Shasta Grant grew up in Newport, New Hampshire. She’s loved reading and writing for as long as she can remember. In first grade, she wrote a story about an apple that could walk and talk. He wore a little black hat and brown shoes. It won first prize in a school writing contest. She wrote another story about a horse, even though she didn’t know anything about horses. Her grandfather kept that story folded up inside his wallet for many years. Growing up, her favorite writer was Judy Blume. A writing contest in fifth grade earned Shasta a lottery entry for tickets to see Judy Blume read in Concord. She was so devastated when her name wasn’t drawn that the school librarian somehow rustled up another ticket. Shasta is sorry if her old classmates learn of this now and find it unfair; she hopes they will see it as a testament to the power of a good librarian.
Shasta moved away from New Hampshire after college, but she continues to be haunted – in a good way – by the mountains and lakes where she grew up. She finds herself using this area as the setting for much of her work, in which she explores girlhood, missing mothers, nostalgia, and the mysteries of the woods.
Shasta is the author of Gather Us Up and Bring Us Home (Split Lip Press, 2017). Ann Patchett selected her story, “Most Likely To,” as the winner of the 2015 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest. She was a 2020 Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow and the 2016 Kathy Fish Fellow at SmokeLong Quarterly.
She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and The Best Small Fictions and long-listed for the Wigleaf Top 50. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Epiphany, Gargoyle, cream city review, MonkeyBicycle, Wigleaf, and elsewhere.
Shasta received her MFA in Fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and has been awarded writing residencies from Hedgebrook and The Kerouac Project. She has taught writing at Ball State University, The Indiana Writers Center, and several women’s correctional facilities.
She is the Coordinating Editor at SmokeLong Quarterly, a writing coach and editor at One Lit Place, and co-founder of Brown Bag Lit.
Shasta lives with her husband and son (and two cats and a dog) in Indianapolis.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you Shasta Grant’s novel When We Were Feral in 2026.
