Home
Hear Faith Shearin read the opening pages of Lost River, 1918
Winner of the 2021 YA Global Fiction Prize, judged by Carnegie Medal Winner Anthony McGowan
Praise for Lost River, 1918
"Lost River is an extraordinary work of art. It is a story of death and rebirth, borrowing from myth and fairy tale, but also conjuring up literary texts from Frankenstein and Dracula, from Southern Gothic to Magical realism. Yet it remains entirely itself, not quite like anything else I've read. The prose is rich and delicate, the story immersive. It has the feel of an instant classic." -- Anthony McGowan, author of Lark
Lost River, 1918 is the story of the Van Beest family, which inherits a house at the edge of a magical forest where the dead return from the afterlife. When 13-year-old Anne's mother, a midwife, delivers a stillborn baby and her father, a mortician, accidentally brings that infant back to life, the Van Beests find themselves at the center of a drama that raises questions about the relationship between the living and the dead.
Lost River, 1918 is available August 2022
Praise for My Sister Lives in the Sea
"In glorious language, Shearin will make you long to share the sisters' adventure on this magical island." -- Gloria Whelan, author of Listening for Lions and Homeless Bird, National Book Award Winner for Young People's Literature
"To read Faith Shearin's My Sister Lives in the Sea is to be a fortunate visitor to the enchanted, haunted island where this wonderful novel-in-stories is set. You'll meet Hazel, your perceptive guide. With compassion and humor, she'll tell you about her family: her unconventional mother, her withdrawn father, her beloved, doomed sister. She'll take you on treasure-hunting adventures and Bigfoot-hunting adventures and adventures in lunar landscapes. She'll show you sea turtles and stars, fishermen's widows and washed up Hollywood actors; she'll show you a house whose staircase ends in the sea. When the last boat is set to leave the island, you won't want to go. It's that kind of place. It's that kind of book." -- Mark Brazaitis, author of The Incurables and The Rink Girl
"close to perfect, beautifully limpid, but also with great power and that elusive quality of strangeness." -- Anthony McGowan, author of Lark
My Sister Lives in the Sea is available September 2023
The Hawthorne sisters, Beth and Hazel, are growing up off the coast of North Carolina in the 1970s. They share a bedroom with identical twin beds and spend their time digging for buried treasure, building rockets, and searching for Bigfoot. Their island is home to shipwrecks and fog, wild horses, sharks, and a mysterious sleeping sickness. When Beth drives off a bridge after a school dance, and the Hawthorne parents divorce, Hazel must find a new relationship to her sister, whose ghost seems to live in the sea.
Faith Shearin is the author of YA Fiction, Poetry, Short Stories and Creative Nonfiction
Faith Shearin, the 2021 recipient of the YA Global Fiction Prize, is the author of seven collections of poetry: The Owl Question (May Swenson Award), The Empty House (Word Press), Moving the Piano (SFA University Press), Telling the Bees, Orpheus, Turning (Dogfish Poetry Prize), Darwin’s Daughter (SFA University Press), and Lost Language (Press 53). She has received awards from Yaddo, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Recent work has been read aloud on The Writer’s Almanac and included in American Life in Poetry. Her short stories and nonfiction have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Literal Latte, The Missouri Review, Meridian, New Ohio Review, and Sixfold, among others. She is the 2022 nonfiction winner of the Perkoff Prize from The Missouri Review.