Susan Zurenda’s “The Girl from the Red Rose Motel” Tugs at the Heart

Podcast: Download (Duration: 36:28 — 33.5MB)

In this episode 356, we feature award-winning novelist Susan Zurenda and her latest novel, “The Girl from the Red Rose Motel,” that bestselling author Ron Rash calls “deeply moving without veering into sentimentality,” and that award-winning novelist Donna Everhart calls a “skillfully crafted story of hope, compassion, and resilience.”

Show discussion highlights:

  • Teaching high school: What’s changed over the years?
  • How teaching high school influenced the novel
  • Introduction to the characters
  • Navigating between privilege and poverty for students
  • Challenges and pressures for students: then and now
  • Parents seeking to control curriculum and belittle teachers
  • A reading from the book
  • Lessons learned in the business of writing
  • Advice to the younger writer self

Brief author bio:

Susan Beckham Zurenda taught English for 33 years on the college level and at the high school level to AP students. Her debut novel, Bells for Eli (Mercer University Press, March 2020; paperback edition March 2021), has been selected the Gold Medal (first place) winner for Best First Book—Fiction in the 2021 IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Awards), a Foreword Indie Book Award finalist, a Winter 2020 Okra Pick by the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, a 2020 Notable Indie on Shelf Unbound, a 2020 finalist for American Book Fest Best Book Awards, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for 2021. Susan has won numerous awards for her short fiction, including winning the South Carolina Fiction Prize twice. Her second novel, The Girl From the Red Rose Motel, will be published September 5, 2023, by Mercer University Press. The author lives in Spartanburg, SC. 

Learn more about Susan and her books HERE.

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