A native of New Windsor, N.Y., Susan graduated with honors from Dartmouth College in 1984 with a bachelor’s degree in English literature. Susan has been a writer, editor and copy editor at various newspapers, including The News and Observer, The Baltimore Sun and The Hartford Courant. Since 2013, she has been Director of Communications at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace, a graduate school that focuses on interfaith dialogue and peacebuilding.

Susan’s articles and essays have appeared in many publications, including The Courant’s Northeast magazine, Reader’s Digest, and several anthologies. In 2022, she was thrilled to publish a humor piece with her illustrator daughter, Claire Wyman, in The New Yorker. Susan began writing fiction seriously after attending the Wesleyan Writers Conference in 2001. Her short stories have appeared in Inkwell, the Village Rambler and on www.bartlebysnopes.com.

Intercession, her first novel (published as A Watershed Year), won the top prize for novels in the 2006 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing competition. Intercession was also one of seven finalists for the Peter Taylor Prize given by the Knoxville Writers Guild. In early 2007, Susan received an Artist Fellowship Grant from the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism. In late 2007, Susan was fortunate enough to secure the representation of Jessica Regel of the Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency (JVNLA) in New York, who now runs Helm Literary Agency.

A Watershed Year was sold to Guideposts Books in 2009 and released in 2011. It was re-released by Amazon’s Lake Union division in 2013. Susan’s second novel, The Virtues of Oxygen, was published by Lake Union on July 22, 2014. A Watershed Year has been translated into German.

The Liability of Love, published by She Writes Press in July 2021, received a starred Kirkus Review and the 2022 Gold Medal in Popular Fiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards.