Susan Hubbard Books in Order

If you want her vampire coming-of-age story: The Society of S → The Year of Disappearances → The Season of Risks
If you prefer sharp contemporary satire: Lisa Maria's Guide for the Perplexed → Lisa Maria Takes Off
If you want award-winning short stories: Walking on Ice → Blue Money

Susan Hubbard was born in Syracuse, New York, and grew up in upstate New York with the kind of reading habit that tends to take over a life. By twelve, she had already read through the children's and young adult shelves at her local library and moved on to the adult section. She also started making things early, including a neighborhood newspaper at seven and what she later described as a bad novel at ten. The pattern was clear long before publication entered the picture.

She started as a reader first, and that still feels central to her work.

Before her books began appearing, Hubbard worked as a reporter and columnist at newspapers in New York and Connecticut. She later returned to Syracuse University for graduate study, taught there, spent several years at Cornell, and eventually joined the University of Central Florida, where she became a Professor Emerita of English. That mix of newsroom pace and classroom patience helps explain her fiction. Her books can be thoughtful and wide-ranging, but they also keep a close eye on what people do under pressure.

Her first book, Walking on Ice, won the Associated Writing Programs Short Fiction Prize. Her later collection Blue Money won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Those books show one side of Hubbard especially well: she is drawn to uneasy encounters, private motives, and ordinary lives that turn slightly strange. The stories move through places like Boston, Northern Ireland, the Scottish Highlands, and upstate New York, and they often leave readers with that uneasy feeling that one small choice can change everything.

Then she shifted gears.

With Lisa Maria's Guide for the Perplexed and Lisa Maria Takes Off, Hubbard moved into satirical contemporary fiction. The Lisa Maria books follow a smart, dryly funny heroine trying to reinvent her life while giving advice to other people and making a fair mess of her own. Hubbard also coedited 100% Pure Florida Fiction, an anthology of contemporary stories set in the state where she would build much of her teaching career. Even when the tone gets lighter, she stays interested in work, class, romance, and the stories people tell about themselves.

Many readers know her best for the Ethical Vampire novels, The Society of S, The Year of Disappearances, and The Season of Risks. These books center on Ariella Montero, a girl growing up between the human and vampire worlds. Hubbard's take on vampire fiction is less about gore and more about identity, family secrets, politics, and the awkward business of growing up. Ari is curious, bookish, isolated, and often wiser than the adults around her, which gives the series a voice that feels both young and old at once. Readers who come back to these books often do so for that mix of eerie atmosphere, coming-of-age tension, and serious questions tucked inside the supernatural setup.

Hubbard's short fiction has appeared in journals such as Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and The Mississippi Review, and her work has been translated and published in more than fifteen countries. She has also received teaching and research honors, along with residencies at places like Yaddo and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre. These days she lives in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and has described a writing hideaway on the Banana River as one of her favorite places to work.