Author and freelance journalist, Susan is the winner of the Fairfield University Book Prize for her collection The Genuine Stories (New Rivers Press, 2018). The novel in stories was picked as a top book of  2018 by the Cedar Rapids Gazette and a finalist for the 2020 San Diego Book Award.

Born and raised in Philadelphia, she moved to Iowa with her husband and family in 1981. Susan began her writing career as a columnist for Practical Horseman Magazine when her youngest daughter was attending horse shows. She is the author of the very popular The Horse Show Mom’s Survival Guide (The Lyons Press, 2005). She divides her time between Iowa and San Deigo, California.

An MFA graduate of Fairfield University in Connecticut, she is currently a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

I write because I have so many questions about the ineffability of life and our lived experience. I write to answer all those questions to myself, to sort  facts from  feelings,  impressions from  memories, and to look in the spaces for the unobserved. And I write because I love to tell stories.

As part of my PhD dissertation, I am writing a novel about memory and the mythologies of culture and family that shape our lives. What started out as an examination of dementia has morphed into the question of memory itself, what we choose to maintain and embellish and what we let go of. Every question I ask spawns twenty more. It has been a long process.

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