State Champ

＂Ferocious, hilarious, slippery, and wise＂ (Leni Zumas)-a protest novel for our times.

A high-school state champion runner turned college dropout, Angela is working as a receptionist at an abortion clinic when a ＂heartbeat law＂ criminalizes most abortions statewide. In the ensuing upheaval, her boss is arrested for providing illegal procedures and the clinic is shut down.

Angela has never been either an activist or a model employee. But she gets why her boss didn’t follow the rules. She decides to go on a hunger strike in the boarded-up clinic, to protest her boss’s arrest and everything that’s been lost. She’ll draw on her skillset: the masochistic discipline of a runner, a history of self-destructive behavior, and a willingness to sleep on exam room tables (whose hygienic paper she uses as her diary).

Angela’s protest is solitary, enraged, and a little messy, but it mobilizes a group of people around her-an ex who’s a local journalist looking for a good story, the everyday people the clinic once served, and most especially a formidable anti-abortion activist named Janine.

Lucid, strange, and deeply metal, State Champ cuts through the political rhetoric to explore the relationship between bodily autonomy and real freedom. Angela’s story is about what abortion access means day-to-day and how much we are-in ways that can transform us-responsible for one another.

Hilary Plum (she/her) is a writer, editor, and teacher living in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Her books include the poetry collection Excisions, the essay collection Hole Studies, and the novel Strawberry Fields, winner of the Fence Modern Prize in Prose. She co-edits the Open Prose Series at Rescue Press and co-hosts the podcast Index for Continuance, which discusses small press publishing, politics, and practice. She teaches at Cleveland State University and in the NEOMFA Program and serves as associate director of the CSU Poetry Center. Her work has appeared in the Cleveland Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Granta, Astra, American Poetry Review, College Literature, Fence, and elsewhere. www.hilaryplum.com