Moore

Susanna Moore is an American novelist. Born in Pennsylvania on December 9, 1945, Susanna Moore soon moved to Hawaii with her family. At seventeen, she left Hawaii for the mainland, where she lived in New York and Los Angeles, working as a model and script reader. In 1983, she published her first novel, My Old Sweetheart , which won the PEN Hemingway Citation and the Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Whiteness of Bones (1989) and Sleeping Beauties (1993) followed, forming a loose trilogy of coming-of-age novels set in Hawaii. After spending two years with NYPD homicide detectives, Moore dramatically departed from her earlier work with In the Cut (1995), a thriller set in New York. Later works explore nineteenth-century British India (One Last Look , 2004) and the world of women's prisons (The Big Girls , 2007), based in part on her time spent teaching in detention centers. She also teaches creative writing at Princeton University. The American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded her a Prize for Literary Achievement in 1999.