TaraShea Nesbit Books in Order

TaraShea Nesbit grew up in Dayton, Ohio, in the Miami Valley, a place she has written about with both attachment and a sharp eye for its contradictions. She studied English literature at Ohio State University before taking her interest in writing further, first in St. Louis and later in Colorado.

At Ohio State, Nesbit earned a bachelor's degree in English literature. She went on to receive an MFA in creative writing, with a focus on poetry, from Washington University in St. Louis, then completed a PhD in creative writing, prose, at the University of Denver. Her work has also included essays, reviews, and short fiction.

She has never treated the line between poetry and prose as a fence.

Nesbit has described a formative reading experience at age twenty, when Joan Didion's essay Goodbye to All That made her feel that a writer could speak directly to one reader's life. She began with poems and nonfiction, and her graduate thesis combined poetry with a novella-length coming-of-age story. Early rejections did not end that path. They taught her that a project can fail, and that failure can make the next attempt less frightening.

Her first novel, The Wives of Los Alamos, arrived in 2014. The book follows the wives of scientists sent to a secret New Mexico town during the Manhattan Project, using a collective first-person voice to tell the story of a community living with isolation, censorship, domestic routines, and unanswered questions. Nesbit's interest in the subject grew after she gave a reading about another Manhattan Project site and was asked about the scientists' wives. She researched oral histories, memoirs, archives, and Los Alamos itself, then turned to fiction because the historical record left so much of the women's interior lives unknown.

The book asks what people can be responsible for when secrecy shapes their daily lives.

In Beheld, published in 2020, Nesbit moves to Plymouth Colony in the 1630s. A killing and its aftermath bring pressure to a settlement already divided by religious rules, social rank, land disputes, and private grudges. The novel gives special attention to women whose experiences were often pushed to the edges of the familiar Pilgrim story, while also following the competing accounts that gather around a crime and a trial. Nesbit spent years researching the period, including visits to Massachusetts, museums, maps, and court records.

Across both novels, she looks at big national stories from the household, the street, and the people expected to keep going while powerful decisions are made elsewhere. Her characters live with the practical details of work, parenting, friendship, belief, and survival. That human scale is central to her historical fiction.

Nesbit teaches creative writing at Miami University in Ohio. Returning to the Miami Valley brought her closer to extended family, and her writing continues to circle questions of place, memory, belonging, and the stories that history chooses to preserve.