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 the Appalachian Arts Alliance and the Mountain Association.
Additionally, she owns and operates Read Spotted Newt, an independent bookstore in the coalfields of eastern Kentucky. She found her passion for writing and storytelling at the Appalachian Writers Workshop at the Hindman Settlement School.
Her personal essays and opinion pieces can be found in Still: The Journal, Lexington-Herald Leader, Courier Journal and Appalachian Journal. Her forthcoming personal essay collection, The Nature of Pain, will be released in 2025 through The University Press of Kentucky.
In The Nature of Pain, Fugate Sheffel recounts coming of age during the opioid epidemic of the late nineties 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, Fugate 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. Fugate Sheffel’s memoir is an aching tale of empathy for modern mountain folks—of love and grief, family and place, and the addictions that continue to pain them.
Mandi Fugate Sheffel 