Nora Shalaway Carpenter’s fiction has been named to Best of the Year lists by NPR and Kirkus Reviews, praised in the New York Times and People, and won the Whippoorwill Award for authentic rural fiction, among other honors. Her newest novel, Fault Lines, which explores the impact of fracking in her home state of West Virginia, won the Green Earth Book Award for YA, the Nautilus Book Award, and a Whippoorwill Honor. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has served on faculty at the Highlights/Boyds Mills’ Whole Novel Workshop since 2021. Before she wrote books, Nora served as associate editor of Wonderful West Virginia magazine. A neurodivergent author with an invisible disability, she is a passionate advocate for the normalization of mental health struggles and the deconstruction of harmful stereotyping, particularly of rural people and places. Her fourth anthology, ONWARD: 16 Climate Fiction Short Stories to Inspire Hope, releases February 2026 from Charlesbridge. Learn more at noracarpenterwrites.com.
