Open my mouth, look, and read
what I ate, or, sometimes
what I hungered for.
Sweetness, rotten
gaps, bits
gnawed and worn down to the root
charred bread and mistletoe, bits
of his hand
bit-back words, here
lodged in the throat.
From Session – Pedestal Magazine, October 2010
Shannon Connor Winward is an American editor and writer. She is the author of the Elgin-Award winning chapbook UNDOING WINTER and THE YEAR OF THE WITCH, a full-length collection of poetry forthcoming from Sycorax Press (Summer 2018). Her fiction has earned recognition in the Writers of the Future Contest, the Odyssey Con Odd Contest, Postcard Poems & Prose Flash Fiction Contest, and the Delaware Division of the Arts, for which she was awarded an emerging artist fellowship in fiction in 2018. Her stories and prose have appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Pseudopod’s Artemis Rising Series, Lunch Ticket, Shoreline of Infinity, The Wild Musette, Persistent Visions, Cast of Wonders, Gargoyle, Spinetingler Magazine, Flash Fiction Online, Plasma Frequency Magazine, The Vestal Review, and PANK (among others), as well as in genre anthologies on both sides of the Atlantic (including Heiresses of Russ: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction 2015).
Shannon’s poetry won the SFPA Poetry Prize in 2016. She has been nominated for the Rhysling and Dwarf Star Awards, and earned recognition in many competitions including the Dogfish Head Poetry Chapbook competition, the Lyon College Celtic Poetry Contest, the Eternal Haunted Summer Reader’s Choice Award, and editor’s pick at Enchanted Conversation: A Fairy Tale Magazine. She has published over 100 poems in venues such as Analog, The Monarch Review, Qu, The Pedestal Magazine, Strange Horizons, Literary Mama, Star*Line, Eye to the Telescope, Mirror Dance, Rivet, The HWA Poetry Showcase, Rogue Agent, Thank You For Swallowing, NonBinary Review and The Ekphrastic Review.
In between fiction, poetry, parenthood, and other madness, Shannon is a foodie, a Celt, an armchair anthropologist, a mouthy Gemini, a ghost lover, a dragon mother/autism mom, a kitchen witch, a semi-colon survivor, a spoon theory poster child, a writer-advocate for mental health awareness and special education reform, a coffee addict, an erstwhile gardener, and a nerd (by marriage). She is a poetry editor for Devilfish Review, and founding editor of Riddled with Arrows, an online literary journal dedicated to meta-fiction, meta-poetry, and writing that celebrates the process and product of writing as art.
Shannon lives and writes in Newark, Delaware, where she can occasionally be found coordinating critique groups and workshops or romancing the microphone. She co-habitates with her husband, an Aspie son, a pixie daughter, the ghost of a cat named Wolf, many long-suffering houseplants, and a collection of owl figurines.