Shawn Sudia-Skehan

Shawn Sudia-Skehan was born to William Daniel Sudia and Margueritte Elizabeth Delony on September 5, 1951 in Atlanta, Georgia. She attended Druid Hills High School, where she made lifelong friendships and met her husband-to-be, Paul Skehan. She majored in English at Georgia State University from which her nascent interest in books grew into a lifelong exploration of literature. After graduation, she and Paul married. She held positions as the Director of Public Information for the Georgia Hospital Association and as Manager of Communications for the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce. In the 1990s, she left the corporate world to engage in her love for the arts as managing partner of a fine crafts gallery.

Shawn engaged in many passions in her life: the Beatles, Paul Revere and the Raiders, Michael Crawford, England, the Brontes. . . But one day, she saw a copy of The Great Gatsby, remembered having read it in high school, and decided to read it again as an adult. Thus began her greatest and most passionate undertaking, understanding the lives of F. Scott Fitzgerald, his wife Zelda, and their daughter Scottie.

She collected Fitzgerald memorabilia, served on the board of directors of the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum in Montgomery, Alabama for many years and as the museum's director of acquisitions. She gave many donations of Fitzgerald memorabilia to the museum, and a wing of the Museum was named after her. Her penchant for research led her to the archives of the University of South Carolina, Princeton, Yale, and Vassar, and to the private collections of the families of contemporaries of the Fitzgeralds. She felt strongly that Fitzgerald had been unjustly portrayed by earlier biographers which led to a public persona that she felt needed to be corrected.

At the Fourteenth International F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Conference in Saint Paul, Minnesota in 2017, Shawn curated an exhibition of rare photographs entitled "Sight Unseen." It was a natural progression for her to combine her extensive research, her catalog of photographs, and a desire to correct negative perceptions. The result is a book entitled An Apprehension of Splendor: A Biography in Photographs of F. Scott Fitzgerald and His Family. She handpicked and annotated 344 rare photographs, 180 of which had never been published. The book was published by the University of Alabama Press the day after she died.

Shawn passed away peacefully surrounded by love ones on June 13, 2025, after a brief illness. She is preceded in death by her parents and beloved husband Paul. She is survived by her sister Shelly Sudia and her husband Terry Spahr, sisters-in-law Joanna Skehan and Molly and husband John Drury, brother-in-law Jamie Skehan and his wife Mary, and many nieces and nephews. A Visitation will be held Saturday, July 12, 2025 at 10 o'clock a.m. with the Memorial Service to follow at 11 o'clock a.m. in the chapel at A.S. Turner & Sons Funeral Home in Decatur.