Born in Tennessee and raised in Texas, Susan graduated summa cum laude from the University of Houston in 2009 with university honors, honors in English, and a minor in studio art. Her senior thesis, Goodbye to the Ocean (formerly known as The Butterfly Collector), received an honorable mention UH honors thesis award in 2009, was a semifinalist in the 2012 Gold Line Press fiction chapbook competition, and won the 2022 Etchings Press novella prize. It is now available to purchase.

Susan completed her MFA in Writing at California College of the Arts in 2013, where she was the recipient of a graduate merit scholarship and a graduate chair award. Her short story “This is Why the Monster Stays” won the 2012 graduate all-college honors award for creative prose and was later nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Hayden’s Ferry Review. She also served as the art director (issue 13) and publisher liaison (issue 15) of Eleven Eleven and was the teaching assistant for CCA’s undergraduate literary journal, Humble Pie (volumes 7 and 8) in the 2012-13 school year. She later worked as a graphic designer for Asymptote Journal and was the visual arts editor for Newfound Journal‘s now-defunct Hothouse Magazine. In 2015, her Clue-themed murder mystery was a featured story in the 2nd annual Twitter Fiction Festival.

In 2021, Susan completed her novel (T-REXIA) about a boy/man and the dinosaurs that haunt him, set in a mystifying world populated by corporations that care more about making money than about the health and safety of their customers. In 2022, her poetry chapbook manuscript WHERE I CAME FROM was longlisted for the Kingdoms in the Wild Poetry Prize, her poem “The Perks of Being a Tan Hua Flower” was a finalist for the Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, and her short story “Touching the Morning” was longlisted for the Voyage Anthology Contest. In 2023, her poem “For Angel Island” was a semifinalist in Charlotte Lit’s Lit/South Awards; her short story “Provenance (A Love Story)” was a finalist for Sycamore Review‘s Wabash Prize and A Public Space‘s writing fellowships; her short story “Gravitational Pull” received an honorable mention in the adult category of the Betty L. Yu & Jin C. Yu Creative Writing Prizes; and WHERE I CAME FROM was shortlisted for the Kari Ann Flickinger Biennial Memorial Literary Prize.

Currently, Susan is working on a sci-fi/horror alien-invasion campus thriller; a sprawling metafictional novel about bookmaking, storytelling, and a writer’s revision process; and a comedic murder mystery set at a Hollywood awards show. She was previously repped by Erin Clyburn and is currently seeking a new agent. In her spare time, she enjoys sewing summer dresses, dancing to ’90s hits, eating potatoes, reading mystery thrillers, and streaming TV.