Author of Novels for Young Adults and Fiction for all Ages
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About Us
Writing
After a life time teaching English to young immigrant students and writing or editing articles about public eduation, I retired to pursue my dream, writing fiction. In my work I try to honor the lives of the bravest people I know, my students, many who suffered unimaginable hardships to arrive in my classrooms. My other passion is writing about- surprise!-romances about older adults, because hey, we're still here, we matter, and we celebrate life just as much as younger generations, only there are very few authors writing about us.
Debut Novel
My first published work of fiction is a young adult novel Hear My Words, inspired by a student who was brutally murdered.by a Central American gang. It revolves around her best friend, Gabi. a girl who went from being the most popular girl in her small town in Central America to being just another invisible immigrant "Spanish" kid in a large suburban middle school. Gabi's must "find her voice" again, in Spanish and in English, to keep her younger brother from joining the same gang that killed her best friend.
Coming early next year, my next novel, The Family in Room 137, in the Immigrant Voices series will look at the issue of family reunification. Every year hundeds of young people from Central America suffer the trauma of horrific border crossings in search of the mothers who left them almost a decade earlier. Expecting to find the loving and comforting mother of their faint memories, they encounter a stresed and overworked parent with a new family who has no idea how to handle the voluble teen they last remember as a cute chubby-cheeked toddler.
Coming attractions!
My next project is a series of writings on life in the Sundown years, that inevitable period of life that we think will "never happen to me." Once you pass the cusp of 60 years on this earth you find that life and living is even more beautiful, yet at the same time, more bittersweet. So much unsaid, so many hurts, lies, and betrayals that cannot be undone. Is there still time?
Welcome to my world!
Susan Zimmerman Orozco has cats, four of them.