Brooke Shaffner

Brooke Shaffner’s novel Country of Under was the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction runner-up and a finalist for Dzanc Books' Prize for Fiction and Black Lawrence Press’s Big Moose Prize. The novel is one of five finalists for Mason Jar Press's 1729 Book Prize, the judging of which is underway. Country of Under is inspired, in part, by growing up part Garza, part Shaffner on the Texas-Mexico border, 13 years of college admissions work with immigrant students there, volunteer work with the New Sanctuary Coalition and Make the Road, and her experience of co-organizing an immigrant advocacy event with CUNY DREAMers. 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 and will appear in the spring issue of Litmosphere. She received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was a Dean’s Fellow. Her writing has been published in The Hudson Review, Lost and Found: Stories from New York, The Lit Pub, Marie Claire, and BOMB. She 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 France. She won the Asheville Writers’ Workshop Fiction Contest and the Charles Lloyd Writing Award for narrative nonfiction. 

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 are in the process of founding Freedom Tunnel Press to publish books that straddle borders.