About Shannon

Well, hey. I’m Shannon. I’m an author, editor, and creative writer whose work hovers over themes of identity, meaning-making, and change. As a recently divorced mother in my forties, I’m increasingly interested in the tension between belonging in relational community and belonging to one’s self; the tension, I suppose, of being human. I’m currently working on a book with Penguin Random House that will explore the way we wrestle with this in many different forms.

Previous books of mine include The Mystics Would Like a Word (2024), Feminist Prayers for My Daughter (2023), and Rewilding Motherhood (2021). My poetry and prose have been published by Literary Mama, Cordella, Make.Shift zine, and Geez.

In my day job as the culture and spirituality editor for the National Catholic Reporter, I have the good fortune of helping other writers hone their voices. Occasionally I write there, too: like the time I got to interview the actor Andrew Garfield for a profile on his spiritual inclinations. As a former middle schooler who wrote would-be articles on celebrities in a notebook kept under my bed, that was pretty cool.

Aside from writing, my days are filled by laughing with my kids, napping with my pets, browsing thrift stores, getting lost in a novel, babying my houseplants, enjoying live music, and compulsively redecorating my house. I’m always late, and I’d like to claim it’s in the name of decolonization and anti-capitalism, but it’s really just time blindness from my ADHD. My family and I make our home in charming little Ames, IA.