About

Susannah Nesmith is an attorney with a background in journalism. She now works full-time as a staff attorney for the Miami-Dade Commission on Ethics and Public Trust. She is not accepting freelance commissions at this time.

Susannah’s first career was in journalism. Her work appeared in Bloomberg News,  BusinessWeek, The New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review, AARP Bulletin, Planning, CNN, Horticulture, The Miami Herald, The Daily Business Review and a variety of other publications.

From 2009 to 2015, Susannah also taught journalism at Barry University as an adjunct professor and advised the award-winning Barry Buccaneer. She served on the advisory board of the Student Press Law Center and has presented at the College Media Association annual conference. She was a member of the Society of Professional Journalists and the National Book Critics Circle. She also served as an associate editor of As You Were; The Military Experience, a literary journal devoted to publishing the literary works of military veterans and their families.

From 2003 to 2009, Susannah was a staff writer and part-time editor for The Miami Herald, where she covered crime and legal affairs. At the Herald, she covered the eight major hurricanes that hit Florida in 2004 and 2005 and was deployed to Haiti during the 2004 coup, to Iraq in 2005, to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and to Cuba in 2009.

Before moving to Miami, Susannah lived abroad for five years, working as a freelance reporter in Bosnia-Hercegovina and as a staff writer for the Associated Press in the Dominican Republic and Colombia. She ran the AP’s operation in the Dominican Republic and in Colombia, she covered the war.  War, wherever she covered it, was the hardest and also the most rewarding work of her journalism career. Some people climb mountains.

Before Susannah moved abroad, she worked at the Palm Beach Post, where she covered crime and the courts in St. Lucie County, Florida, while also working on the Post’s NASA team (Shuttle launches were cool, but Titan launches were cooler!) and reported on the early years of the AIDS epidemic. Susannah’s first job at a daily newspaper was at El Mercurio, Chile’s largest newspaper, where she wrote in Spanish about everything from judicial reform after the end of the Pinochet dictatorship to the death of the country’s only elephant.

She is fluent in Spanish.

Susannah completed her Masters in Fine Arts degree at Goucher College’s Creative Nonfiction program, where she won the Christine White Award for Literary Journalism for an excerpt of her thesis. She completed her JD at Florida International University in 2022 and was admitted to the Florida Bar in the spring of 2023.

She lives in Miami with her husband, Chuck Rabin, their big, goofy mutt, Deena, and two silly cats, one of whom has 24 toes. He’s a mutant. A Great Dane puppy, Astro, recently joined the family – he’s as big as you probably imagine, and as dumb as normal-sized puppies, but his puppy mistakes are commensurate with his size – giant! When she’s not working, Susannah can sometimes be found kayaking around Miami, picking garbage out of the waterways. She also spends a lot of time in her back-yard slice of the urban Florida jungle, trying to eliminate invasives, cultivate native flora and fauna, channel rainwater where it can do the most good – and the least harm,  and grow a few tomatoes organically.