Susan Conley

Susan Conley's novel, Paris Was the Place, was published by Knopf in August 2013. Her memoir, The Foremost Good Fortune (Knopf 2011), was excerpted in The New York Times Magazine and the Daily Beast. It was an Oprah Magazine Top Ten Pick of the Month, a Slate Magazine Book of the Week, and a finalist for the Goodreads Choice Award. It won the Maine Literary Award for Memoir. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, The Huffington Post, Ploughshares, The Harvard Review, and elsewhere.

She's received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Breadloaf Writers Conference, and the Massachusetts Arts Council. A former faculty member at Emerson College, she has also taught at Colby College and Simmons College. She currently teaches at the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing program, and she’s the Jack Kerouac Visiting Writer at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. She’s also the co-founder of the Telling Room, a nonprofit creative writing lab in Portland, Maine, where she leads a variety of workshops.