Suzanne Strempek SheaSuzanne Strempek Shea’s twelve books include the memoir Songs from a Lead-Lined Room: Notes–High and Low–from My Journey through Breast Cancer and Radiation, and This Is Paradise: An Irish Mother’s Grief, an African Village’s Plight and the Medical Clinic That Brought Fresh Hope to Both. Her writing on health and trauma has been published in Yankee, The Irish Times, Organic Style and, regularly for four years, in Obit magazine. She often lectures and leads writing workshops on the subjects. A former reporter for the Springfield (Mass.) Newspapers and The Providence Journal, Suzanne earned a BFA in photography from the former Portland School of Art (now Maine College of Art), an experience she credits with giving her a new way to see the world and to write about it. She taught for 18 years at the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program in creative writing, and for 12 years was writer-in-residence and director of the creative writing program at Bay Path University in Longmeadow, Mass., where she founded the MFA program in creative nonfiction and co-founded the Narrative Medicine Certificate program. She has taught in the MFA program at Emerson College and in the creative writing program at the University of South Florida. She also has taught in Ireland, at Annie Deppe and Ted Deppe’s Curlew Writers Conferences in Howth and Dingle, and in Dingle via the Stonecoast Ireland residency. Suzanne created and co-leads the annual summer writing seminar in Dingle offered through Bay Path University’s MFA and is co-organizer of Iota Short Forms writing program. Suzanne lives in her native Western Massachusetts with husband Tommy Shea and dog Otis.

    Upcoming Workshops taught by Suzanne Strempek Shea