Mesha Maren

Mesha Maren is the author of the new novel Sugar Run. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, Oxford American, Crazyhorse, Southern Cultures, Hobart, Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2015 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, a 2014 Elizabeth George Foundation grant, an Appalachian Writing Fellowship from Lincoln Memorial University, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Ucross Foundation. She is the 2018-2019 Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and also serves as a National Endowment of the Arts Writing Fellow at the Beckley Federal Correctional Institution.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Maren's reply:

I am reading:

Waiting for Nothing by Tom Kromer – an amazing autobiographical novel written by a man from Huntington, West Virginia about his years of homelessness during the 1930s.

Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians by Peter Guralnick - an exploration of early country, rockabilly, and the blues music.

And I'm also reading an advance reader's copy of Meander Belt by M. Randal O'Wain- a collection of gorgeous, whip-smart essays about family, loss, and coming of age in the Working-Class South-forthcoming in October 2019.

Visit Mesha Maren's website.

--Marshal Zeringue