Susan Neville is Demia Butler Professor of English at Butler University. She is the author of six books of creative nonfiction: Indiana Winter, Fabrication: Essays on Making Things and Making Meaning, Twilight in Arcadia, Iconography, Butler’s Big Dance, and Sailing the Inland Sea. Her prize-winning collections of short fiction include In the House of Blue Lights, winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize; and Indiana Winter, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her stories have appeared in the Pushcart Prize anthology and recently in journals such as The North American Review, The Missouri Review, Image, The Collagist, and others. She is a recent winner of the McGinnis-Ritchie Award from the Southwest Review.

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Neville teaches creative writing and literature courses at Butler, and she was director of the First-Year Seminar program for five years. She is experienced in getting students involved in
programs across classes and also in public programming. She founded and ran the Visiting Writers Series at Butler University, a program that brought approximately sixteen writers a year to the Butler campus for readings, workshops, and question and answer sessions open to the public. In addition, she ran the first Spirit and Place Festival in Indianapolis, an event that involved collaboration with the Indiana Humanities Council, the Indianapolis Public Library, all of the city’s universities, and religious organizations. She was also responsible for hiring Etheridge Knight as the first Writers Studio Fellow at Butler. Etheridge worked with student poets, gave a reading, and, along with students and the poet Carolyn Forche, discussed the intersection of politics and poetry.