Susan Burton

Susan Burton is a contributing editor of This American Life and a former editor of Harper’s. Her radio documentaries have won several awards, including an Overseas Press Club citation, and she received a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to do stories about teenagers. Her writing has appeared in Slate, the New Yorker, New York, and the New York Times Magazine, and she is the co-author, with Hyder Akbar, of Come Back to Afghanistan: A California Teenager’s Story, which was named an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. The film Unaccompanied Minors, which was directed by Freaks and Geeks creator Paul Feig and released by Warner Brothers in December 2006, is based on one of her essays. Susan was a winner of Seventeen magazine’s fiction contest in 1993, and she graduated from Yale in 1995. She now lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their son. She is at work on a novel.

You can read the essay on which the film Unaccompanied Minors was based. The essay was originally broadcast on This American Life on January 6, 2001.

Send email to susanmasonburtongmail.com.