Susan Conley was the 2013 Jack Kerouac Writer-in Residence at UMass Lowell.
Conley is novelist, memoirist, and co-founder of The Telling Room in Portland, Maine, a center to promote literacy, storytelling and creative writing for children aged 6 to 18.
Conley’s novel, Paris was the Place (Knopf 2013) was an Amazon Fall Pick for Fiction, an Indie Next Pick, and Elle Magazine’s Reader’s Prize Pick. Conley’s memoir, The Foremost Good Fortune (Knopf 2011)—which retells her experience living in China while being diagnosed with breast cancer, was a Top Ten Pick in Oprah Magazine, a “Book of the Week” in Slate Magazine, and winner of the Maine Literary Award for Memoir.
Conley has published work in The Paris Review, The Harvard Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares and many other journals and magazines.
She earned an M.F.A. from San Diego State University, and has taught creative writing, poetry, and literature at Emerson College in Boston.