Charity Shumway

Charity earned an MFA in creative writing from Oregon State University and a BA in English from Harvard College. Her first novel, Ten Girls to Watch, comes out this July. In 2007, she spent nine months reporting on the 50th Anniversary of Glamour’s “Top Ten College Women” contest, which served as the inspiration for her book. Her writing has appeared in that magazine and has also been published by Fitness, Ladies Home Journal, and Garden Design, among others. She lives with her husband in Brooklyn, New York.

Phew. Now that that’s done with, here’s a slightly less formal introduction. For a lot of my friends, reading Ten Girls to Watch is a fairly disorienting experience. You see, the narrator of the novel and I have a lot in common, and people who know me often come away confused by what happened in real life and what happened only in the novel.