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 now returning to the memoir that she worked on during her 2008 MacDowell residency, with more compassion and complexity than she could manage then. An excerpt of the memoir 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 Ucross Foundation, the Saltonstall Foundation, the Edward Albee Foundation, the Jentel Foundation, the I-Park Foundation, and VCCA. She received her M.F.A. from Columbia University, where she was a Dean’s Fellow.
Brooke teaches and edits through her company Between the Lines. With her partner Niteesh Elias, she founded Freedom Tunnel Press to publish books that straddle borders.
