Nina Shope

Wellesley High School Author: Nina Shope (1993)

       Nina Shope grew up in Wellesley and attended Bates Elementary School, Wellesley Middle School, and Wellesley High School, graduating in 1993.  She is a proud recipient of the WHS Sylvia Plath Award for writing.  She studied with English teachers Dee Fralick, Jeanie Goddard, Ronna Frick, and Marisa McCoy during her years in high school.  

      Nina’s debut novel, Asylum, won the 2020 Dzanc Fiction prize and was released in May of this year.  Her collection, Hangings: Three Novellas, won the Starcherone Books Award and was published in 2005.  She is the recipient of the Calvino Prize from the University of Louisville, the Jeremy Lake Memorial Fiction Prize from Syracuse University, a residency from the Millay Colony for the Fine Arts, and the Barbara Banks Brodsky Prize from Brown University.  Her writing has appeared in a number of literary journals and several anthologies.  She holds a B.A. with Honors in Creative Writing from Brown and an MFA in Fiction from Syracuse University.

       Of Hangings, a reviewer wrote “it blazes a new direction in writing … and is a brave, scorching leap in experimental fiction, a stunning and audacious work of lyricism, style, and astonishing grace.”  A review of Asylum said “Shope’s is thrilling writing at the intersection of prose and poetry; a fever dream of passion, trauma, and nightmare… it is a brilliant and visionary book by a brilliant and visionary writer who is grabbing hold of the fiction genre and crashing it wide open.”  

About Asylum:  https://linktr.ee/ninashopeauthor