About Susan Katz

(photo by Dan Hall)

We live in a small house within walking distance of the house where George Washington spent his famous winter in Valley Forge with the Revolutionary Army. I can peek in his window and see the big stone fireplace where his food was cooked. It always makes me glad I have a microwave.

My husband David teaches at Community College of Philadelphia, and our grown son Demian works as a software programmer. For a long time,we had a dog named Snoopy, whom we called a "beag-lador" because she was half beagle, half labrador retriever. She lived to the very old age of 106 in dog years, and one of these days perhaps she'll come back to life in a book. Now our main pet is Beauregard, our house rabbit, who's co-authoring with me a book called The Revenge of the Guinea Pig.

I've loved to write since I was growing up (that's me - on the left - as a Camp Fire Girl in the picture below). At eleven, I began a novel I called The Lonesome Cove. It wasn't very good (in fact, it was terrible), and I never finished it. But I never stopped writing. I've been a poet for a long time and have published hundreds of poems. And when my son was young, I used to write short prose pieces about his pets and his hobbies and the funny things he said, and I published those in magazines like Ladies' Home Journal.

Finally, though, I got brave enough to write another novel, and this time I finished it. To find out more about it, click on Snowdrops for Cousin Ruth.

I've also published a picture book, When the Shadbush Blooms, co-authored with Carla J.S. Messinger and illustrated by David Fadden; and four collections of poetry: Oh, Theodore! Guinea Pig Poems, illustrated by Stacey Schuett; Mrs. Brown on Exhibit and Other Museum Poems and A Revolutionary Field Trip: Poems of Colonial America, (also featuring Mrs. Brown and her students, both illustrated by R.W. Alley; and Looking for Jaguar and Other Rain Forest Poems, illustrated by Lee Christiansen. Several of my poems also appear in Fairies, Trolls, and Goblins Galore, edited by Dilys Evans and illustrated by Jacqueline Rogers. I'm presently working on several new poetry collections and a novel titled The Unknown Land.

If you have any questions you would like to ask me, you can leave them in my mailbox and I'll try to answer them.

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