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Jenn Shapland

Biography

Jenn Shapland

Jenn Shapland is a writer living in New Mexico. Her nonfiction has been published in Tin House, Outside, the Lifted Brow, Essay Daily and elsewhere. She won the 2019 Rabkin Foundation Award for art journalism, and her essay “Finders, Keepers” won a 2017 Pushcart Prize. She teaches as an adjunct in the Creative Writing department at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CARSON McCULLERS is her first book.

Jenn Shapland

Books by Jenn Shapland

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir
by Jenn Shapland - Memoir, Nonfiction

Jenn Shapland is a graduate student when she first uncovers letters written to Carson McCullers by a woman named Annemarie. Though Shapland recognizes herself in the letters, which are intimate and unabashed in their feelings, she does not see McCullers as history has portrayed her. Her curiosity gives way to fixation, not just with this newly discovered side of McCullers’ life, but with how we tell queer love stories. Why, Shapland asks, are the stories of women paved over by others’ narratives? What happens when constant revision is required of queer women trying to navigate and self-actualize in straight spaces? And what might the tracing of McCullers’ life --- her history, her secrets, her legacy --- reveal to Shapland about herself?