Book Event: Maya Jewell Zeller in conversation with Sharma Shields at Fact & Fiction

About the Book: From award-winning poet, essayist, and highly-lauded educator Maya Jewell Zeller comes Raised by Ferns, a memoir of growing up feral in rural America, told in interconnected essays that move between a precariously settled adulthood and the narrator’s unconventional past. Praised by Jess Walter as “Lovely, vital writing that challenges and makes personal the tired conceptions and biases we have about poverty” and by Jamie Ford as “A luminous meditation on growing up with empty pockets but a heart full of wildflowers,” Raised by Ferns will appeal to readers interested in place-based writing, class tensions, the struggles and joys of parenthood and family, and the trouble with systems that don’t serve most of us.

About Maya: A 2024 Washington State Artist Trust Fellow, Maya Jewell Zeller is most recently the author of The Wonder of Mushrooms (AdventureKEEN, 2025); and out takes/ glove box (New American Press, 2023), chosen by Eduardo Corral as winner of the 2022 New American Poetry Prize and praised by Diane Seuss as “ the kind of deft performance only a mermaid or a mother could pull off.” Jewell Zeller is also co-author, with Kathryn Nuernberger, of Advanced Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024) as well as the interdisciplinary collaboration, with visual artist Carrie DeBacker, Alchemy for Cells & Other Beasts (Entre Rios Books, 2017). Earlier collections include the chapbook Yesterday, the Bees (Floating Bridge Press, 2015) and Rust Fish (Lost Horse Press, 2011). She also co-edited, with Washington State Book Award winner Sharma Shields, the multi-genre anthology Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses From the Gloomy Northwest (Scablands Books, 2021). Recipient of a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, a Writing Fellowship from Oxford, and two residencies in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Jewell Zeller has presented her work in Madrid, as part of the Unamuno Author Festival, and at the University of Oxford. She serves as Professor for Central Washington University and as Affiliate Faculty in Poetry and Nature Writing for the low-residency MFA at Western Colorado University. She lives in the Inland Northwest with her teens.

About Sharma: SHARMA SHIELDS is the author of a short story collection, Favorite Monster (Autumn House Press 2012), and three novels, The Sasquatch Hunter’s Almanac (Henry Holt 2015), The Cassandra (Henry Holt 2019), and Duckling (forthcoming from Henry Holt in 2027) . Sharma’s short stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Electric Lit, Catapult, Slice, Slate, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, Fugue, and elsewhere and have garnered such prizes as the 2020 PNBA Award, a 2020 Artist Trust Fellowship, 2016 Washington State Book Award, the Autumn House Fiction Prize, the Tim McGinnis Award for Humor, and the A.B. Guthrie Award for Outstanding Prose. She managed a small press, Scablands Books (now dormant), and is a contributing editor for Moss. Sharma has worked in independent bookstores and public libraries throughout Washington State and is currently the Writing Education Specialist for Spokane Public Library. In autumn of 2025, Sharma received a Humanities Washington Changemaker Award for her library service and contributions to the Inland Northwest literary community.

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