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Jenny Shank's new short-story collection, Mixed Company, details the life-changing encounters that can occur when people from a diverse array of financial and racial backgrounds meet in the most unlikely of circumstances. 

Inspired by the relationships and connections formed within her hometown of Denver, Jenny Shank details the stories of citizens living through a period of extreme economic strife in a city that is becoming increasingly gentrified. In one story, "Casa del Rey," a wary pregnant woman struggles with intrusions from a bothersome neighbor. "Hurts" describes the clash that occurs between two basketball teams with dramatically different racial make-ups. Mixed Company contains a story for everyone, and all of them will impact you in ways you hadn't anticipated. 

Mixed Company is "breezy, vivid, at turns delightful and aching—and quite serious. Truly, across chasms of gender, race, and class, across generations and just across town, these stories aim to do nothing less than remind us of the messiness and grace of reaching out to one another," says Joe Wilkins, author of Fall Back Down When I Die and The Mountain and the Fathers. 

Mixed Company is also the winner of the George Garrett Fiction Prize! You can order it here.

Jenny Shank's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times and McSweeney’s. Her work has been honorably mentioned by Best American Essays, the Pushcart Prize and her mother. She teaches in the Mile High MFA program at Regis University and the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver.