Unarmed: An American Educator's Memoir

Megan Doney

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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, this memoir is about how to live with an open heart, alive to luck, learning, and love.

This short, literary memoir is a personal response to a school shooting at New River Community College in Christiansburg, Virginia. Even more so, Unarmed: An American Educator's Memoir is a must-read for educators at all levels, for college students, for parents, and for all of us who think deeply and widely about American society.

Winner of the 2024 Nonfiction Prize from the Washington Writers' Publishing House.

Book Details

Publisher: Washington Writers' Publishing House
Publish Date: Oct 8th, 2024
Pages: 180
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.50in - 5.50in - 0.41in - 0.52lb
EAN: 9781941551417
Categories: • General• General• General

About the Author

Doney, Megan: - 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 the winner of the 2024 Nonfiction Prize from the Washington Writers' Publishing House.

Praise for this book

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.

Megan Doney has written a clear-eyed, devastating indictment of our nation's failure to elevate communal safety above brutal self-interest. With heart-breaking honesty and compassion, she manages to balance despondency and hope 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