Kentucky bourbon country runs deep in Suzanne Feinstein’s DNA. Her 3rd great-grandfather was William “Stiller Bill” Caudill, who ran a distillery in Eastern Kentucky, producing bourbon and apple and peach brandy, earning his nickname through a reputation for excellence. When production was outlawed, he kept his word to abandon the still—turning to farming and beekeeping, distributing honey instead of bourbon.

Feinstein was born in Lexington and raised between Ohio and Kentucky, where summers and holidays on her grandparents’ fifty-acre Nicholasville farm shaped her literary landscape. She walked to the Kentucky River through limestone bluffs, past stacked stone fences and wildflowers, playing in dusty tobacco barns and absorbing every sensory detail that would later bring her fiction to vivid life.

In 2009, a fire consumed her grandparents’ beloved farmhouse. During the cleanup, Feinstein discovered a dresser drawer filled with their correspondence from 1940-1946. This treasure trove of romantic love became both personal salvation and literary inspiration. Like her character Erie Shelbourne, she became a true “archivist of the heart,” transcribing these letters and sharing them on Substack (earlandmabel.substack.com).

Feinstein holds an English degree from Western Kentucky University and an MBA from Vanderbilt. After beginning her career as an editor for Writer’s Digest Books and Athlon Sports Publishing, she found her calling at Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management, where she’s spent twenty years nurturing graduate students.

She shares her woodland Tennessee home with her rock musician husband, their exceptionally creative teenager, and their rescued dog and cat. There she creates The Trestle Ridge Stories—fiction infused with the hard-won wisdom that choosing to love fully is always worth the cost.

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