Shannon is a writer and teacher from Buffalo, NY. She attended The Buffalo Seminary for high school. It was there that she saw Lucille Clifton, another Buffalo native, read her poetry. Clifton’s voice has been resounding through her mind ever since. That’s when she became a writer.

At Barnard College she studied Literature, Writing, and Women’s Studies and worked at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, which shaped her as a scholar and a feminist. As the president of Lesbians and Bisexuals in Action (L.A.B.I.A) on campus, she worked to make Barnard a safer place for all students.

After graduation, she worked for The Fortune Society, a non-profit dedicated to helping people reacclimate after prison. As editor of Fortune’s quarterly journal, The Fortune News, she wrote and edited articles about the prison-industrial complex and the prison experience. Many of the articles were written by inmates and ex-offenders. She also curated an annual prisoner art contest. Her correspondence with writers and artists in prison allowed her to cultivate long-term editorial relationships with people whose voices would otherwise be silenced.

In 2002, she enrolled in the Ph.D. program in literature at The University of Chicago where she studied late twentieth-century literature and epistemology. Her dissertation, The Aesthetics of Information: Contemporary Facts and Fiction, 1963-2007, argued that in a culture obsessed with facts but skeptical of objectivity literature and art are increasingly used as tools for processing the growing archives of information and evidence, from the Kennedy Assassination to climate change.

She now lives in Los Angeles where she teaches literature and writing at Santa Monica Community College, a job that combines her passion for literature with her commitment to social justice. She also taught at Art Center College of Design in their Media Design M.A. program where students and faculty design not only projects but speculative futures.

The whole time she’s been studying and teaching, she’s been writing: a novel, poems, short fiction, shorter flashes, scripts, and sketches. During a sabbatical in 2019, she was finally able to devote herself to writing. This website is a culmination of that work and is dedicated to her students whose journey to find and develop their voices is her life’s work.