(forthcoming)
"This is a story whose time has come,
and Southard is the only one who can write it."
~ Arizona Commission on the Arts – from panel
comments upon award of 2008 Individual Artist Project Grant
Nagasaki invites readers into the daily lives of five atomic bomb survivors, all of whom were teenagers at the time of the Nagasaki atomic bomb attack in 1945.
By weaving together their dramatic eyewitness accounts of the bombing, intimate portraits of the physical, emotional, and social challenges of post-atomic survival, and U.S. policies of censorship and denial that continue to affect national views of the bombings, Nagasaki tells the neglected story of life after nuclear war and will help shape public discussion and debate over one of the most controversial wartime acts in history.
The book will be published by Viking Press in 2013.
Susan's book, Nagasaki, will be published by Viking Press in 2013 (Wendy Wolf and Kevin Doughten, editors). Nagasaki is represented by Rick Balkin of The Balkin Agency.
Susan was selected as a 2011 Mailer Nonfiction Fellow at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony in Provincetown, MA. The month-long fellowship provided an opportunity for full-time work on her manuscript and focused discussion among other fellows in nonfiction, fiction, and poetry.
Out of nearly two hundred submissions, Susan's essay, "Afterlife," adapted from Nagasaki, was selected by contest judge Robin Hemley as one of two runners-up in Hunger Mountain's 2009 Creative Nonfiction Essay Prize. "Afterlife" appears in the current issue of Hunger Mountain. You can read the essay on Hunger Mountain's website.
Over the summer of 2010, in recognition of the sixty-fifth anniversary of the Nagasaki atomic bombing, Susan was a guest on over twenty radio programs across the United States, including "Viewpoints" with Pat Reuter, which is nationally syndicated to 355 stations. Stations and airdates are listed here.