Megan Doney has written perhaps one of the most important memoirs published since Columbine. Speaking from within the storm of the culture of violence in American gun culture, her voice is one of reason, tenderness, and urgency. -Emily Rapp Black, New York Times bestselling author of I Would Die If I Were You
This 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. Her experience in South Africa presents 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 Racial Reckoning, winner of the 2023 PEN John Kenneth Galbraith Prize for Nonfiction.
After surviving a school shooting, 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, about how to live with an open heart, alive to luck, learning, and love. From Christiansburg, Virginia to South Africa, Doney explores the intersections of public and domestic violence in this compelling, urgent literary memoir of survival and hope. Winner of the 2024 Nonfiction Prize from the Washington Writers' Publishing House.
