Shann Ray has served as a National Endowment for the Arts fellow, a research psychologist for the Centers for Disease Control, a panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities, Research Division, and a visiting scholar in the Netherlands, the Philippines, Canada, South Africa, and Colombia. His collection of stories, American Masculine, named by Esquire for their Three Books Every Man Should Read series and selected by Kirkus Reviews as a Best Book, won the Bakeless Prize, the High Plains Book Award, and the American Book Award. Sherman Alexie said Ray’s work is “tough and beautiful” and Dave Eggers called it “lyrical, prophetic, and brutal, yet ultimately hopeful.” Shann’s creative nonfiction book of leadership and political theory, Forgiveness and Power in the Age of Atrocity, sheds light on the nature of categorical human transgressions and engages the question of ultimate forgiveness in the context of ultimate violence. He 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 and the Ruminate Short Story Prize. His work has appeared in some of the nation’s leading literary venues including Poetry, McSweeney‘s, Narrative, and Northwest Review. Shann grew up in Montana and spent part of his childhood on the Northern Cheyenne reservation. He lives with his wife and three daughters, in Spokane, Washington where he teaches leadership and forgiveness studies at Gonzaga University.

Books by Shann Ray:

Other poems on the web by Shann Ray:
Two poems
"Poem for My Wife and Three Daughters"
Four poems

Shann Ray's Website.

Shann Ray According to Wikipedia.

About Balefire:

"In Shann Ray’s collection, Balefire, one senses always the poet’s tender regard for family as well as the forces of nature that flesh, flame, and fray each human relationship."
—Sandra Alcosser

"Shann Ray brings to American poetry a voice that is at once rugged and unapologetically vulnerable. In these poems, Ray writes with the same incisive eye that has won him so much praise for his fiction, but with an even sharper ear. Like any decent bluesman, Shann knows when to wail, when to whisper, and when to let the silences do their own damn work. Here, folks, is an able and true ‘vessel for the song of this world.’"
—John Murillo

"From tenderness to violence, to something impossible to name, Shann Ray offers his readers a new kind of lyric. These poems stand as chiseled testaments to the heart’s survival; from a father’s fists like windmills to a wife’s surprising power. This marvelous collection is filled with spare poems that accrue and steadily grow into knowledge—the kind of knowledge that tastes of blue spruce and rough-hewed redemption. A riveting poetic debut."
—Susan Rich

"A celebration of the intricacies of love. Shann Ray’s Balefire is visionary—a powerful and moving visit to the places that haunt us."
—Debra Magpie Earling