Bio
Czech American artist, social scientist, and American Book Award winner Shann Ray teaches leadership and forgiveness studies at Gonzaga University and poetry at Stanford. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and group Fulbright recipient to South Africa, through his research in forgiveness and genocide Shann has served as a visiting scholar in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas, and as a poetry mentor for the PEN America Prison and Justice Writers Program. He has delivered poetry engagements at Cambridge and the Center for Contemplative Leadership at Princeton Theological Seminary, and values mutual work involving art, leadership, and the reconciliation of people and nations. Having collaborated as a visiting poet with painter Makoto Fujimura on a United Nations grant entitled Intercultural Dialogues through Beauty as a Language of Peace, Ray is also an International Book Award winner, a three-time High Plains International Book Award winner, Bread Loaf Fellow, Bakeless Prize winner, Western Writers of America Spur Award winner, and winner of the Foreword Book of the Year Readers’ Choice Award. His work comprises a libretto and 17 books, of which 12 are poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction including Atomic Theory 7, The Garment of Praise, Forgiveness and Power in the Age of Atrocity, Balefire, American Masculine, Sweetclover, Blood Fire Vapor Smoke, American Copper, The Souls of Others, and Transparent in the Backlight. His poems and prose have been featured in Poetry, Esquire, Narrative, Mudlark, McSweeney’s, Prairie Schooner, Poetry International, Big Sky Journal, Montana Quarterly, and the American Journal of Poetry.
* Shann’s presentation at the American Book Award ceremony *
Born and raised in Montana, Ray’s work considers the nature of humanity with regard to violence and forgiveness. He holds a dual MFA in poetry and fiction from the Inland Northwest Center for Writers at Eastern Washington University, a Masters in clinical psychology from Pepperdine, and a PhD in systems psychology from the University of Alberta in Canada. He has served as a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Fellow, a research psychologist for the Centers for Disease Control, and as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is the editor of The International Journal of Servant Leadership.
His work has been featured in some of America’s leading literary venues including Poetry, Esquire, McSweeney’s, Narrative, Prairie Schooner, America, Borderlands, Southern Humanities Review, Diode, LitHub, StoryQuarterly, The American Journal of Poetry, Poetry International, South Dakota Review, High Desert Journal, Tin House online, Fugue, Northwest Review, and Montana Quarterly. Ray is the winner of the subTerrain Poetry Prize, the Crab Creek Review Fiction Award, the Poetry Quarterly Poetry Prize, the Pacific Northwest Inlander Short Story Award, the Ruminate Short Story Prize, and the Creative Writing Distinguished Alumni Award from Eastern Washington University. His work has been selected as notable in the Best American Sports Writing, Best American Nonrequired Reading and Best of the West anthologies, as a finalist for the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize, as a finalist for the Western Writers of America Spur Award in short fiction, as a finalist for the American Short Fiction Short Story Prize, as a Narrative Story Contest Silver Winner, and appeared in the Best New Poets and Best of McSweeney’s anthologies. Ray has served as a Milton Fellow Mentor at Seattle Pacific University, and as a Visiting Writer at Pepperdine University, the University of Montana Western, Pacific University, Dickinson State University, Hope College, and Seattle Pacific University. His influences include Debra Magpie Earling, Melanie Rae Thon, Sherman Alexie, Sandra Alcosser, Li-Young Lee, Claire Davis, Milan Kundera, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, James Welch, Michael Ondaatje, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, A.B. Guthrie, William Kittredge, Sharon Olds, Anne Sexton, Richard Hugo, Richard Ford, Katerina Rudcenkova, C.D. Wright, Jim Harrison, and Hillsong United with Taya Smith, Joel Houston, Jadwin Gillies, and Brooke Fraser.
Click below to see Shann and his brother Kral throwing down:
Kral and Shann Youtube Dunking video
… serious dunks begin at the 4 minute mark
And here’s an interview of Shann by Peter Geye for Fiction Writers Review:
