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. Her stories have been published in Persistent Visions, Cast of Wonders, Psuedopod, Gargoyle, Spinetingler Magazine, Scigentasy, Flash Fiction Online, Plasma Frequency Magazine, and PANK, as well as in genre anthologies on both sides of the Atlantic. Her poetry has won the SFPA Poetry Prize, been nominated for a Rhysling award, and appears widely in such venues as Analog, The Pedestal Magazine, Strange Horizons, Eternal Haunted Summer, Literary Mama, Star*Line, Rogue Agent, Thank You For Swallowing, and Enchanted Conversation: A Fairy Tale Magazine.
A Semi-Finalist in the Writers of the Future Contest, Shannon was also runner-up for an emerging artist fellowship in literature by the Delaware Division of the Arts in 2014 and 2015.
In between fiction, poetry, parenthood, and other madness, Shannon is also Madame Secretary for the Science Fiction Poetry Association, a poetry editor for Devilfish Review, and founding editor of the forthcoming Riddled with Arrows Literary Journal.
Shannon lives and writes in Newark, Delaware.