Susan Imhoff Bird finds her bliss in the canyons and hillsides of northern Utah, and in the water-and wind-sculpted rock farther south. She can usually be found astride her bicycle or hiking a canyon trail, absorbing the wisdom of the natural world, when she’s not writing or working with clients in her private psychotherapy practice. In wintertime, it’s often skate skiing or yoga asanas that challenge her stability and remind her that the law of gravity will out.
Travels in Asia, South America, and Europe exposed her to varied cultures and religions, and have inspired much of her work, which include a prize-winning short story (Mariposa, Utah Humanities Council, First Place Short Story 2001), and a memoir of humanitarian work in Nepal. However, it is living in Utah, in the mountainous West, that has most shaped her perspective and voice.
Bird’s narrative non-fiction book, Howl: of Woman and Wolf (Torrey House Press, 2015), explores a raging controversy pitting the rights of nature against those of man, while allowing the reader access to Bird’s own journey of discovering her own inner “wild.” Howl is a WILLA Fiction Finalist.
As a 2015 Artist in Residence at the Taft Nicholson Center in Lakeview, Montana, Bird wrote essays in homage to the wetlands, to wild horses, and to the consciousness that drives
A transplant to Utah at age eleven, Bird earned her B.S. and M.S.W. at the University of Utah. A true westerner, Bird has long been drawn to the Tetons, and has set her current work in northwest Wyoming, in a valley just half a day’s drive from her Salt Lake City home. This novel, The Bridge, explores landscapes both internal and external; it is a story of healing and resilience ignited by a land stunningly beautiful and achingly wild.
Work
Bibliography
Faith Greater Than Pain, Olympic Publishing, 2012. Co-authored with L. “Doc” Cleland.
Howl: of Woman and Wolf, Torrey House Press, 2015.
