She is a co-founder of the Needlewriters cooperative which organises quarterly poetry events in Lewes, East Sussex.

She was raised on a small tenanted dairy farm in Salisbury, Wiltshire where her family milked fifty cows.

[2] Her early work (in the 1980s) appeared in magazines including Reality Studios, The Rialto and City Limits.

Some recordings of her work from a live performance, from this period, are in the British Library sound collection.

[28] Hugh Dunkerley in The London Magazine said of Home Farm, her fourth collection, "At a time when both politics and performance poetry seem to be about who can shout loudest, Sutherland’s is a quiet and necessary voice".

This was subsequently reworked and published as an essay accompanying new editions of Reznikoff's cycle of poems, Holocaust.