Raised in a renovated slaughterhouse on the outskirts of Wilmington, Ohio, Shannon C. Ward is author of the poetry chapbook, Blood Creek (Longleaf Press, 2013). She earned her MFA in poetry from The North Carolina State University in 2009, and since then, her work has received generous support from Yaddo, Norton Island, the Anderson Center, Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, and the Willapa Bay Artist-in-Residence Program. She is a recipient of the 2016 Foley Poetry Prize, the 2016 White Oak Kitchen Prize in Southern Poetry, and a 2013 Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in many excellent journals, including Raleigh Review, Great River Review, Superstition Review, and Tar River Poetry. She teaches composition, literature, and creative writing at Methodist University in Fayetteville, North Carolina and was recently named the 2020 educator of the year by the Fayetteville-Cumberland Human Relations Commission. In 2020, she became the Editor-in-Chief at Longleaf Press.