E. L. Shen

E. L. Shen writes and edits fiction centered on Asian American young people negotiating ambition, grief, friendship, and belonging. A Barnard College graduate with a concentration in creative writing, she began with the middle-grade figure-skating novel The Comeback. The Queens of New York follows three seventeen-year-old best friends through their first summer apart. Everett pursues a theater role in Ohio, Ariel attends a science program in San Francisco while grieving her sister, and Jia remains in Flushing to help at her family's restaurant. Their separate settings let Shen test the friendship without reducing it to nostalgia: racism in performance, family responsibility, loss, and uncertain plans make each girl claim space differently. Quill Tree Books published the teen novel in 2023. Its alternating perspectives keep Jia Lee, Ariel Kim, and Everett Hoang equally central, and the audiobook extends that design through three narrators. The Queens of New York presents distance as a change in friendship's form rather than proof that the bond has failed.