“Her Stories, Her Heritage: Suzanne Strempek Shea on Mining Her Life and Community for Fiction and Nonfiction”
Virtual Lecture Series on Borders
Photo by Helen Peppe
PUBLIC EVENT OPEN TO ALL
Speaker: Suzanne Strempek Shea
Date: Thursday, March 11, 7:00 p.m. CST
Location: Online
Suzanne Strempek Shea is the author of six novels: Selling the Lite of Heaven, Hoopi Shoopi Donna, Lily of the Valley, Around Again, Becoming Finola, and Make a Wish But Not for Money. 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. Suzanne is also the author of This is Paradise: An Irish Mother’s Grief, an African Village’s Plight and the Medical Clinic That Brought Fresh Hope to Both. She also is a co-author of 140 Years of Providential Care: The Sisters of Providence of Holyoke, Massachusetts. 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 Irish Times, 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 also coordinates Bay Path University’s Narrative Medicine Certificate Program and the MFA program’s Summer Writing Seminar in Ireland. She also has taught in the MFA program at Emerson College and in the creative writing program at the University of South Florida. She lives in Bondsville, Mass., with lifelong journalist Tommy Shea, most recently the senior foreign editor at The National newspaper in Abu Dhabi.
This event is made possible in part with a grant from Humanities Texas, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
For more information, contact Dr. Adam Kozaczka at 956.326.3300 or adam.kozaczka@tamiu.edu
