Mindy Misener

“Mindy Misener’s Good Guys is a thrilling debut, a brilliantly paced and plotted novel built around a shattering secret and the transformations it provokes within a family and a community. Misener explores the oceanic silences that surround the archipelago of the stories people tell and retell about the past, and the power of our stories to both conceal and reveal truth. Georgie and Jo had my heart, and Misener’s beautiful novel charts the tidal forces that shape their lives, and our own.” — Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!

“This dual coming-of-age novel captured me completely. I read it over one busy week, and couldn’t wait to get back to Jo and Georgie at the end of each day. Mindy Misener writes beautifully about sisters, family ties, moral complexities, and the fragile landscape of earliest adulthood.” — Monica Wood, author of How to Read a Book

“An intimately observed portrait of small-town sisters in the twin shadows of the opioid epidemic and America’s foreign wars. Running throughout, a profoundly affecting current of hope in the form of the dogged love of siblings. Misener’s debut is exquisitely crafted, emotionally acute and brimming with heart.” — Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl

Read an excerpt of Good Guys here, at The Common

I’m a writer, editor, teacher, and preacher. I studied literature at Williams College and fiction writing at the University of Michigan. I’ve taught writing at the University of Michigan and Montana State University. My prose has appeared in Image, The Common, The Christian Century, the North American Review, and other outlets. In October 2026, my novel Good Guys is coming out with Melville House. Currently I’m working on an MDiv at Yale Divinity School, where I’m earning a certificate at Andover Newton Seminary and co-editing the YDS/ISM-supported, student-run literary journal LETTERS. I plan to be ordained in the United Church of Christ.