Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing

Susan Conley is the author of the memoir The Foremost Good Fortune, which was an Oprah Magazine Top Ten Pick, an Entertainment Weekly “Memoir to Read,” a Goodreads Choice Award Finalist, and the winner of the Maine Literary Award for Memoir.

Her novel Paris Was the Place was an Indie Next Pick, an Amazon Big Book for Fall in Fiction, a People Magazine Top Pick, a Boston Globe Book of the Week, a Slate Magazine Summer Read, and an Elle Magazine Readers Prize Selection.

Her book Stop Here This is the Place, a collaboration of prose and photography, was a Real Simple Magazine Must Read, and winner of the Maine Literary Award for Publishing Excellence.

Susan has been awarded fellowships from The Macdowell Colony, The Breadloaf Writers Conference, The Maine Arts Commission, and The Massachusetts Arts Commission. Other work has appeared in magazines including The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, The Daily Beast, Ploughshares, The North American Review, The Harvard Review, Rattle, Downeast Magazine, Maine Magazine, and Middlebury Magazine.

She was the 2015 Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and has taught creative writing and literature at Emerson College, Simmons College, Colby College, and The University of Maine at Farmington. Susan lives with her husband and two sons in Portland, Maine, where she is the co-founder of The Telling Room, a creative writing lab for kids. Her most recent book, Elsey Come Home, is a novel forthcoming from Knopf in 2018.