Skip to main content

Shelley Puhak

Biography

Shelley Puhak

Shelley Puhak is a critically acclaimed poet and writer whose work has appeared in the Atlantic, Lapham’s Quarterly, Teen Vogue, Virginia Quarterly Review and elsewhere. Her essays have been included in The Best American Travel Writing and selected as Notables in four consecutive editions of The Best American Essays. She is the author of of two books of poetry, most recently GUINEVERE IN BALTIMORE, winner of the Anthony Hecht Prize. THE DARK QUEENS is her nonfiction debut. She lives in Maryland. 

Shelley Puhak

Books by Shelley Puhak

The Dark Queens: The Bloody Rivalry That Forged the Medieval World
by Shelley Puhak - History, Nonfiction

In sixth-century Merovingian France, Brunhild and her sister-in-law, Fredegund, were iron-willed strategists who reigned over vast realms, changing the face of Europe. The two queens commanded armies and negotiated with kings and popes. They formed coalitions and broke them, mothered children and lost them. They fought a decades-long civil war --- against each other. With ingenuity and skill, they battled to stay alive in the game of statecraft, and in the process laid the foundations of what would one day be Charlemagne's empire. Yet after the queens' deaths, their stories were rewritten, their names consigned to slander and legend. In THE DARK QUEENS, Shelley Puhak sets the record straight.