Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing

Susan is the author of the novel, Elsey Come Home (Knopf 2019), which delves into the far corners of addiction, marriage, and motherhood. Her memoir The Foremost Good Fortune was an Oprah Magazine Top Ten Pick, an Entertainment Weekly Memoir to Read, and the winner of the Maine Literary Award for Memoir. Her novel Paris Was the Place was a People Magazine Top Pick, a Slate Magazine Summer Read, an Elle Magazine Readers Prize Selection and a Boston Globe Top Pick. Her third book, the poetry and photography collaboration Stop Here This is the Place, was a Real Simple Magazine Must Read and won the Maine Literary Award for Publishing Excellence.

Susan has received grants and fellowships from The Macdowell Colony, The Breadloaf Writers Conference, The Maine Arts Commission, and The Massachusetts Arts Commission. She was the Maine Literary Fellow for 2016.

Other work has appeared in magazines including The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, The Daily Beast, The New York Times, Ploughshares, The North American Review, The Harvard Review, The Virginia Quarterly, The Three Penny Review, The New England Review, Witness, Downeast Magazine, Middlebury Magazine, and Omnivoracious.

She's taught creative writing and literature at colleges including Colby College, the University of Maine at Farmington, and the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, where she was awarded the Jack Kerouac Visiting Writer Fellowship.

Susan was raised in rural Maine, and after several years in California, Boston, and Beijing, she now lives in Portland (Maine) with her husband and two sons, where she is a founder of The Telling Room, a creative writing center serving 4,000 Maine students annually. The Telling Room is guided by a belief in social justice and the understanding that when children have access to their own stories, their lives are changed as well as the communities they live in.