UNARMED: AN AMERICAN EDUCATOR’S MEMOIR
Available everywhere books are sold.
Washington Writers’ Publishing House
Winner of the 2024 WWPH Nonfiction Prize
Release date: October 8, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-941551-41-7 /Available via Ingram to Booksellers
“Megan Doney writes in the brutal, continuing aftermath of gun violence, an indictment of our nation’s heartbreaking failure to elevate communal safety above brutal self-interest. It is a clear-eyed, devastating indictment of our nation’s intractable state of denial regarding the lethality of our attachment to gun culture. A haunting reflection on our shared precarity, our open wounds, and the traumas that won’t heal. With heart-breaking honesty and compassion, Megan Doney outlines the contours of our collective longing for security in a relentlessly gun-saturated nation. In Unarmed, Megan Doney balances despondency and hope; bereavement alongside stubborn endurance in the face of our nation’s tolerance for the intolerable.” –Caroline Light, Senior Lecturer in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Harvard University and author of Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense
“Unarmed is like no other book I’ve read–about gun control or anything else. Unexpected, poetic, it gives voice to the mix of fear, rage, shame, and guilty passivity so many Americans feel from a distance about gun violence, even though Doney was much closer to it. Her experience in South Africa presents a surprisingly sensible counterpoint–a clearheaded alternative way of confronting both a brutal history and brutality in the present, contrasted with America’s heart of darkness.” –Eve Fairbanks, author of The Inheritors, An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Reckoning
After surviving a school shooting at New River Community College in Christiansburg, Virginia, English professor Megan Doney was traumatized and adrift. Rather than hardening her heart and life, she wrote Unarmed: An American Educator’s Memoir. An insightful response to American gun violence and illusions of public and private safety, it’s also about her journey over the past decade toward living with an open heart, alive to luck, learning, and love.
Megan Doney teaches composition, literature, and creative writing at New River Community College in Virginia. Her work has appeared in Ilanot Review, Rappahannock Review, Creative Nonfiction, and other literary journals, as well as the anthologies Allegheny and If I Don’t Make It, I Love You: Survivors in the Aftermath of School Shootings. Doney was a Fulbright fellow in South Africa in 2007, and returned there in 2015 to study reconciliation and public narrative in the aftermath of violence. She earned an MFA from Lesley University. Unarmed: An American Educator’s Memoir is her first book. MORE ON MEGAN DONEY HERE.