If award-winning writer Susan Reifer had followed her parents' advice she never would be where she is now. But passions won out over sensibility, and today she is among the most widely-published snowsports and mountain travel experts in North America. She also writes about a broad array of other topics, including luxury travel, smart travel, food and cuisine, shelter, the business of resort development, celebrities, green living and the outdoors.
Currently Susan is a contributing writer at SKI, where more than 50 of her articles have appeared since 1996. Her features -- some 200 to date -- also have appeared in publications as wide-ranging as Outside Magazine, Los Angeles, United Airlines' Hemispheres and more. She is a former contributing editor at Sports Illustrated WOMEN and former senior contributing editor at SKIING, where her column, "Parallel Universe," ran bimonthly. During the Olympic Winter Games of 2002 she worked as a bureau supervisor and editor for the Olympic News Service.
As a career writer/editor, her background includes stints in investigative reporting (writing cover stories for the L.A. Weekly and researching white collar crime for Barron's), as a celebrity profiler (writing features for In Style, Redbook and even Penthouse) and in new media (writing for E! Online and Microsoft Network). She has been a contributing editor and correspondent at Adventure Journal, Powder Magazine and Freeze Magazine. She also has worked extensively as a researcher for print, television and movies; clients include E! Entertainment Network, Disney Educational Productions and Oliver Stone's Illusion Entertainment, among others. Her on-screen film credits include Natural Born Killers (1994) and Alexander (2004).
Susan also leads corporate workshops in writing and communications strategies, and periodically teaches university-level workshops in literary journalism. Most recently she was writer-in-residence at Hofstra University's 28th annual Summer Writers' Conference and, in January 2005, taught a month-long writing intensive at Williams College in Massachusetts.
She graduated from Williams College, where she received a Bachelor of Arts in English and History. Originally from Los Angeles, she now divides her time between California and British Columbia. She shares her life with her husband, Sandy, and their dog, Truman.
***NEW -- OCTOBER 27, 2008***
Susan has won the 2008 Alto Tourism Media Award for excellence in travel journalism for her feature "Alberta Unbound," which ran in SKI Magazine in November 2007.
Separately, Susan has been named a finalist for the Tourism Industry Association of Canada's 2008 Tourism Excellence Travel Media Award; this award, sponsored by the Globe and Mail, will be presented at TIAC's leadership summit in November. Susan's nomination is based on her body of published work about Canadian travel experiences.
