About
Alanna Schubach is a fiction writer, freelance journalist, and teacher. Her debut novel, THE NOBODIES, was published by Blackstone in June 2022.
She was named a NYC Emerging Writers Fellow with the Center for Fiction in 2019, and a Fellow in Fiction with the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2015. Her short stories have appeared in the Iowa Review, Shenandoah, the Sewanee Review, the Massachusetts Review, Electric Literature, and more, and she has attended residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and MacDowell. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College.
She served as Contributing Editor for Brick Underground and has contributed essays, features, criticism, opinion, and profiles to The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Village Voice, and more.
She teaches fiction and non-fiction for the Gotham Writers Workshop and privately mentors students in creative writing.
Featured Work
The Nobodies
The story of two young women whose friendship offered—and demanded—more than either should share.
Jess and Nina, Nina and Jess … to everyone else they’re typical best friends, sharing closeness and confidences in their own little world. But Nina and Jess have a secret. Simply by touching their foreheads together, they can swap bodies.
In Jess’s assertive persona, self-conscious Nina turns bolder, free to say what she’s frightened to voice on her own. Inhabiting Nina, Jess becomes part of the loving, stable family she craves.
Now, in crisis after her father’s death, Jess has reentered Nina’s life following a long separation. Once again they switch bodies, and their worlds begin to mesh. Each deceives the other, confesses, is forgiven. But how deeply can you sink into another’s life before there’s nothing left of you? Set against the vibrant backdrop of New York City, The Nobodies poses questions about the nature of intimacy, the many flavors of betrayal, and the value of female friendships.
