An Evening with Mandi Sheffel in Conversation with Joy Priest

Author Mandi Sheffel joins us to talk about her book, The Nature of Pain. She will be joined in conversation by Joy Priest. Following the talk, there will be time for Q&A with the audience and book signing.

Want to pre-order your copy of the book? You can do so here.

About the book:

"One by one, the mourners came to me. I didn't want to talk. I didn't want to discuss what might have happened. I didn't want to be here. The lump in my throat was suffocating. I'm not meant to grieve like this... I wanted to go somewhere without all these eyes. Pain is easier to digest in solitude."

Mandi Fugate Sheffel was born in the heart of rural small-town America, in a place where "wild teaberry grows," with creeks "as clear and cold as nature would allow." As a curious, sensitive child raised in a challenging environment, she formed a deep bond with her cousin Eric. As the pair grew up together, they sought a sense of belonging, and drugs and alcohol provided a temporary escape from the harsh realities of their lives. Everything shifted when Purdue Pharma launched aggressive marketing campaigns for OxyContin in central Appalachia.

In The Nature of Pain, Sheffel recounts coming of age during the opioid epidemic of the late 1990s and early 2000s. She illuminates the importance of kinship and connection to place while exposing the bitter truths of a community transformed by opioids. With candid, lyrical prose, Sheffel reveals what life is really like for people in active addiction and recovery. Her lived experience as an eastern Kentuckian affected by the opioid crisis is an underrepresented story that must be heard. Sheffel's memoir is an aching tale of empathy for modern mountain folks—of love and grief, of family and place, and of the addictions that continue to pain them.

About the author:

Mandi Fugate Sheffel was born and raised in Red Fox, KY. She is a graduate of Eastern Kentucky University and is currently the Sycamore Fund Project Coordinator at The Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky. She is the board vice chair of Mountain Association. Additionally, she owns and operates Read Spotted Newt, an independent bookstore in the coalfields of eastern Kentucky. Her personal essays and opinion pieces can be found in Still: The Journal, Lexington-Herald Leader, and the Courier Journal. Her forthcoming personal essay collection, The Nature of Pain, is available now through The University Press of Kentucky.

About the conversation partner:

Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and the editor of Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology (Sarabande, 2023). She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Fine Arts Work Center fellowship, and the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review. Her work—including poems, essays, and cultural criticism—has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, The New Republic, and Sewanee Review, among others. Priest is a member of the Affrilachian Poets and she currently teaches creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh.