Jenn Shapland is a writer living in New Mexico. Her first book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award and the Southern Book Prize, and won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award, the Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award, and the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award. It was long-listed for the American Library Association Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence and the Reading the West Book Prize.

Her most recent book, Thin Skin, was a Time, Publishers Weekly, and New York Public Library best book of 2023. Alexander Chee, the author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, calls it “a wrenching, loving and trenchant examination of feminism, nuclear power, healthcare, queerness and American life unlike any I can think of, in essays that give lessons in pushing this form to the limit. The resulting collection is iconoclastic, electric, illuminating. … A book to keep for a long time.” 

Shapland's essays have appeared inNew England Review, the New York Times, Guernica, and Tin House, and have been awarded a Pushcart Prize and the Rabkin Prize. Her research and writing have been supported by residencies at Aspen Words, Yaddo, Ucross, and Vermont Studio Center and by fellowships from the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and the Howard Foundation. She has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Texas at Austin and she works as an archivist for a visual artist.