Susan Hayden is a multigenre writer. She is the author of Now You Are a Missing Person, a memoir in poems, stories and fragments, published by Moon Tide Press. It was a Kirkus Reviews Best Indie Book of 2024, after having received the Kirkus Star. Hayden's book also made the Shortlist for the Memoir Prize for Books, was an Eric Hoffer Award Finalist, a National Indie Excellence Awards Finalist, a Readers’ Choice Book Award Finalist and Runner-up in the Zibby Awards 2023 for Best Coming of Middle/Old Age book, awarded by Zibby Owens. And it was a 2024 Finalist in the IAN Book of the Year Awards in 3 categories: Grief/Hardship, Poetry, and Women’s Non-Fiction. Now You Are a Missing Person was selected for the Best of 2023: Fiction & Literature from Los Angeles Public Library, as selected by library staff. Additionally, it was the Winner in the Poetry category and Winner in the Wild Card category from Southern California Book Festival.

Hayden is published in the anthologies: Catching Fire (Rose of Sharon Press); Look What I Did About Your Silence (El Martillo Press, 2025); From Venice to Venice: Poets of California and Italy (El Martillo Press, 2024); Beat Not Beat (Moon Tide Press, 2022); Los Angeles In the 1970s: Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine (Rare Bird Books, 2016); I Might Be The Person You Are Talking To (Padua Playwrights Press, 2015); The Black Body (Seven Stories Press, 2009) and elsewhere.

She is the Creator, Curator and Producer of Library Girl at Ruskin Group Theatre in Santa Monica, CA, since 2009. The monthly event celebrates the written word and features poets, essayists, novelists, playwrights and singer-songwriters. The show was named Best Local Literary Series from The Argonaut's Best of the Westside. In 2015, she received the Bruria Finkel/Artist in the Community Volunteerism Award from the Santa Monica Arts Foundation. Hayden is also a playwright. Her work has been produced at The MET Theatre, The Lost Studio, Padua Playwrights Workshop/Festival, Mark Taper Forum's Other Voices Program, South Coast Repertory's Nexus Project, EST's WinterFest, The California Studies Council, Cafe Plays and the Ruskin.

She is the proud mother of singer-songwriter Mason Summit, one half of the music duo, The Prickly Pair. She lives in Santa Monica and Joshua Tree with her husband, music journalist Steve Hochman.