Joanna Ruocco’s award-winning novel, ‘A Shore Thing,’ is a collaboration with history professor Mir Yarfitz

Creative writing and English professor Joanna Ruocco’s most recent historical romance novel, “A Shore Thing,” – a queer and trans love story – was named a “Best Romance of the Year” by The New York Times and Parade and is listed as one of NPR’s 2024 “Books We Love.”

This is the fourth book in a series of historical romance novels set in and around the art world of Victorian London.

Ruocco, who publishes under the name Joanna Lowell, collaborated with Wake Forest history professor Mir Yarfitz, who is a scholar of gender and queer and trans lives in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Yarfitz contributed research, and he and Ruocco co-wrote the novel’s historical note. 

The next book in the series, “Rare Find,” is scheduled to be published in June 2025.