In addition to teaching at Texas State, Susan worked for 20 years as a newspaper journalist and served as lay chaplain for the Episcopal campus ministry at Texas State from Jan. 1995 to Aug. 2007. She is also married and is the mother of a grown daughter.

Susan’s favorite pastimes are native plant gardening, hiking, watching birds and other wildlife, traveling in the American West, photographing plants and landscapes, playing 12-string guitar, reading mysteries, and spending entirely too much time on the computer.

Besides mysteries, her reading interests include contemporary nature writing/creative nonfiction, memoir, social commentary, and the work of Christian mystics and contemplatives. One vein of her own writing focuses on the topics of nature and spirituality, while another takes a satiric look at the absurdities of everyday life.

Susan is a member of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. In May, 2004, Texas Tech University Press published Susan’s first collection of essays, Icons of Loss and Grace: Moments from the Natural World. In Spring 2007, University of Texas Press published What Wildness Is This: Women Write About the Southwest, which Susan co-edited. She also has an essay in Let There Be Night: Testimony on Behalf of the Dark, published in 2008 by the University of Nevada Press, and in To Everything on Earth: New Writing on Fate, Community, and Nature, published in 2009 by Texas Tech University Press.