According to an interview with the Poetry Foundation, she describes her love of formalism as: " I am addicted to the esoteric pleasures of rhyme and meter, and I don’t even try to deny it or camouflage it with slant rhyme". She has been portrayed as a New Formalist by many if not most noted critics of her work.