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In June, she will publish her ninth book, “The Secret Battle of Evan Po.”

Her track record landed her the gig of writing two books about Corinne Tan. The books are based on an American Girl doll who “lives” in Aspen, Colorado, with her mom, sister and stepfather, loves skiing and ice skating, and is training her puppy to become a search-and-rescue dog. “Corinne” and “Corinne to the Rescue” were published in January, coinciding with the debut of the doll.

She was brought into the project early enough to contribute to the creative process of making the doll itself a reality. American Girl designers consulted with Shang and an advisory committee on several features, including Corinne’s hair style and color, skin tone and eyes.

But the pandemic kept Shang from leaving home in Northern Virginia and going to Aspen for the book’s geographic research. Fortunately, two of the advisers helped fill in the details.

“One had grown up in Aspen and the other had raised kids in Aspen,” Shang said. “Otherwise I might not have known that Corinne’s school could have a ski lift right outside.”

Before coming to UVA in 1986, Shang hadn’t intended to go to law school. But undergraduate courses on the Supreme Court with UVA government professor Henry Abraham changed her mind.

“I loved his classes, loved learning about Supreme Court cases and what they meant to the United States,” she said. Abraham, who died in 2020 at age 98, taught in what is now the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics for 25 years.

Shang took a year off after graduation and, inspired to go into law, applied to several schools. UVA Law was always her top choice, because “you get spoiled when you live in Charlottesville.”

“I was an unusual student at the time,” she said. “There was very much more emphasis on law firm jobs, and I figured out pretty early on that’s not how I wanted to use my law degree.”

She became a research assistant to professor Elizabeth “Buffie” Scott, whose focus at the time was the decision-making rights of minors in medical situations.

Shang’s debut novel was “The Great Wall of Lucy Wu,” published in 2011.

Shang got an internship at the National Center for Youth Law and became more focused on the rights of children. At the time, she said, job prospects for law graduates weren’t great, so she took some time off, trained as a CASA – or court-appointed special advocate, who represents the interests of abused or neglected children in legal proceedings – and worked for an attorney in Arlington. She went on to serve as an attorney for the American Bar Association Juvenile Justice Center, focusing on the representation of children in juvenile proceedings.

She also married fellow Law School alumnus David Harrington, also a Double Hoo, now with the U.S. Department of Justice. “We were both working and started having kids,” Shang said. She left her work at the ABA to raise their children full-time. The couple has three children.

When she was invited to her 20th high school reunion, she asked herself, “What have I not done that I always wanted to do?” And the answer was: “Write a children’s book.” She took a class starting in 2006, began writing and won a new author’s grant based on the first 50 pages of “The Great Wall of Lucy Wu.”

“That gave me a lot of confidence,” she said. “It took me a year to write the first 50 pages and six months to write the next 100.”

While continuing to write, Shang went back to her legal roots in 2016, working part-time at the Baltimore-based Pretrial Justice Institute as a research and communications associate. As part of her work there, Shang has been working on racial equity in pretrial systems.

“I would say that that my work at PJI has empowered me to write the stories I’m writing now,” she said. “Talking about race and racism in a thoughtful way has become an important focus in the children’s literature world. I’m grateful I have jobs that enrich each other.”