Born Suzanne Latham in Bunnlevel, North Carolina, on October 8, 1936, she started school as a third grader because of her reading ability. Although it took her some time to catch up to her classmates in cursive writing and arithmetic, she was always creating short stories and poems. After graduating from Duke University, she taught English, then married Carl R. Newton in 1957. She quit teaching within a few years to raise a family of four children. Although finding time in her busy life was not easy, she never stopped writing and was soon selling short stories to magazines. When one of her stories became too long to be published as a magazine article, she published her first book Purro and the Prattleberries. As her children became older, she reentered the teaching field to become a writer-in-residence at Meredith College and to serve as a consultant in...