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 fiction has earned recognition in the Writers of the Future Contest, the Odyssey Con Odd Contest and the Delaware Division of the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship, and has appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Psuedopod, Shoreline of Infinity, The Wild Musette, Persistent Visions, Cast of Wonders, Gargoyle, Spinetingler Magazine, Scigentasy, 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, Mirror Dance, 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 also Madame Secretary for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association, 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 with her husband, an Aspie son, a mischievous daughter, an immortal cat, and a collection of owl figurines.