Susan Conley

SHE | HER | HERS

  • Stonecoast MFA Faculty

Education

  • MFA, San Diego State University
  • BA, Middlebury College

Susan is the award-winning author of five critically acclaimed books, including her newest, best-selling novel Landslide, named a New York Times Book Review “Editor’s Choice,” a TODAY Show “Best Summer Read,” a Vanity Fair Magazine “Books We Can’t Stop Thinking About,” and a “Best Book” by Good Morning America, The New York Post, Medium, Bustle, and others. Her writing has appeared in magazines and journals including The New York Times MagazineThe Paris ReviewLithub, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Harvard Review and others. She’s been awarded multiple fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, as well as fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Maine Arts Commission, and the Massachusetts Arts Council. She’s won the Maine Book Award and the Maine Award for Publishing Excellence and has been a featured Tedx Speaker, where her talk the “Power of Story,” has been viewed widely. She’s taught at colleges and international art-residencies including Emerson College, Colby College, The University of Massachusetts, as the Jack Kerouac Visiting Fellow, The Haystack School, The Spannochia Foundation, La Napoule Foundation, and The Beijing Hutong. She lives in Portland, Maine, where she is the co-founder and prior executive director of the Telling Room, a youth creative writing lab that believes in the power of story to change lives and communities. For more information, visit her website.

Selected Publications

  • Landslide, a novel (Knopf 2021)
  • Elsey Come Home, a novel (Knopf 2019)
  • Stop Here This is the Place, a poetry/photography collaboration (Downeast Books 2016)
  • Paris Was the Place, a novel (Knopf 2013)

Education

  • MFA, San Diego State University
  • BA, Middlebury College