Suzanne Kathleen Freisinger
Vitello Graham Soulé

… was born in Vienna in the early 60’s, where she and her young parents were tossed out of various apartments for throwing wild parties. Her formative years were marked by immersion in the languages and dialects of Vienna’s International District. Sent to “the English School” at age five, Suzy perfected a Mary Poppins accent, which launched her career as an appropriator of one thing or another.

At six, she moved to “The States;” many of them, as it turned out, before settling in upstate New York, where she spent her adolescence riding her horse, Sweet William, through the woods,  composing the stories and blog posts she would later write.

Suzy attended Syracuse University, where she took up and abandoned pretty much every major offered—finally graduating with a degree in nutrition. She married her college sweetheart and adopted his lyrical last name, Vitello, as antidote to childhood taunts (Frizzy-hanger? Freeze-singer?). Suzy’s first marriage turned tragic when Frank died in a car accident four days before Suzy gave birth to their second child.

At twenty-eight, after a brief stint in San Diego, Suzy and her babies happened upon Portland, Oregon, where she moved into a sixth-floor walk-up, rented a typewriter, and began to pound out short stories, articles and essays. She joined Tom Spanbauer’s original band of Dangerous Writers in 1990, and set to work on a dark novel. Its many iterations live in a collection of Rubbermaid tubs that have been moved a dozen times throughout Portland’s urban quadrants. Marriage, another baby, grad school, divorce (yes, the slideshow reveals her getting married three times), all of these milestones marked the next eighteen years. In 2008, Suzy married Kirk, the most awesome and supportive spouse a writer could want, and settled into a glorious never-before-experienced state of security, which included, for the first time ever, health insurance.

As the long-time coordinator of a robust weekly writing workshop whose members include Chuck Palahniuk, Cheryl Strayed, Chelsea Cain, Lidia Yuknavitch, Monica Drake and others, Suzy is committed to writing about love in all of its guises, styles and languages. Her work is represented by Melissa Sarver of The Elizabeth Kaplan Literary Agency.

“Suzy Vitello is one of the smartest writers I know.  She’s taught me probably 40 percent of everything I know about writing fiction.  I still write mainly to please her.”  - Chelsea Cain, NYT bestselling thriller author

“What I love most about reading Suzy Vitello’s stories is that I feel like I am inside the world of her characters so deeply that I start talking aloud to them. They are my friends, my sisters, my mother, my lovers, my husbands and ex-husbands and daughters and sons.  I could stay inside her stories and not come out.” - Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water and forthcoming Dora: A Head Case

“Suzy Vitello Soulé writes like the sweet, smart, sassy person I aspire to be. Her stories are full of mystery and longing and the endless and varied complexities of ten thousand kinds of love. She’s never written a page that didn’t make me ache for another one. Her work is sheer must-gobble-it-up.” -Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild and Torch