Media/Press

Thanks for your interest in my novels. I’d love to help you with a story or participate in an interview, review or giveaway. Here’s information you may need:

Interview topics: I am available for help with topics of southern culture and southern writing, and the place of fiction in the video age.

Author Bio

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 red Schwinn bicycle.

In Charleston, SC Susan was a professional flutist playing at the famous Piccolo Spoleto festival, as well as many private gigs in historic homes and sailboats. Susan completed a degree in counseling, in part to understand the wide array of characters in her Appalachian gene pool, and became a marriage and family therapist. She was the founder of the Women’s Center in Charleston, South Carolina, which still provides services to women over twenty years after its inception.

In 1994, Susan answered the long-time call to writing, closed her successful counseling practice, and moved with her daughters to Asheville, North Carolina. She simplified her life and took part-time jobs in order to focus the main portion of her day on writing. She worked at a copy shop, made gourmet dog biscuits, cashiered at a home-improvement mega store, and did freelance editing.

Susan’s first novel, Seeking Sara Summers, the transformative story of a mid-life woman, was published in 2008 and has sold over 5,000 copies. Her second novel, The Secret Sense of Wildflower, the story of a precocious adolescent grieving for her father in 1941 Tennessee, was published in 2012 and earned a starred review (for books of remarkable merit) from Kirkus Reviews, known as the world’s toughest book critics.

Author Photo

Book Description

Set in 1940s Appalachia, The Secret Sense of Wildflower tells the story of Louisa May “Wildflower” McAllister whose life has been shaped around the recent death of her beloved father in a sawmill accident. While her mother hardens in her grief, Wildflower and her three sisters must cope with their loss themselves, as well as with the demands of daily survival. Despite these hardships, Wildflower has a resilience that is forged with humor, a love of the land, and an endless supply of questions to God, who she isn’t so sure she agrees with. When Johnny Monroe, the town’s teenage ne’er-do-well, sets his sights on Wildflower, she must draw on the strength of her relations, both living and dead, to deal with his threat.

With prose as lush and colorful as the American South, The Secret Sense of Wildflower is powerful and poignant, brimming with energy and angst, humor and hope. In its ability to create a truly original Southern voice, The Secret Sense of Wildflower establishes Gabriel as a thoughtful and powerful Southern writer.

Book Info:

The Secret Sense of Wildflower

Genre: southern historical fiction

ISBN: 978-0-9835882-3-8

212 pages

Print and ebook editions

Publisher: Wild Lily Arts

Release date: April 2012

Seeking Sara Summers

Genre: Midlife Women

ISBN: 978-0-615-22207-3

195 pages