Susan Kenney

Susan McIlvaine Kenney (born April 28, 1941) is an American novelist, short story writer, literary critic, and educator. She is best known for her novels In Another Country and Sailing, as well as her Roz Howard mystery series. Her work has received major literary awards, appeared in anthologies and been reviewed widely in national media. Kenney taught literature and creative writing at Colby College for over three decades, and her fiction, essays and reviews have appeared in literary journals, leading magazines and newspapers.

Early life and education Kenney was born in Summit, New Jersey on April 28, 1941 , the first child of Virginia Tucker McIlvaine, a college graduate with B.A. in English and Music, and James Morrow McIlvaine, a college graduate with a B.A. in Mathematics and Logic and a JD law degree from NYU. At that time he was newly employed in a promising line of work with the Sun Oil Company, starting with the management of a service station in Elizabeth, NJ.

In 1946 James was promoted to an executive position as a land management lawyer at the Sun Oil Offices in Toledo Ohio. Kenney, her mother and her two younger siblings remained in Toledo until October 1953, when they relocated to Skaneateles, New York. This village, where her mother's family lived, served as the setting and inspiration for much of her subsequent writing She was active in journalism and athletics, serving as assistant editor of the school newspaper, writing a column for the Skaneateles Press, and competing in track and field, and she earned college credit by successfully completing Advanced Placement examinations in literature and history.

In the fall of 1959 with the extra college-level credits she had earned in high school, Susan matriculated as a second quarter freshman at the Northwestern University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences with a double major in English Literature and Concentration in Creative Writing. In her second quarter in the winter of 1960 she enrolled in the first of the four creative writing courses she would complete in her years at Northwestern.

In the spring of 1962 she published her first short story, Loss

In her senior year, due to recurring family problems at home, Susan received permission to leave Northwestern at the end of the winter quarter in March 1963. Having already fulfilled all the credits necessary for her to graduate with her B.A degree, she went home to Skaneateles to take care of her mother and younger siblings, later graduating in absentia with honors in June 1963.

Academic career After earning her M.A. and Ph.D from Cornell, in 1968 Kenney joined the faculty at Colby College in Waterville, Maine in 1968, rising to the rank of full professor as she taught English and American literature, fiction and other creative writing for more than thirty years. In 1993 she was honored with the Charles A. Dana Professor of Creative Writing Chair, retiring as Emeritus in 2007. The novel explores Boyd’s experiences of loss and crisis, including the sudden death of her father, her mother’s recurring mental breakdowns, and her husband’s life-threatening illness. The work was honored with the Quality Paperback Book Club New Voices Award and has appeared in multiple editions, including hardcover, paperback, large print, and book club editions. Kenney also authored the novella Escape The series begins with Garden of Malice , in which English professor Roz Howard investigates a series of sabotages and potential murders on the estate of Lady Viola Montfort-Snow, navigating the eccentricities of residents and dangerous botanical knowledge. The second installment, Graves in Academe, depicts Roz confronting a serial killer at Canterbury College whose murders parallel events in literature, blending academic scholarship with suspenseful investigation. The third book, One Fell Sloop, follows Roz and Alan Stewart as they encounter a suspicious death while sailing off the coast of Maine, engaging in a complex “locked-room” style mystery. Kenney also published the shorter mystery Aunt Agatha Leaving, in which Roz solves a decades-old case during a sailing excursion, reviewed as the most popular work in Goodreads. The Roz Howard series was initially published in hardcover and paperback editions, and though these titles are now out of print all of them can be found online.

This work exemplifies Susan’s sensitivity to personal loss and her skill in capturing the emotional nuances of family and memory, her versatility demonstrated across genres, combining literary introspection with the precision and ingenuity of mystery writing. , Newsday, Down East Magazine, The Boston Globe and others, covering genres from books for children to fiction and nonfiction by contemporary authors, contributing to literary discourse.

These activities coalesced with her stories and novels into the recently recognized genre of autobiographical fiction, carrying on the dialogue regarding her work and life. , highlighting the emotional depth and interconnected narrative structure of her work. Both In Another Country and Sailing received featured reviews in The New York times Book Review She later married Anthony J. Corrado, a retired professor of government at Colby College. The couple resides in central Maine, where Kenney continues to write and engage in literary activities.

Awards

National Merit Scholarship Finalist 1958 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing, 1983–1984 New Voice Literary Award, In Another Country,1985 New York Times Notable Paperback of the Year, for Sailing 1989 Escape, a Novella” special Mention in Pushcart Prize Awards 2005

Sailing, novel, Viking, April 1988: Literary Guild edition, 1988, Penguin paperback,1989. large print, Swedish and Danish editions, l991.

Short stories

“Loss,” Northwestern Tri-Quarterly, Volume 4 Spring Number three, 1962. “Mirrors,” Epoch, Fall 1975. Epoch, Volume XXV, Number 1. “A Place I’ve Never Been,” The Hudson Review, Winter, 1984. “In Another Country.” Boston Globe Magazine, February 10, 1984. “The Death of the Dog and Other Rescues,” Epoch, Spring-Summer, 1984: Volume XXXIII Number 2 “In Case You Don’t Come Back,” The Hudson Review, Summer, 1985. “The Last Birthday Cake, Family Circle, October 4, 1985. “Sailing,” revised version of earlier story, Boston Globe Magazine, November 22, 1987. “The Idea of Boats,” TheYacht, Summer l988 “The 50 Percent Solution,” a spoof mystery story serialized in Colby Magazine, Waterville, ME, 1998 “How We Leave Her,” Epoch, Vol 63. Number 3, 2014 Series.

Stories in Anthologies

“The Shadow Child,” in The Eloquent Edge, edited by Margery Wilson and Kathleen Lignell, Acadia Pub. Co. 1990. Collection nominated for Pushcart Prize, 1990. “Ringing the Net.” autobiographical sketch in Between Friends, ed. Mickey Pearlman, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994. “A House of Books: My Book House,” personal essay in The Most Wonderful Books, an anthology of essays about childhood reading edited by Michael Dorris and Emily Buchwald, (Milkweed Editions, 1997). “Toledo,” autobiographical sketch in Breaking Bread, Essays from New England on Food, Hunger, and Family edited by Debra Spark and Deborah J. Corey, Boston MA Beacon Books 2022. “A Room of One’s Own Revisited: Women in Literature,” University of Michigan Papers in Women’s Studies, Vol. 1, no. 2 Summer 1974. “Why wasn’t Virginia Woolf Analyzed?” a paper delivered to the Cornell University Group for Applied Psychoanalysis, April 1975. “Two Endings: Virginia Woolf’s Suicide and “Between the Acts.” University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. XLIV, No. 4 Summer 1975, 265-289. "Virginia Woolf and The Art of Madness," (with E. J. Kenney, Jr.) The Massachusetts Review, Spring 1982.“Editing The Palimpsestic Text: The Case Of Virginia Woolf’s A Sketch Of The Past “by Elizabeth A. Shih and Susan M. Kenney: article in Virginia Woolf In The Real World: Selected Papers From The 13th International Conference On Virginia Woolf: edited by Karen Kukil, Clemson University Press, Clemson, South Carolina 2005. “Inside the Real Maine?” essay-review of Inside Vacationland: New Fiction from the Real Maine, Down East Magazine, Special Issue, January 1986. “A Client Called Noah,” by Josh Greenfeld, Front page review of NYTBR, February 6, 1987. “Looking for Doctor Right,” review of Doctors and Women, a novel by Susan Cheever, NYTBR, December 6, 1987. “Three Maine Mysteries,” essay-review, Down East Magazine, July 1988. Man Meets Boat Meets Hurricane,” review of Spartina, a novel by John Casey, NYTBR, June 25, 1989. “Golf? Transcendental?” review of The Lies Boys Tell, a novel by Lamar Herrin, NYTBR, October 20, 1991. “‘I’m One of the Ones It Was Done To!'” review of Violence, a novel by Richard Bausch, NYTBR, January 29, l992. “Death Comes to the Professor,” review of Literary Murder, a novel by Batya Gur, NYTBR, December 26, l993. Sometimes a Great Ocean,” review of Alongshore, by John R. Stilgoe, NYTBR, July 3, l994. “Their Fellow Americans,” review of Snow Falling on Cedars, a novel by David Guterson, NYTBR, October 16, l994 “Shades of Difference,” review of The Wedding, a novel by Dorothy West, NYTBR, February 12, l995 “Gone Fishing,” review of Light Years, a memoir by Le Anne Schreiber, NYTBR, September 15, l996 “Crimes of the Heart,” review of The Weight of Water, a novel by Anita Shreve, NYTBR, January 19, l999.