American
Shelby Cunningham is an American writer and the daughter of bestselling novelist Elin Hilderbrand. She grew up on Nantucket, Massachusetts, and attended St. George's School, a boarding school in Rhode Island, before studying creative writing at the University of Miami. The Academy (2025), co-written with her mother, is her debut as a published novelist; the story draws on Cunningham's own boarding-school experience, and she has described her role in the collaboration as keeping the teenage characters' voices authentic against her mother's instincts, cutting dated references and sharpening the book's Gen Z dialogue.