Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing

Susan Conley’s memoir The Foremost Good Fortune (Knopf 2011), was an Oprah Magazine “Top Ten Pick,” an Entertainment Weekly “New Memoir to Watch,” a Goodreads Choice Award Finalist, and the winner of the Maine Literary Award for Memoir. Her novel Paris Was the Place (Knopf 2013), 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 most recent book is a collaboration of photographs and poetry called Stop Here, This is the Place (Downeast Books 2016).

She’s received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Breadloaf Writers Conference, and the Massachusetts Arts Council. She has taught writing workshops at Emerson College, Simmons College, Colby College, The University of Maine at Farmington, and The University of Massachusetts at Lowell, where she was the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence.

Other work of hers has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The Huffington Post, Ploughshares, Prarie Schooner, The North American Review, The Harvard Review, Downeast Magazine, Maine Magazine, Middlebury Magazine, and elsewhere. In 2016 she was awarded the Maine Arts Commission’s Literary Fellowship. Susan lives with her husband and two sons in Portland, Maine, where she is also the co-founder of The Telling Room, a creative writing lab serving thousands of Maine kids every year, guided by the belief that children are natural storytellers.