Our Mission

Creative Director

Shawna Kay Rodenberg

Shawna Kay Rodenberg is the author of Kin, a debut memoir deemed “essential reading” by the Washington Post and “gorgeously gritty” by Oprah Daily.  She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, where she now teaches nonfiction, and her essays have appeared in Salon, the Village Voice, and Elle. In 2016, Shawna was awarded the Jean Ritchie Fellowship, and in 2017 she was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award. 

As a teacher, Shawna is generous, creative, collaborative, and unconventional.  As an editor, she is invested and insightful.  She believes deeply that art of all kinds can solve all manner of ills and should be accessible to absolutely everyone, and she has given lectures and readings and facilitated workshops in a variety of forums from the Midwest to New England, Appalachia, and beyond.  

Shawna is also a registered nurse, mother of five, and grandmother of two.  She was raised in the mountains of eastern Kentucky and, briefly, on a cluster of religious communes in northern Minnesota.  She’s obsessed, universally, with mysteries and mystics.  She lives on a hobby goat farm in southern Indiana.  Her second book, a sequel to her first, is in progress.