Baker Artist Portfolios

Shelby Switzer is a queer writer from the American South now based in Baltimore, MD, USA. They write short stories and novels, as well as the occasional essay or paper on society and community infrastructure. As a fiction writer, they investigate relationships and how we build our identity through them or in opposition to them. They enjoy portraying the humor and absurdity in relationships and in the mundane, playing with surrealism as an avenue for absurdity, joy, and creative authenticity. They believe that a story should be fun to write and to read, even if – especially if – it also hurts. They know they have a story worth telling when they've both giggled uncontrollably and cried for at least an hour at some point during its writing.

Shelby is a Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ Voices Fellow, assistant fiction editor at the Nashville Review, and an alum of the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, OneStory Summer Conference, and Lighthouse LitFest Advanced Fiction Workshop. They received their undergraduate degree from the University of Cambridge in medieval languages and literature. Their fiction has appeared in The Hopkins Review, The Spectacle, and The Maine Review.