About Me
“A Life built around Music” may be the best way to sum up Sue K Riley. Sue was drawn to music from the age of 5 when her Grandfather, Waldo, started helping her with piano. Sue always knew that music would be her life’s calling. She began playing in churches at age 11, and started giving private piano lessons at age18. Believing in the power of music to touch hearts and heal lives, Sue continues to mentor, teach, and share music through a wide variety of means.
Sue is one of the founders of emPower Music & Arts, with the mission of “Changing the World, One Song at a Time”. emPower hosts the yearly Posi Awards, which recognizes excellence in songwriting for artists who create songs with messages of peace, oneness, and joyous living. The annual emPower Posi Festival is in it’s 16th year and will be held virtually in Sept of 2021, and then at Unity Village, MO for the 17th Posi Awards Sept 14-18, 2022.
A prolific singer songwriter herself, Sue has created 8 CDs of original uplifting Posi music, along with accompanying songbooks. Her CD “Everything Changes, I Can Change Too” was produced by Daniel Nahmod and contains “Grandpa’s Hands” a musical tribute to her Grandfather that recently won a First Place Gold Medal in the SAW song competition from Washington, DC and the song “Teach Me To Pray” received a second place Silver Medal.
Sue collaborated with Glen Roethel to create a congregational CD “Go Out and Shine”
Her newest CD “There Are Moments” was released in May of 2020.
Sue was the chair person for the Music Ministry Team of Unity Worldwide Ministries for 11 years. Through her leadership, the team created 10 songbooks of Positive New Thought Music for use in our spiritual centers. Sue and Richard Mekdeci helped plan and run a yearly conference called Sound Connections which was dedicated to providing training and resources to music ministries. This conference is now part of the Posi Festival.
Sue and her business partner Richard Mekdeci have published a handbook on Music Ministry, full of practical tips on how to turn your weekly music into a “music ministry”, host successful special events, create a great service flow, hire a music director, speak “music-ese”, and many other topics vital to successful ministries.
Sue tours the country performing in the emPower “PosiPalooza” concerts which bring Posi Award Winning artists together in a unique, uplifting format where the artists swap songs in an organic musical conversation. To date, they have produced over 300 of these concerts in the US and Canada to rave reviews.
My Interests
Music, songwriting, decorative painting, creative process, guitar, walking, reading, woodcarving, Scrabble, crossword puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, Christmas,
