Ferocious, hilarious, slippery, and wise” (Leni Zumas ) – the story of a woman risking her life and finding her own way to protest the end of abortion rights.
STATE CHAMP
by Hilary Plum
Bloomsbury, May 2025
(via The Gernert Company)
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.
“Oh, this voice! Ferocious, hilarious, slippery, wise-I couldn’t stop listening. Hilary Plum is one of my favorite writers working today because her curiosity about injustice and liberation is so relentless, so tender, and so alert to the fact that every single one of us is implicated in the struggle.” ―Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks
“Revelatory . . . Perfect for fans of Henry Hoke’s Open Throat and Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot . . . Hilary Plum, through this funny and furious narrator, throws bold punches in defense of reproductive rights and celebrates the commitment of those who uphold them.” ―Shelf Awareness
Hilary Plum is the author of five books, including the poetry collection Excisions, the essay collection Hole Studies, and the Fence Modern Prize in Prose-winning novel Strawberry Fields. She teaches at Cleveland State University and in the NEOMFA program, and she serves as associate director of the CSU Poetry Center. Her work has appeared in Granta, Astra, The Rupture, Los Angeles Review of Books, Cleveland Review of Books, and elsewhere. She lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.