Sue William Silverman

Profile

Sue William Silverman is an award-winning memoirist, essayist, and poet, whose most
recent book is Acetylene Torch Songs: Writing True Stories to Ignite the Soul. A previous work of creative nonfiction, How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences, was named “one of 9 essay collections feminists should read in 2020” by Bitch Media. Additionally, it won the Gold Star Foreword Reviews INDIES Book of the Year award and the 2021 Clara Johnson Award for Women’s Literature sponsored by Jane’s Story Press Foundation.

Sue’s first memoir, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs award in creative nonfiction, and her second memoir, Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction, was also made into a Lifetime television original movie nominated for two PRISM Awards. Her memoir-in-essays, The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew, was a finalist for Foreword Reviews’ IndieFab Book of the Year Award.

She is also the author of Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir and two poetry collections, most recently If the Girl Never Learns, which won two gold medals from the Human Relations Indie Book Award. A new poetry chapbook is Crayon Colors for Serial Killers. One of Sue’s personal essays appears in The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present, while six other essays won national writing contests with Hotel Amerika, Mid-American Review, Water~Stone Review, Blue Mesa Review, Los Angeles Review, and Under the Sun.

Other poems and essays have appeared in such places as The Rumpus, Bellingham Review, Prairie Schooner, Chicago Tribune, Detroit Free Press, Arts & Letters, Creative Nonfiction, brevitymag.com, and River Teeth. Sue was featured in an interview in The Writer’s Chronicle and has been the subject of several documentaries including for the Discovery Channel and WE-TV. As a professional speaker, she has appeared on national radio and television programs such as The View, Anderson Cooper-360, CNN-Headline News, and PBS Books. She holds an honorary doctorate from Aquinas College.

Sue’s flash-essay collection, Selected Misdemeanors: Essays at the Mercy of the Reader, is forthcoming September, 2025, from the University of Nebraska Press.