Join us for a talk and signing with Susan Beckham Zurenda. She’ll be here discussing her new novel Bells for Eli.

After teaching literature, composition, and creative writing to thousands of high school and college students for 33 years, Susan turned her attention to putting a novel in her heart on paper, the genesis of which started with a short story that won a fiction prize some years ago. She is delighted to present her debut novel, Bells for Eli, to readers on March 2, 2020. During her years of teaching at Spartanburg Community College and then as an AP English teacher at Spartanburg High School, Susan published short stories and won numerous regional awards such as the South Carolina Fiction Prize (twice), the Porter Fleming Competition, The Southern Writers Symposium Emerging Writers Fiction Contest, The Hub City Hardegree Contest in Fiction, Alabama Conclave First Novel Chapter Contest, and The Jubilee Writing Competition (twice).  Since 2018, she has published six stories in literary magazines. 

Bells for Eli is a tender and engaging Coming of Age story in which fate takes with one hand and gives with the other in a time and place of social constraints. It is a world where family secrets must stay hidden, present and past. The novel explores the power of culture, family, friends, bullies, scars, and lovers on two cousins devoted to each other. Though cruelty and pain threaten to dominate, determination, otherworldliness, and most powerfully love, hope, and connectedness combine to enact their mysterious forces.