Susan Gladin, M.Div, is an ordained United Methodist minister whose curiosity has led her down many roads. She spent 16 years in the position of Executive Director, leading various non-profit organizations in and around Hillsborough, N.C. She was a founding member of The Episcopal Service Corps. 

 

Concurrently, she was a writer, spending 20 years as a columnist with the Chapel Hill Herald. She was selected for the inaugural Elizabeth Daniels Squires Writers’ Residency and was writer in residence of Wildacres Retreat Center from 2005 – 2006. She has also been recognized for her fiction work, winning the Lower Cape Fear Historical Society Fiction Contest in ‘04 and receiving the Doris Betts Fiction Prize in ‘05. More recently she has been published in The Christian Century. In addition to creative writing, she has years of experience with curriculum development.

Susan also spent 18 years as a small business owner and farmer. From 1980 to 2019 Susan lived on a farm in Hillsborough, where she and her late husband raised their daughters and owned wool processing and livestock health supply businesses. The farm has been known widely throughout the community as Down Yonder Farm; a gathering place for musicians, writers, and artists of many stripes, and today is run by Susan’s daughter Jessie Gladdek. This past Christmas day Susan re-married, and now she and Michael Patrick live in the town of Hillsborough.

More recently, Susan has completed Spiritual Director and Health Coach training. She is a certified Second Breath Conscious Facilitator and has been teaching and facilitating programs with the Center (and before that, Servant Leadership School) for nearly 15 years. Susan never stops grappling with what it means to live a life of service and faith. She brings a wealth of knowledge of the Christian wisdom tradition and a curious attention to every room she facilitates. We are so appreciative to be shoulder to shoulder with her in this work.

As though she’s not kept busy enough, Susan recently adopted a big Great Pyrenees puppy who, at 9 months weighs nearly 90 pounds, and keeps her hands full.