About Suzanne

Suzanne Strempek Shea is the author of five novels: Selling the Lite of Heaven, Hoopi Shoopi Donna, Lily of the Valley, Around Again, and Becoming Finola, published by Washington Square Press. She has also written three memoirs, Songs From a Lead-lined Room: Notes - High and Low - From My Journey Through Breast Cancer and Radiation; Shelf Life: Romance, Mystery, Drama and Other Page-Turning Adventures From a Year in a Bookstore; and Sundays in America: A Yearlong Road Trip in Search of Christian Faith, all published by Beacon Press.

She is at work on a book about Mags Riordan, founder of the Billy Riordan Memorial Clinic in the African nation of Malawi, and is seeking publisher interest in a sixth novel, about a palm reader, and in an anthology on soap operas coordinated with novelist and dramatist Elizabeth Searle.

Winner of the 2000 New England Book Award, which recognizes a literary body of work's contribution to the region, Suzanne began writing fiction in her spare time while working as reporter for the Springfield (Massachusetts) Newspapers and the Providence Journal (Rhode Island). Her freelance journalism and fiction has appeared in magazines and newspapers including Yankee, The Bark, Golf world, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Organic Style and ESPN the Magazine. She is a regular contributor to Obit magazine.

Suzanne is a member of the faculty at the University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast MFA program in creative writing and is writer-in-residence at Bay Path College in Longmeadow, Mass. She has taught in the MFA program at Emerson College and in the creative writing program at the University of South Florida.

She lives in Bondsville, Mass., with her husband, Tommy, a columnist for The Republican newspaper in Springfield, Mass., and their two dogs, Tiny and Bisquick.