Help us celebrate our friend Mesha and her latest masterpiece Shae!

About the book

When sixteen-year-old Shae meets newcomer Cam, the two become fast friends, and then much more. After Shae gets pregnant and their daughter is born via a traumatic C-section, she’s given opioids to manage the pain. Her days soon begin to revolve around obtaining pills, and she slips further from her loved ones and herself. Simultaneously, Cam is coming into herself, building a feminine identity and undergoing a transition that Shae, while supportive, cannot fully understand. In the heart of West Virginia, opioids are dispensed as freely as candy, and the community is largely hostile toward trans people. It is, however, the only home Shae and Cam know.

Shae is as much about these women as it is about this home they both love, even when it doesn’t always love them back. Maren, who teaches at Duke and has been published in Tin House, The Oxford American, The Guardian, and more, recalls childhood afternoons spent listening to her elderly neighbors “talk about their fierce love for our little corner of West Virginia despite the fact that the quarries and rivers there had robbed them of husbands and children, health and limbs.” Those memories are central to her work today:

“My research and writing are focused on the intersections of identity and landscape and rooted in the question of how the specific place where a person is born and raised impacts them; how the very shapes of the hills and trees anchor themselves inside us and form our first vocabulary.”

In her signature, painstakingly beautiful prose, Maren offers a true lesson in how and where we love.

Carter Sickel, author of The Prettiest Star, raves, “Shae is a beautiful, big-hearted novel about love, desire, and daring to be one’s self. I will be thinking about the characters for a long time.”

About the author

Mesha Maren is the author of the novels Sugar Run and Perpetual West (Algonquin Books). Her short stories and essays can be read in Tin House, The Oxford American, The Guardian, Crazyhorse, Triquarterly, The Southern Review, Ecotone, Sou’wester, Hobart, Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the 2015 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, a 2014 Elizabeth George Foundation grant, an Appalachian Writing Fellowship from Lincoln Memorial University, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Ucross Foundation. She was the 2018-2019 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is an Associate Professor of the Practice of English at Duke University.