Susan Schiefelbein has won honors for writings on social issues. Senators John Glenn and William Proxmire have read her articles to Congress. Her byline has appeared on forty articles and featured on the front pages of the Washington Post’s Sunday Book Review and its editorial section. She won the National Magazine Award, the highest award in magazines, for her medical reporting, which the judges called “compassionate, compelling, and great public service.”

The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus, the environmental manifesto that Schiefelbein coauthored with explorer Jacques Cousteau, was deemed “an electrifying masterwork” in the U.S. and has been republished in Germany, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Finland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania.

Journey to the Amazon, a telefilm for which she wrote the narration, garnered the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award and France’s Sept d’Or. The Incredible Machine, a book Schiefelbein coauthored on the human body, became a National Geographic best-seller.