Bio

Photo by Chelsea Weathers 2021

Jenn Shapland is a writer and archivist living in New Mexico. Her first book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers (Tin House 2020), was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award and the Southern Book Prize, and won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award, the Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award, and the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award. Shapland has a PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin, where her dissertation, Narrative Salvage, focused on wastescapes in contemporary literature. She currently works as an archivist for a visual artist.

Her second book, Thin Skin, will be published by Pantheon Books. Her essays have appeared in New England Review, the New York Times, Outside, Guernica, and Tin House. Her research and writing have been supported by residencies at Yaddo, Ucross, and Vermont Studio Center and by fellowships from the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and the Howard Foundation. Beyond My Autobiography of Carson McCullers and Thin Skin, she is at work on a novel called The Crab Apples set at the home of a well-known lesbian artist who goes missing.