Megan Campisi Books in Order

Megan Campisi grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and now lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family. She works across novels, plays, and teaching, which helps explain why her fiction feels so alert to bodies in motion, spoken language, and the social rules that can close in on a person.

She did not arrive at writing by a tidy, one-track route.

Before publishing novels, Campisi studied theater at Yale and later at the École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris. She has also had a run of jobs that sound as if they wandered in from other people's stories: forest ranger, sous-chef in Paris, and physical theater specialist. Those experiences show up less as autobiography than as texture, a feel for work, hunger, movement, and the odd rituals that shape daily life.

Theater came first. Campisi began as an actor and then moved into devising, building original plays with an ensemble, and she has said that was when she realized she loved structure, character, and dialogue more than performing itself. Her plays have been staged in the United States, France, and China, and titles like The Subtle Body, The Pinks, and Floating Brothel show the same curiosity about history, politics, and rule-breaking women that later appears in her fiction.

Teaching has stayed central, too. Campisi has taught at Yale University, the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and the Shanghai Theater Academy, and she is on the faculty of the Neighborhood Playhouse theater conservatory in New York City. In 2019 she received a Fulbright Specialist Award to teach master classes at Tatbikat Theatre in Turkey.

History, though, seems to be the magnet that keeps pulling her stories into place.

Her first novel, Sin Eater, grew from that pull. After discovering the old custom of sin eating, Campisi became interested in the person no one listens to but everyone needs, and built an alternate Tudor world around fourteen-year-old May Owens, a girl punished, marked, and pushed to the edge of society. Readers who click with the book tend to remember its mix of court intrigue, bodily detail, and anger at the way class and gender can be turned into weapons.

Sin Eater was published in 2020 and later won the Historical Writers' Association Debut Crown. It also makes clear what Campisi returns to again and again: women under pressure, systems that call themselves moral while doing real harm, and the strange kinds of freedom that can open up for an outsider.

Her second novel, The Widow Spy, shifts from a shadowy Tudor court to Civil War Washington, but the interest is similar. The book follows Kate Warne, the first female Pinkerton detective, as she tries to outmaneuver Confederate spy Rose Greenhow, and it lets Campisi explore politics, class, loyalty, and the messy question of whether people divided by belief can ever truly reach each other. If Sin Eater shows her taste for folklore and alternate history, The Widow Spy shows how comfortable she is with real historical figures, espionage, and a sharper thriller engine.

There is a through line in all of it.

Campisi writes about women who are underestimated, boxed in, or written out, and then asks what they can see from that position that nobody else can. She still splits her time between writing and teaching, and that mix feels right for her work. Her books are imaginative, but they are also built by someone who has spent years in rehearsal rooms, classrooms, archives, and ordinary jobs, paying close attention to how people speak, move, hide, and survive.