Curator Bio: Shann Ray
Shann Ray (Literature) is the winner of the Subterrain Poetry Prize, the Crab Creek Review Fiction Prize, and the Ruminate Short Story Prize. He grew up in Montana and has lived on the Northern Cheyenne reservation, as well as in L.A., Alaska, Germany and Canada. He served as part of a group Fulbright project in leadership at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and as a visiting scholar for the Ninoy and Cory Aquino Leadership Center in Manila, the Philippines. He was nominated by the Inland Northwest Center for Writers for the Best New American Voicesanthology, and received a Pushcart nomination from McSweeney’s for his story The Great Divide which was also selected for the anthology The Better of McSweeney’s, Volume 2. His poetry was an open competition winner in the Best New Poetsseries. His collection of short stories, American Masculine, won the Bakeless Prize. Shann Ray lives with his wife and three daughters in Spokane, Washington, where he teaches leadership and forgiveness studies at Gonzaga University. http://www.shannray.com/blog/