Featured Mentor: Nina Shope

We are excited to announce our featured mentor of the week: Nina Shope! Nina is the author of Hangings: Three Novellas, published by Starcherone Books and Asylum, winner of the 2020 Dzanc Fiction Prize. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Conjunctions, Quarter After Eight, Fourteen Hills, 3rd Bed, Open City, Sleeping Fish, Salt Hill, and elsewhere. Among other honors, she is the recipient of the Calvino Prize from the University of Louisville. Her stories have been anthologized in PP/FF: An Anthology, New Standards: The First Decade of Fiction at Fourteen Hills, and Wreckage of Reason: XXperimental Women Writers Writing in the 21st Century. She holds an B.A. from Brown University and an MFA from Syracuse University. She currently lives in Denver, Colorado, with her husband, author Christopher Narozny, and their corgi.

Nina spoke candidly about what she hopes to offer aspiring writers: “I am excited to read some fresh, new experimental writing! Sometimes we have too many other voices in our heads when we write, sometimes we need others to help us sculpt and reflect upon our creations. I hope I can offer the latter and promise to be a close and attentive reader. I might not have as much useful advice about the publishing world, however, as we are all just stumbling our way through!”

Two novels that Nina was “very taken with” recently were Athena by John Banville and Damballah by John Edgar Wideman.

Click here to sign up for a mentorship from Nina!

Click here to purchase Nina’s brilliant historical fiction novel, Asylum.