Background

Suzanne Lillian Bunkers was born on April 20, 1950, in Le Mars, Iowa, United States. She is a daughter of Jerome Anton Bunkers, a rural postman, and Verna Bunkers (maiden name Klein), a homemaker.

Suzanne was raised in a small town of Granville, Iowa.

Education

Suzanne Lillian Bunkers entered Iowa State University at the age of eighteen. She received her Bachelor of Science in English in 1972. Two years later, she obtained a Master of Arts degree in English literature.

Then, Bunkers pursued her higher education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She graduated in 1980 with a Doctor of Philosophy degree.

Career

In addition to writing, Lillian Bunkers career has been related to teaching, as well. So, the start of her career can be counted from the post of a teaching assistant she held at Iowa State University from 1972 to 1974 and at Purdue University from 1974 to 1975. That year, she occupied the same position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Four years later, she started the course of lectures there.

Bunkers left the University in 1980 and began her long collaboration with other institution, Minnesota State University, Mankato. After five years in capacity of assistant professor, Suzanne Lillian Bunkers obtained the status of an associate professor and held the post till the end of the decade. Since 1989, she has been working as a professor of English and has been taught literature and creative writing.

From 1990 to 2002, Bunkers hosted ‘The Weekly Reader’ program on the university’s public radio station called KMSU-FM. She invited authors who told about their works or read the extracts from their writings.

To collect the material for her creative nonfiction books, Suzanne Lillian Bunkers travels a lot to western Europe, especially to Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. The author has also visited Mexico, Canada and China. Nowadays, she continues her researches in the United States and Europe.

Alongside her own writings, Bunkers has contributed to many anthologies, including ‘Girl’s Diary’ series of Capstone Publishers, and periodicals, such as Minnesota English Journal, The Lion and the Unicorn, Plainswoman and others.

Achievements

• Suzanne Lillian Bunkers is an accomplished author who manages to show the American history in her creative nonfiction writings through the personal memories of people from various periods, locales, races and economic situations.
  
  Bunkers has been a recipient of different research fellowships, including those from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Bush Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota Historical Society and others.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Diaries of Girls and Women: A Midwestern American Sampler

    (The book captures and preserves the diverse lives of fort...)

    2001
  • Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women's Diaries

    (These fifteen essays explore the rich texture of women's ...)

    1996
  • Good Earth, Black Soil

    (A book in collaboration with Frank W. Klein)

    1981
  • In Search of Susanna

    (An autobiography by Suzanne L. Bunkers)

    1996
  • All Will Yet Be Well: The Diary of Sarah Gillespie Huftalen 1993
  • The Diary of Caroline Seabury, 1854-1863 1991

Views

Quotations: "Dailiness is central to my writing. ... As I fashion creative nonfiction, I inter¬weave diary entries, excerpts from letters, newspaper clippings, photographs, oral histories, and family stories to lay out patterns of dailiness. My hope is that, by doing so, I can make more visible the lives of women and men within the context of families, generations, and cultures."

"As a writer of creative nonfiction, I believe that I have a responsibility to work in good faith as I strive to bring past events and individuals into the present through the interaction of my memory and imagination. Doing so means waiting to write until I have talked with others and, even more importantly, listened to their stories and examined how their memories are interwoven with my own."

"Creative nonfiction is not the result of objective, scientific study. It is intensely personal. It reflects my thoughts and feelings about myself and others. While my stories include imaginative detail, they are as true as I can make them, given that my interpretations of people and events bear the unmistakable marks of my own experience and personality."

"Because I write scholarly and popular works, there is not one overarching motivation for my work nor one expression of my work. As a teacher and scholar, I have been inspired by the works of authors whom I’ve read and taught in classes over the past twenty-five years. As a writer, I have been especially interested in the interaction of memory and imagination as it manifests itself in such forms as memoir, essay, diary, and historical fiction."

Membership

• American Association of University Women , United States

• Women’s Caucus for the Modern Languages , United States

• Minnesota Historical Society , United States

• National Council of Teachers of English , United States

• American Council of Learned Society , United States

• American Studies Association , United States

• Modern Language Association of America , United States

• Midwest Modern Language Association , United States

• Minnesota Council of Teachers of English , United States

• International Society for the Study of Narrative

Interests

• traveling, playing softball, the history of Luxembourg, genealogy, cats

Connections

Suzanne Lillian Bunkers has one daughter named Rachel Susanna. She was born in 1985.

Father:

Jerome Anton Bunkers

Mother:

Verna Bunkers

Daughter:

Rachel Susanna Bunkers

Godmother:

Lillian Welter Bunkers

godfather:

Theodore Klein Jr.