About Susan Gabriel
- Finalist for the 2011 Linda Flowers Literary Award
- Finalist for the Women Playwrights’ Initiative Competition
- Finalist for the Robert Ruark Short Fiction Contest
Susan Gabriel writes with passion, humor and insight about Southerners, both wise and wounded; teens, both ordinary and odd; and the people who love them, both explicit and unconscious. While she at times has written plays, poetry and nonfiction (see her blog), Susan primarily writes novels and short stories.
Secrets figure prominently in Susan’s work, secrets we keep from ourselves and the ones we keep from others, secrets we dare not tell and the ones we must reveal in order to survive.
Susan recognizes few labels other than “human” (“I’m a writer, not a genre” she says) and delights in the feedback from her readers from Portugal to Portland, New York to New Zealand.
Susan Gabriel grew up in the archetypal American South, playing in the shade of mimosa trees and catching lightning bugs as the heat waned on long summer evenings. She lived on banana popsicles and when not in school, spent most days exploring the woods around her home or on her bicycle from morning until night.
In college and graduate school, Susan completed degrees in education and counseling, in part to understand the wide array of characters in her Appalachian gene pool, and became a licensed professional counselor, as well as a marriage & family therapist. While running her counseling practice in Charleston, Susan also wrote professional articles for various publications and book reviews for the Charleston Courier newspaper.
After running her successful counseling practice for ten years, Susan answered the long-time call to writing and moved with her daughters to Asheville, North Carolina and began to write poetry and fiction. Susan simplified her life and took part-time jobs in order to focus the main portion of her day on writing. These part-time jobs included running copies, cutting out and cooking gourmet dog biscuits, cashiering at a home-improvement mega store, as well as being a typist, personal assistant and freelance editor for author and Jungian analyst, Bud Harris.
Now she spends half her days writing her own fiction and half editing other people’s books.
Susan makes her home in the mountains of North Carolina. She enjoys reading (of course), attending Broadway plays, traveling to Tuscany, wandering in the woods near her home (some things never change), visiting with her grown daughters, and providing entertainment for her two dogs and three cats.
