Susan Fales-Hill

After graduating with honors from Harvard College, Susan began her writing career as an apprentice on the original Cosby Show (starring Bill Cosby & Phylicia Rashad). Simultaneously, she cut her teeth as the show's "warm-up" person, training which (along with the weekly recitation of classic French poems at her alma mater, the Lycee Francais de New York) honed her public speaking skills and banished any fear of facing even the most hostile, rotten fruit- wielding crowd. After two years at Cosby, she worked on the show's successful spin-off, A Different World, where, at the age of twenty-eight, she became Co-Executive Producer/Head Writer, one of the youngest in the business. A seminal article she wrote for Vogue about growing up bi-racial led her to pen her memoir about her mother, Always Wear Joy, which won critical acclaim and was a finalist for both the NAACP Image Award and the Hurston Wright Legacy Award. Her next book, the novel One Flight Up, was praised as "a dazzling narrative of New York's social diorama with wit, irony, and great humor" by André Leon Talley, editor at large,Vogue. Her latest novel, Imperfect Bliss (2012) updates Austen's Pride and Prejudice to tell the story of a respectable, middle-class, middle-age couple, Harold and Forsythia, with four eminently marriageable daughters, one of whom wins the starring role in a reality series. Susan is known in New York's philanthropic circles for her generous support of education and the arts and her championship of diversity in the rarefied world of ballet (she served for eight years on the board of American Ballet Theater, four as its Vice Chair).