Nora Shalaway Carpenter. Running Press/Hachette, Sept. 2023.

Winner of the 2024 Green Earth Book Award for YA Fiction, a 2024 Whippoorwill Honor for outstanding rural fiction, and a 2024 Nautilus Book Award Gold medal, FAULT LINES tells the intertwined story of two rural teens―one with a secret energetic connection to the earth, suffering immensely from damage caused by fracking―and the other depending on fracking completely, his mother’s pipelining job being the only thing keeping them off the street.

Riveting, powerful, and a little bit magical, FAULT LINES offers an unflinching examination of socio-economics, gender expectations, and environmental ethics.

Nora Shalaway Carpenter’s critically acclaimed anthology RURAL VOICES: 15 Authors Challenge Assumptions About Small-Town America was named an NPR Best Book of the Year, and her fiction has been written about in the New York Times & People. She holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and serves on faculty for the Highlights Foundation’s Whole Novel Workshop. A neurodivergent author with an invisible disability and a passion for climate activism, she is a dynamic speaker who presents routinely at national conferences.

Originally from rural West Virginia, Carpenter now roams the mountains of western North Carolina. Her book ONWARD: 16 Climate Fiction Short Stories to Inspire Hope is out Feb ’26 from Charlesbridge Press.