Brooke Shaffner

Brooke Shaffner’s novel Country of Under won The 1729 Book Prize in Prose, judged by Diane Zinna, and is forthcoming from Mason Jar Press in April 2024. Country of Under was the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction runner-up and was shortlisted for Dzanc Books' Prize for Fiction and Black Lawrence Press’s Big Moose Prize. An excerpt won the Asheville Writers’ Workshop Fiction Contest. Brooke is working on a memoir tentatively titled Everything I Love Is Out to Sea, an excerpt of which won the 2023 Lit/South Award, judged by Melissa Febos, and appeared in Litmosphere. Other work has been published in The Hudson Review, Lost and Found: Stories from New York, The Lit Pub, Marie Claire, and BOMB. Brooke has been awarded artist grants from United States Artists and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, the Saltonstall Foundation, the Edward Albee Foundation, the Jentel Foundation, the I-Park Foundation, and VCCA. She received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was a Dean’s Fellow, and won the Charles Lloyd Writing Award at Davidson College. Read more at BrookeShaffner.com. 

In addition to Between the Lines workshops, Brooke has taught writing and literature at Rutgers University, The Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, Northwestern University’s Center for Talent Development, Athens Academy, and the Globe Institute of Technology. She has created college essay workshops for College Strategies and GEAR UP. She has written English Language Arts curricula for Pittsburgh, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Atlanta public high schools through Kaplan K-12 Learning Services and edited curricula for Achievement First charter schools. Brooke and her partner Niteesh Elias founded Freedom Tunnel Press to publish books that straddle borders.