Susan grew up in New York City’s public housing, where characters moved through hallways and stairwells and people learned early how to read a room. Long before she had language for it, she was listening—to tone, to body language, to what wasn’t being said. That instinct to listen has shaped everything she’s done since.
As a writer, Susan is drawn to the ways people make meaning of their lives. Pole Dancers at the Red Barn, her debut novel-in-stories, grows out of that passion. She’s an alumna of the Writers’ Institute at the City University of New York and the New Directions Writing Program in Washington, D.C. She’s been accepted to a number of prestigious writers’ conferences, and her fiction has appeared in the New Directions Journal of Fiction and Poetry.
Photography became another way of paying attention. Her photo-essay South Bronx Barrio, a collection of images and vignettes about families in that neighborhood, is archived at the Museum of the City of New York and The Bronx Museum of Art. Another project, The Woman I Am, combines interviews and portraits exploring the relationship between women’s gender and their creative work; it is housed in the library of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.
For more than forty years, Susan also worked as a psychotherapist, sitting with people as they navigated love, loss, reinvention, and hope. That work continues to inform her fiction—especially her attention to emotional nuance and the narrative arc of a life.
She holds three master’s degrees—an M.S.Ed., an M.S.W., and an M.F.A.—a reflection of her lifelong love of learning.
Today, Susan lives in the Hudson Valley, in Rhinebeck, New York where she continues to explore life’s complexities through writing, psychotherapy, and photography—guided by the Socratic idea that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”
When she’s not writing, you’ll likely find her playing bridge or bocce, visiting museums, attending dance or theater performances, or taking a class in something she knows nothing about.