Shannon Cain

Shannon Cain - Picador Guest Professor in the summer semester 2011

Shannon Cain, born in 1965, is a multiple award-winning fiction author. She is from downtown Tucson, Arizona. After her MFA in 2005 from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, she published with Lisa Bowden Powder: Writing by Women in the Ranks, from Vietnam to Iraq (Kore Press, 2008). Her stories have been awarded the Pushcart Prize, the O. Henry Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her short stories have appeared e.g. in The Colorado Review and American Short Fiction. Her debut short story collection, The Necessity of Certain Behaviors, was published in 2011. It was awarded with the 2011 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Shannon Cain has taught fiction writing at the University of Arizona, Gotham Writers’ Workshop, UCLA Extension, Arizona State University and as a private coach and workshop facilitator. In 2014, Cain was awarded a three-year Skills and Talents Visa in the arts from the government of France, and moved to Paris. In the same year, Cain edited and published the short story anthology Roadside Curiosities. Stories About American Pop Culture. The book was born in a classroom at the Institute for American Studies during her stay as Picador Guest Professor and published by the Leipzig University Press. In 2015, Cain’s work was published in two anthologies: The Lineup: 20 Provocative Women Writers and Winesburg, Indiana. She is also the founder of La Maison Baldwin, a residency program in the south of France supporting Black writers.