On her father's side, Suzanne is the granddaughter of Charles Fletcher Lummis, first City Editor of The Los Angeles Times, a position he took on in 1885 after walking across the country from Ohio.
He rose to fame as an Indian rights activist, early champion and preservationist of Southern California's Spanish heritage, and author of several books defining and describing the American Southwest.
Her parents, Keith Lummis and Hazel McCausland, met in the San Francisco office of the U. S. Secret Service, back when the agency was under the auspices of the U. S. Treasury Department.
Since 1991, she has taught various levels of poetry workshops through the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, including special focus classes she developed, “Exploring Other Voices: Writing the Persona Poem,” “The Complete Poet: Vulnerability, Sexuality, Sense of Humor,” “The Art of Craft,” and “Poetry Goes to the Movies: The Poem Noir.” Lummis's seminal work comingling poetry and film noir has helped to define the poem noir motif—a sensibility that fuses urban grit and urbane wit, and that draws upon film noir's tales of crime and human fallibility but also its striking dialog and starkly beautiful visual compositions.
In his KCET column showcasing Open 24 Hours under the title “Four Iconic Books in the Landscape of L.A. Letters,” Mike Sonksen dubbed her "a poetic Raymond Chandler.