Skip to main content

Shawna Kay Rodenberg

Biography

Shawna Kay Rodenberg

Shawna Kay Rodenberg is originally from Seco, a tiny former coal camp near the headwaters of the Kentucky River in Letcher County, Kentucky. She is a mother, grandmother, community college English instructor and a registered nurse. Her poetry, essays and reviews have appeared in Consequence, Salon, the Village Voice, the Bennington Review, the Crab Creek Review, Kudz and Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel; she won a 2017 Rona Jaffe Writers' Award in creative nonfiction. Rodenberg is also a vocalist; she and her husband, David, are collaborating on an album, a mix of original Americana, vintage country and traditional mountain songs.

Shawna Kay Rodenberg

Books by Shawna Kay Rodenberg

Kin: A Memoir
by Shawna Kay Rodenberg - Memoir, Nonfiction

When Shawna Kay Rodenberg was four, her father spirited her family from their home in the hills of Eastern Kentucky to Minnesota, renouncing all of their earthly possessions to live in the Body, an off-the-grid End Times religious community. Disciplined harshly for her many infractions, Shawna was sexually abused by a predatory adult member of the community. Soon after the leader of the Body died and revelations of the sexual abuse came to light, her family returned to the same Kentucky mountains that their ancestors have called home for 300 years. Shawna ultimately leaves her mountain home but only as she masters a perilous balancing act between who she has been and who she will become.