What if the moment that nearly killed you was the one that finally told the truth?

Ten years sober, Jared Shackelford stands at an AA podium when a simple question pulls him back into the night he almost died. What follows is a reckoning—guided by memory, music, and the ghost of a boy he once loved.

Raised poor in a Southern trailer park by an alcoholic father, Jared grows up skating cracked pavement, clinging to punk rock, and searching for belonging wherever he can find it. As a queer kid on the margins, he builds a family out of misfits, bands, and late nights at the skatepark—until love, loss, and addiction begin to pull him apart.

The Last Punk in Miners Creek is a raw, lyrical coming-of-age novel about class, queerness, chosen family, and the seductive pull of self-destruction. By turns brutal and tender, it asks what survives when everything else falls away—and whether it's ever too late to build something worth staying alive for.

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