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Mesha Maren

Biography

Mesha Maren

Mesha Maren is the author of SUGAR RUN and PERPETUAL WEST. Her work has appeared in the Oxford American, the Guardian, Tin House, the Southern Review and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, an Elizabeth George Foundation grant, and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Ucross Foundation. She is an assistant professor at Duke University and also serves as a NEA Writing Fellow at the federal prison camp in Alderson, West Virginia.

Mesha Maren

Books by Mesha Maren

by Mesha Maren - Fiction

When Alex and Elana move from small-town Virginia to El Paso, they are just a young married couple, intent on a new beginning. Mexican by birth but adopted by white American Pentecostal parents, Alex is hungry to learn about the place where he was born. He spends every free moment across the border in Juárez studying lucha libre (Mexican wrestling) for his graduate work in sociology. Meanwhile, Elana feels disillusioned by academia and has stopped going to class. She has no idea that Alex has fallen in love with Mateo, a lucha libre fighter. When Alex goes missing and Elana can’t determine whether he left of his own accord or was kidnapped, it’s clear that neither of them has been honest about who they are.

by Mesha Maren - Fiction

In 1989, Jodi McCarty is 17 years old when she’s sentenced to life in prison. When she’s released 18 years later, she finds herself at a Greyhound bus stop, reeling from the shock of unexpected freedom but determined to chart a better course for herself. Not yet able to return to her lost home in the Appalachian Mountains, she heads south in search of someone she left behind, as a way of finally making amends. There, she meets and falls in love with Miranda, a troubled young mother living in a motel room with her children. Together they head toward what they hope will be a fresh start. But what do you do with your past --- and with a town and a family that refuses to forget, or to change?