In addition to teaching at Texas State, Susan worked for 20 years as a newspaper journalist and served as lay chaplain for the Episcopal campus ministry at Texas State from Jan. 1995 to Aug. 2007. She is also married and is the mother of a grown daughter.

Susan's favorite pastimes are native plant gardening, hiking, watching birds and other wildlife, traveling in the American West, photographing plants and landscapes, playing 12-string guitar, reading mysteries, and spending entirely too much time on the computer.

Besides mysteries, her reading interests include contemporary nature writing/creative nonfiction, memoir, social commentary, and the work of Christian mystics and contemplatives. One vein of her own writing focuses on the topics of nature and spirituality, while another takes a satiric look at the absurdities of everyday life.

Susan is a member of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment and the Episcopal Society for Ministry in Higher Education. In May, 2004, Texas Tech University Press published Susan's first collection of essays, Icons of Loss and Grace: Moments from the Natural World. In Spring 2007, University of Texas Press published What Wildness Is This: Women Write About the Southwest, which Susan co-edited. She will also have an essay in Let There Be Night: Testimony on Behalf of the Dark, due to be published in 2007 by the University of Nevada Press.