Megan Campisi Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Megan Campisi is a teacher, playwright, and a novelist. Her plays have been performed in the United States, China, and France. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, New York.

Megan has been a sous chef in Paris, a forest ranger, and a physical theater specialist all around the world.

Originally from San Francisco, California, she went to L’Ecole International de Theatre Jacques Lecoq (from 2001 until 2003) where she received an MFA, and Yale University (from 1995 until 1999) where she got a BA.

She divides her time writing and performing with her New York-based theater company, known as Gold No Trade, and teaching as an artist-in-residence around the United States and Asia.

Megan has taught at Yale University, the Shanghai Theater Academy, and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She is an ISTA artist and gave workshops around the world in Lecoq-based theater (neutral mask, mimodynamics, mask, object-theater, clown, tragic chorus, and devising), Commedia dell’Arte, and Shakespeare.

While teaching at Yale, she taught students the practice and structure of writing and performing physical comedy to undergraduate students in Daniel Larlham’s Comedy in Performance course. She also taught Intermediate Acting in the undergraduate Theater Studies department.

Megan worked for six years at Scholastic Media, providing coverage for the manuscripts under consideration for further development.

From 2007 until 2013, Megan researched and fact-checked works by journalist and writing David Rieff. This includes two pieces that appeared in the New York Times Magazine, and a book he wrote on global food security.

When she began writing her debut novel, “Sin Eater”, her child was nine months old, so she would write while holding her baby. She wrote parts of the novel at her kitchen table. Other parts were written in between classes in the break room of the theater conservatory she taught at. Megan fully admits that she gets ideas anywhere and everywhere, which means that some parts she actually wrote while on the subway.

For her plays, she has received ADAMI prizes and the French Alfa. In the year 2019, she received a Fulbright Specialist Award to give master classes in Turkey at Tatbikat Theatre.

Megan’s debut novel, called “Sin Eater”, was released in the year 2020, and is from the speculative, young adult, historical fiction genres. The novel was published by Atria Books.

“The Subtle Body” is a play that premiered in the year 2013. Early in the eighteenth century, Dr. John Floyer and Charlotte, his wife, travel off to China where they see the traditional medical practice of pulse-diagnosis in which not just one, but sex are felt in order to diagnose illnesses such as cancer and liver cirrhosis. Dr. Floyer is simply at a loss to prove how the practice works using Western reasoning as well as the scientific method. As far as he is concerned, there is just one pulse and it comes from the heart.

Charlotte starts rethinking her comprehension of the human heart when she falls in love with Wang Ming, the translator. Ming asks Charlotte to join his house as his second wife, Charlotte and Ming’s first wife confront together just how perceptions of love and truth can rarely be extricated from culture.

“Sin Eater” is the first stand alone novel and was released in the year 2020. There is an old adage that says there are really just two stories: a stranger arrives in town, and a man goes on a voyage. Here is the third: a woman breaks the rules.

Are you able to uncover the truth when you have been forbidden from speaking it?

The duty of the Sin Eater is a necessary evil: she hears the confessions of anybody dying, eats their sins as a funeral rite. A Sin Eater eats the sin by consuming a symbolic food of some kind, then taking their sin on, which frees the person confessing their sins to pass over. Stained by each of these sins, she is silenced and shunned, doomed only to live in exile at the town’s edge.

May Owens works as a young maid, and has recently been orphaned. She is incredibly talkative and only fourteen years old, and is only concerned with where her next meal will come from. She gets arrested for stealing a loaf of bread, however, and then sentenced to becoming a Sin Eater, locating food is the last of her worries all of a sudden.

May is supposed to apprentice with a woman that is a veteran Sin Eater and unable to talk with her. She has to make her way in this cruel and dangerous world she hardly understands.

This is a devastating sentence, however, May’s newfound invisibility opens up some new doors, as people move out of her way since they are afraid to touch her. It grants her access to royal bedchambers and prison cells. When two of the Queen’s courtiers suddenly become ill, May hears their deathbed confessions. Then she starts investigating a horrible rumor that is just whispered about the palace corridors.

“The Sin Eater”, set in a thinly disguised sixteenth-century England, is a wonderfully rich tale of treachery and treason. Of power, of women, and the odd freedom that comes from being an outcast, because like May learns, being a nobody does sometimes count for everything.

With this novel, Megan explores differences in gender, society, and class during the sixteenth century. Megan’s prose is both poetic and rich, and gave readers something to sink their teeth into with the novel. Fans found this is part horror, part mystery, and is, ultimately, a timeless tale of woman regaining her power. The tone is tense and gloomy, and May is a compelling and strong character. Readers found the premise to be very fascinating, with a strong attention to historical detail, and colorful and lively writing with some humor.

The novel combines elements of “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Handmaids Tale” to form an imaginative and gripping historical novel. Megan’s stirring portrait of injustice gets deepened by May’s grief, cleverness, and frustration. It is a spellbinding novel that is a treat for those fans of feminist speculative fiction.

One Response to “Megan Campisi”

1. Beth Collier: 2 years ago

   I have just finished this thoroughly entertaining novel with the feeling that modern life isn’t so bad after all. Apart from the lack of small details regarding financial cost of living verses the cost of Deer Heart and other According Foods, I was freely able to read myself out of my daily life and slide into the sad and thoughtfully created world of a young sin eater. This story of horror and intrigue is well written. My gratitude to you Megan Campisi.

   Reply