Susan Neville’s first collection of short fiction, Invention of Flight, won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction from the University of Georgia and her second collection, In the House of Blue Lights, won the Richard Sullivan Prize from Notre Dame University Press. It was named one of the best books of 1998 by The Chicago Tribune. The Town of Whispering Dolls won the Catherine Doctorow Award for Short Fiction from Fiction Collective 2 and the Indiana Authors Award for Fiction.  Kirkus Reviews calls the book “haunted and haunting,” “searing,” and “Rust Belt stories that reject the label ‘flyover country’ with arresting strangeness.”  

In addition to books of fiction, she is the author of seven works of creative nonfiction and hybrid prose including Fabrication, a collection of lyric essays about Indiana factories; Into the Fire, an ebook  about women in the Ku Klux Klan, published as a Ploughshares Solo; and Indiana Winter. Her collection of essays Sailing the Inland Sea was named the Best Book of Indiana in the nonfiction category from the Indiana Center for the Book. She is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and two Pushcart Prize awards. In 2021 she retired from teaching at Butler University after 38 years. Recent essays and stories have appeared in the North American Review, Missouri Review, Image, Diagram, Southwest Review, and other journals. She was born in Indianapolis and taught at Butler University for 38 years. She lives in Indianapolis with her husband and one large dog.