Susan Burton

Susan Burton is at work on a memoir, The Invention of the Teenage Girl, to be published by Random House. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Slate, The New Yorker, and others. She is a contributing editor of This American Life and a former editor of Harper's. Her radio documentaries have won numerous awards, including an Overseas Press Club citation, and she received a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to do stories about teenagers. She is the co-author, with Hyder Akbar, of Come Back to Afghanistan, which was named one of the ALA’s top-ten best books for young adults in 2006. The film Unaccompanied Minors, which was directed by Freaks and Geeks creator Paul Feig, is based on one of her radio essays. Susan was the second-prize winner of Seventeen magazine’s fiction contest in 1993, and she graduated from Yale in 1995. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their two sons.

photo by Kathy Ryan