Susan Conley is a writer, a teacher and a co-founder of The Telling Room, a creative writing lab in Portland that believes in the power of stories to transform students' lives and change communities. Susan served as the executive director of The Telling Room for its first two years of life before moving to China, where she wrote a memoir titled The Foremost Good Fortune (Knopf, 2011). This book chronicles the years Susan, her husband and two young boys lived in Beijing, learned Mandarin, set out on The Hunt for the Greatest Dumpling in China, and contended with Susan's cancer diagnosis. The book was excerpted in The New York Times Magazine and The Daily Beast and was voted a Goodreads' Choice Award Winner for Best Travel and Outdoor Books of 2011.

Susan has been the recipient of two MacDowell Colony residencies, a Breadloaf Writer's Fellowship and a Massachusetts Arts Council Grant. Maine Today Media gave Susan a 2011 "Greatest Women of Maine" Award. A graduate of Middlebury College and San Diego State University, Susan has taught creative writing and literature seminars at Emerson College, as well as at Harvard's Teachers as Scholar's Program. She continues to teach all flavors of writing workshops at The Telling Room and has a novel forthcoming from Knopf in the spring of 2013. Susan lives in Portland with her husband, Tony Kieffer, and their two boys ages 9 and 11, who are avid story tellers themselves and not at all sick of dumplings.

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