Inspired by Southern women, Shawn’s characters oscillate between self-destructive perfectionists & scrappy idealists.
These unique voices mirror the women she knows: too good, too human, too hard on themselves.
Yet full of so much hope.
Shawn writes what she knows and therefore leans into real, imagined, & heightened pressures women of color carry ever so lightly.
A simple mission, no? To debunk the weightiness of all that weight.
Comedy is a merciful back door allowing her characters to “meet” themselves for the first time.
Before the world told them who they should be.
WHY HER? WHY NOW?
Of & from The South, Shawn is also the granddaughter of a maid and a pulpwood trucker.
On both sides, Shawn’s parent’s fulfilled
their parents’ wildest dreams: becoming physicians.
As a writer, Shawn lives her parents’ waking nightmare.
To some, Shawn is an all-purpose brown muppet, the funny black-ish friend, or an Ex-Debutante/Blair Waldorf Ice Queen. Shawn has been all these people, but now chooses to simply identify as a code-switching muppet. Tap dancing for laughs and belonging.
If the culture is just exploring black joy, it’s miles off from interrogating the black on black violences or white supremacy’s inability to tolerate black privilege. Let alone how either system can contain the extreme paradoxes of both black excellence and black trauma in a way that moves it beyond melodrama.