Sue Macy


Susan Beth Macy is an American author. She writes young adult nonfiction, focusing mainly on women's history and sports. Her 2019 book, The Book Rescuer, won the American Library's Association's 2020 Sydney Taylor Book Award.

Early life and education

Macy was born in New York City in 1954 and raised in Clifton, New Jersey. Macy is Jewish. Her father, Morris Macy, was a certified public accountant and her mother, Ruth Macy, taught high school business classes until becoming a homemaker. In her youth, Macy's career interests leaned toward law, but after she won a scholarship in 1971 through her local newspaper to Northwestern University’s summer high school journalism institute her interests began to broaden to writing and journalism. The Northwestern University Journalism Institute enabled Macy to serve as a summer intern to the North Jersey Herald News for the next three years.
Macy attended Clifton High School and Princeton University.

Career

Macy's book, Wheels of Change: How Women Rode the Bicycle to Freedom , was published by the National Geographic Society and explores the impact of the bicycle on women's liberation in the 1890s. It was a finalist for the Young Adult Library Services Association's YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults in 2012. Maria Popova wrote on Brain Pickings that Wheels of Change is "a remarkable National Geographic tome that tells the riveting story of how the two-wheel wonder pedaled forward the emancipation of women in late-nineteenth-century America and radically redefined the normative conventions of femininity."
Macy's 2019 picture book, The Book Rescuer, is the story of Yiddish Book Center's founder Aaron Lansky. The Book Rescuer was a Parents' Choice Award winner and has received starred reviews from Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and The New York Times. The Book Rescuer was announced as the winner of the 2020 Sydney Taylor Book Award in the Picture Book category at the American Library Association’s Youth Media Awards on January 27, 2020.
In February 2020, the National Geographic Society released Macy's exploration of female athletes in the 1920s, entitled Breaking Through: How Female Athletes Shattered Stereotypes in the Roaring Twenties.

Books