Suzanne Strempek Shea

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 co-wrote 140 Years of Providential Care: The Sisters of Providence of Holyoke, Massachusetts with her husband, Tom Shea, and with author/historian Michele P. Barker. This is Paradise, a book about Mags Riordan, founder of the Billy Riordan Memorial Clinic in the African nation of Malawi, was published in April by PFP Publishing.

Her sixth novel, Make a Wish But Not for Money, about a palm reader in a dead mall, will be published by PFP Publishing on Oct. 5, 2014.

Suzanne’s essay Crafty Critters, about her lifelong love of knitting, a craft she learned in the “Crafty Critters” 4-H club of Palmer, Mass., back in childhood, is included in the recently released anthology Knitting Yarns, Writers on Knitting, edited by Ann Hood.

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 (Rhode Island) Journal.

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 was 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 and director of the creative writing program 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 also has taught in Ireland, at the Curlew Writers Conferences in Howth and Dingle, and in Dingle via the Stonecoast Ireland residency.

She lives in Bondsville, Mass., with Tommy Shea, most recently the senior foreign editor at The National newspaper in Abu Dhabi, and their dogs Tiny and Bisquick