Susan Shreve


Susan Shreve is an American novelist, memoirist, and children's book author. She has published fifteen novels, most recently More News Tomorrow, and a memoir Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood. She has also published thirty books for children, most recently The Lovely Shoes, and edited or co-edited five anthologies. Shreve co-founded the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at George Mason University in 1980, where she teaches fiction writing. She is the co-founder and the former chairman of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Early life

Susan Richards Shreve was born May 2, 1939 in Toledo, Ohio, but moved with her family to Washington, D.C. at the age of three. She attended and graduated from Sidwell Friends School in 1957.

Education

Shreve received a BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania in 1961, and an MA in English from the University of Virginia in 1969.

Career

She founded the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at George Mason University in 1980 and has taught there ever since. She has been a visiting professor at Columbia School of the Arts, Princeton University, and Goucher College. She has received a Guggenheim Award for Fiction, a National Endowment grant for Fiction, the Jenny Moore Chair in Creative Writing at George Washington University, the Grub Street Prize for non-fiction, the Poets and Writers’ Service award, and the Sidwell Friends School Outstanding Alumni Award. In 1980, Shreve co-founded the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, which presents the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction annually.
Shreve published her first novel, A Fortunate Madness, in 1974. Thirteen novels have followed. She published a novel Glimmer under the pseudonym Annie Waters in 1997. Shreve wrote about her experience as a patient at FDR's polio clinic in her memoir Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood. Her most recent novel, More News Tomorrow, was published in 2019.
Shreve's children's books include the Joshua T. Bates series, Blister, an ALA Notable Book and a Publishers Weekly Best Children's Book, and most recently The Lovely Shoes. When writing for young readers, she publishes as Susan Shreve.

Works

Novels

She married Porter Shreve, with whom she had four children. Shreve later married noted literary agent Timothy Seldes. Her oldest son is the author Porter Shreve.