Biography

Susan Denney was born in Monroe, Louisiana and grew up in Shreveport with her parents and her twin brothers. She was involved in theater, music and dance as a small child. She loved books both fiction and nonfiction. Her favorite novels were Half Magic, Ice Cream for Two, The Borrowers and Charlotte’s Web. She dreamed of two things: one was to go to Paris and the other was to write. As a teen, she played in the school orchestra, was pianist for her church congregation and participated in the “Z” club, the National Honor Society and the French Club.

She studied at Baylor University for one year and then transferred to Louisiana State University. She graduated from LSU with a BA, Magna Cum Laude, in French in 1970. She married Michael Denney in Shreveport in 1971. She obtained a Master’s degree in French from the University of Iowa in 1974. After her Master’s degree, she and her husband went to Europe where she fulfilled that lifelong dream of going to Paris. They studied in Southern France for a year.

After her return to the United States, the most important job of her life began. In a period of eight years, three girls and a boy were born. During these years when time was precious, she began working on that second childhood dream. She began publishing articles and short stories and working on a children’s novel.

When her youngest child went to public school, she began her second major career as a teacher. She began by teaching English as a Second Language at several universities in the North Texas area. From 1992 to 2007 she taught French at Denton High School. As Madame Denney, she shared with hundreds of students her love of French language and culture.

Beginning a fulltime freelance writing career in the fall of 2007, she is now a regular contributor to the newsletter Writing for DOLLARS! and has published in Byline Magazine, The Friend, The Ensign, Writing-World, and Nuestra Gente Utah. She is a member of the Lone Star NightWriters. She has won writing contests sponsored by the Oklahoma Writers’ Federation.

At present she is working on an LDS romance as well as magazine articles and short stories. As a volunteer she teaches Sunday School, indexes genealogical records for www.familysearch.org and makes free audiobooks for LibriVox.org .