Teen Queen Training — Kristine Langley Mahler on Her Book in Conversation with Asha Dore | Totally Biased Reviews

Our host, Asha Dore, talks with Kristine Langley Mahler about her 2026 book, Teen Queen Training published by Autofocus Find it here: https://nyupress.org/9781957392431/teen-queen-training/ About the book: It takes a lot of work to erase the rules of being a teenage girl. Desperate to know what behaviors would produce the "right" adolescence, during the late 1990s Kristine Langley Mahler sought instruction from outdated etiquette guides and Seventeen magazine to subdue her central fear: how to convince someone to choose her. Twenty years later, married and mothering three adolescent daughters of her own, Mahler stumbles upon a 1963 edition of The Seventeen Book of Etiquette and Entertaining—elegant, archaic directives that push her right back into her old frustrations and propel the creation of Teen Queen Training: a series of 26 erasure essays created from its 26 chapters, illuminating the differences between what she was told and what she really learned. About the author: https://kristinelangleymahler.com/  Kristine Langley Mahler is the author of three nonfiction books: A Calendar Is a Snakeskin (Autofocus Books, 2023), Curing Season: Artifacts (West Virginia University Press, 2022), and the erasure essay collection Teen Queen Training (Autofocus Books, 2026). Kristine's work has been supported by an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council and a residency from Art at Cedar Point Biological Station, thrice named Notable in Best American Essays, received the Rafael Torch Award from Crab Orchard Review, won the Sundog Lit Collaboration Contest, and has appeared in print and online at Salon, DIAGRAM, Fourth Genre, Ninth Letter, and Brevity, among others. Kristine is the director and publisher of Split/Lip Press. A memoirist experimenting with the truth on the suburban prairie, Kristine makes her home outside Omaha, Nebraska. Cancer sun, Aquarius moon. Ask her where she's "from" and she will spread out the maps. email Kristine: kristine at kristinelangleymahler dot com Bluesky: @suburbanprairie / Instagram: @kristinelangleymahler newsletter: Creepsakes Totally Biased Reviews is a Parley Lit production in collaboration with Parley Productions. Hosted and Edited by Asha Dore and Rebecca Tourino Collinsworth. Music by Nuclear Peasant. Find more at www.TotallyBiasedReviews.com