Susan Messer

Susan Messer has had fiction and nonfiction published in Glimmer Train Stories, North American Review, Colorado Review, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Another Chicago Magazine, killingthebuddha.com, Lost, and others. Awards include an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in prose, an Illinois Arts Council literary award for creative nonfiction, and prizes in Moment magazine’s short fiction competition, Chicago Public Radio’s Stories on Stage competition, and the Jewish Cultural Writing Competition of the Center for Yiddish Culture. She has had two residencies at Ragdale, an arts colony, and been a finalist in the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren competition, the Writers@Work fellowship competition, and Chicago’s Guild Complex nonfiction competition. Grand River and Joy is her first novel.

Learn more about her at her website: www.susanmesser.net. Every Wednesday morning, she posts to her blog "The Discomforts of Diversity," which you can find at http://ethnicwords.blogspot.com/