In the way that you rarely fully appreciate a moment while it is happening, I didn't grasp the uniquely frenetic, sometimes exhausting, and always wonderful experience of growing up with Susan Zimet as my mother until I was, as they say, old enough to know better. Whether it was the dizzying delight of an impromptu NYC day trip to try our luck at half price Broadway tickets or the adolescent misery of always sharing my birthday party with our local Congressman, all my memories are tinted with that larger-than-life energy that my mother brings to everything: her work, her passion projects, and of course, her family. Throughout my life, my mom has had countless of those passion projects, some staying in favor longer than others. But the one enduring through line is her commitment to education. Whether it was creating a Cold War/Peace museum or raising our celebrity cred with her activism against hydrofracking, she was voraciously learning and spreading her knowledge through the platform she built for herself. And with her 2018 young adult book, Roses and Radicals: The Epic Story of How American Women Won the Right to Vote, she is teaching the next generation of women one of the most important stories ever-it's right there in the title. Growing up with my family in the uber-progressive town of New Paltz, NY, I took feminism for granted. When Susan became the Supervisor, six-year-old Hannah was proud that she was the first woman to get the job, but didn't have the wherewithal to be incredulous at the fact that no woman had ever been elected to this office before. It was almost Y2K! Eventually, the gravity of that fact hit me. Still, I only recently learned that when my mother balanced her first town budget, cutting taxes without any major funding eliminations, she was told to her face that her husband must have done the work. At this point in her career, Susan hadn't fallen down the rabbit hole of researching the Suffragist movement, but she was channeling them all along the way. During her decades in political office, she endured countless cruelties and faced them down with a strength and poise drawn from the Suffragists (with some very colorful language thrown in!). As long as I have known her (since my birth, that is) Susan's dream has always been to work in children's educational media. Watching her achieve that dream with such an impactful and timely book has been a joy-and, watching her achieve that on top of everything else she does is an exercise in inspiration. Because this only covers the tip of the iceberg of Susan's accomplishments. Her current "day job" is the Food and Anti-Hunger Policy Coordinator for New York State under Governor Cuomo. In a time where uncertainty is the way of life for every American, food insecurity is an all-time public health priority and Susan has been at the forefront of making sure that New York won't go hungry as a result of this pandemic. That wraps up Susan in a fitting way: even though she's not much of a cook (the kitchen is my dad's domain), she has dedicated her life to making sure everyone is educationally, emotionally, and literally fed, full, and happy.

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