Hi. I’m Shana Youngdahl I write poems and novels about how making mistakes doesn’t make you less intelligent, it just makes you human.

The seeds of my debut novel As Many Nows As I Can Get started a lifetime ago, when I was a teenager and met other young people who believed in their dreams so fiercely they’ve held onto them even as the winds of life have blown hard.

My second novel A Catalog of Burnt Objects is a sibling story and a love story spun in a small town that faces a catastrophic wildfire much like the one that devastated my hometown of Paradise, California. These days I live in the Saint Louis area and teach Writing in the MFA program at Lindenwood University.