Susan Hubbard

As a child

Susan Hubbard was born in upstate New York, the youngest (by 16 years) of three sisters. She was an early reader and writer, and at the age of ten she wrote her first novel, which she destroyed at the age of thirteen. One of her sisters was a librarian who gave her a hard-cover book each Christmas and birthday, and who allowed her to read adult-level books before she was a teenager. This may have warped her sensibility permanently. Her parents had her hearing tested because when she was reading or daydreaming, she tuned out everything else. Her hearing was, and remains, fine, despite exposure to many rock concerts. When she was sixteen, she was selected as an American Field Service exchange student and spent the summer in Cornwall, England. She remains an avid traveller, using her camera and notebook to record inspirations for her fiction.

As an adult

Susan Hubbard was the first in her family to attend college. She took a year off to travel and to work with International Voluntary Service in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Back in the states again, she was steered toward a career in journalism, and after graduation she spent several years as a newspaper reporter and columnist. Later she went back to graduate school to focus on creative writing, studying with noted fiction-writers Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff. Hubbard is a Professor of English at the University of Central Florida, where she teaches creative writing. She's the proud parent of two daughters, Kate and Clare, and is married to the writer Robley Wilson.

As an artist

Many of Susan Hubbard's stories and books originate in dreams. Her first book, Walking on Ice, won the Associated Writing Programs' Fiction Prize, and her second, Blue Money, received the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for best book of the year by an American woman. Hubbard has been a writer in residence at several universities and artists' colonies, including Yaddo and Cill Rialaig. Altogether she has published six books of fiction and co-edited an anthology. She currently focuses on writing fiction that attempts to be literary as well as speculative, incorporating elements of the supernatural and the fantastic.

Things you didn't know about Susan Hubbard

1. Susan Hubbard is allergic to cats.
2. She owns six cats, all adopted strays.
3. Three of her air plants are having pups.
4. This year during hurricane season she alphabetized her spice cabinet.
5. She has been called a formidable prankster.
6. Her office is home of the Gallery of Questionable Taste.
7. For reasons she doesn't know and could never understand, Susan Hubbard was named one of the Twenty Coolest People in Orlando, Florida.
8. She does not eat meat.
9. She loves raw oysters, but eating them makes her feel guilty.
10. Her favorite weekend pastime is running on the beach at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

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