co-editor of the ABA national bestseller Wanting: Women Writing About Desire (2023). Her first book, Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town, was listed as one of Oprah's top 5 summer memoirs and is the basis for the documentary film The Atomic States of America, a 2012 Sundance selection, and the anthology she co-edited with Margot Kahn, This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home (2017), was a New York Times Editor’s Choice.
At Electric Lit McMasters tagged eight "books that delve into the life of single mothers, both fictional and real," including:
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha PhilyawRead about the other entries on the list.
When this collection blazed onto the scene in 2020, it won every award possible, putting West Virginia University Press on the map. The nine stories in this shatteringly beautiful collection are all part of a loosely interconnected galaxy in which Black women and girls move through kitchens, bedrooms, and back parking lots, searching for, and often finding, desire, agency, religion, and care. In the “Peach Cobbler,” a single mother is observed through her teenage daughter’s eyes, handing down her family recipe for the dessert, as well as much more than she intends.
--Marshal Zeringue
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