A touch that could not be more tender.
Suzanne Strempek Shea; a thumbnail biography

With a touch that could not be more tender, Suzanne Strempek Shea takes on the tough subject of breast cancer and files a first-person report from the battlefront.

"I found it extremely jarring simply being told I had cancer," writes novelist Suzanne Strempek Shea.  "This is a thing with a reputation for killing people.  And it was inside me.  Me."  Written as she underwent seven weeks of radiation therapy, Shea's literary memoir Songs from a Lead-Lined Room is a meditation on the nature of illness and recovery.  Shea reflects on her interactions with family, friends, and fellow cancer patients, and the daily routine of walking and writing that helped her endure.

Suzanne Strempek Shea was born and raised in Western Massachusetts, which is where she has set her fiction.  A graduate of the former Portland (Maine) School of Art, now the Maine College of Art, Suzanne has been a staff writer for the Springfield (Mass.) Newspapers and the Providence (R.I.) Journal-Bulletin.  She also has freelanced for publications including Yankee magazine, the Boston Globe Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the former New England Monthly.

She is the author of Selling the Lite of Heaven, Hoopi Shoopi Donna, Lily of the Valley, and Around Again, all published by Pocket Books.  Her memoir titled, Songs from a Lead-lined Room, Suzannešs account of her radiation treatments for breast cancer, is being published by Beacon Press.

Suzanne was the recipient of the 2000 New England Book Award for Fiction, presented by the New England Booksellers Association for a body of work that has contributed to the literature of the New England region.