Suzanne Scanlon is the author of 2024's Committed (Vintage / Anchor Books), a critical memoir about women, reading, and mental illness.

Scanlon’s previous books include Promising Young Women (Dorothy, 2012) and Her 37th Year, An Index (Noemi, 2015). The French translation of Promising Young Women will be published by Les Editions du Portrait in March 2024, alongside another small book, “The Moving Target of Being.” Her 37th Year, An Index was a best book of the year from Electric Literature. Writing for the Chicago Tribune, Kathleen Rooney described the book’s structure as “brilliant”: Her complex structure allows this book’s layers and textures to happen simultaneously, and to comment on themselves as they are happening. It shows that experience itself can be like a collage: not neatly linear, but full of overlaps and ragged edges.

Her 37th Year, An Index was featured in Martine Syms’ short film, shown at The Museum of Modern Art, and a Swedish translation was published in 2016. A chapter of Promising Young Women was featured as part of a group exhibition titled Institutional Garbage at Sector 2337, presented by the Green Lantern Press and the Hyde Park Art Center. A fiction, “The Rape Essay,” was published in Ireland, as part of A Kind of Compass, Stories on Distance (Tramp Press, 2015); “Skepticism and Affirmation” was published in Rockhaven: A History of Interiors (Which Witch) a book of photography and essays documenting the abandoned Rockhaven Sanitarium in La Crescenta, California.

Scanlon’s fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Granta, BOMB, Fence, The Iowa Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Millions, and elsewhere. She’s received fellowships from The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ox-Bow Artists Residency, and the Ragdale Foundation.

Scanlon has an MFA+MA from Northwestern University’s Litowitz Creative Writing program, and a BA from Barnard College. She has taught creative writing at many colleges, and delivered readings and talks at venues across the US. Currently she teaches at the School of Art Institute Chicago and she is an Artist-in-Residence at Northwestern University.