Suzanne Richardson Harvey, an amazing talent and friend. Suzanne’s work has appeared in two issues of The Stray Branch, #3, Spring/Summer 2009 and #4, Fall/Winter 2009 and a review of her book, “A Tiara for the Twentieth Century” appeared in the Spring/Summer 2010 issue.  She was a great source of inspiration and encourgement for me and the magazine in its early days. She will be missed.

OBITUARY: SUZANNE RICHARDSON HARVEY

(Posted with the permission of the family)

Suzanne Richardson Harvey was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1934 and
married there in 1956. She was a member of the Academy of American Poets as
well as a member of the National Council of Teachers of English. She passed
away on Saturday, July 17, 2010, in Walnut Creek, California.

She received her B.A. from Mount Mercy College, now Carlow University; an
M.A. from Northeastern University, with a thesis on George Meredith; and a Ph.D. from Tufts University, where she specialized in Elizabethan poetry and
wrote a dissertation on Edmund Spenser.

After teaching at Pine Manor College and Tufts University in the Boston Area
in Massachusetts, she and her family relocated to the San Francisco Bay
Area, where for almost two decades she lectured in the English Department at
Stanford University. Nearly a decade of her time at Stanford was spent as a
resident fellow (together with her husband) in an all-freshmen residence
hall. They co-authored a book about this experience entitled Virtual
Reality and the College Freshman: All Our Friends Are 18 (Alamo Trails
Press, 1999).

While at Stanford, she also was a visiting lecturer in the English
Department at the University of California at Berkeley. For nearly a
decade, she regularly taught editorial workshops offered as part of the
curriculum for the Publishing Program at the University of California
Extension. Her teaching produced the volume A Functional Style: Logic and
the Art of Writing, which she used as a teaching device not only in her
university courses, but also outside the classroom at workshops for the
University of California Regents, for Bank of America executives, and at
Asilomar for the American Medical Writers Association. Upon retirement from
Stanford in 1997, she remained active, lecturing for Emeritus College and
for Diablo Valley College near her home in Alamo, California.

Her collected poetry has appeared under the title A Tiara for the Twentieth
Century (Fithian Press, 2009), with individual poems published in the USA,
Canada, the UK, Australia, and Austria. She is survived by her husband,
Robert J. Harvey, cofounder and former chairman, CEO, and president of
Thoratec Corporation, now in Pleasanton, California; and her three sons,
Dennis, Brian, and James (Duke); in addition to five grandsons, Kevin, Sean,
Gregory, Patrick, and Matthew.

• Next >