Shoshauna Shy

photo by James Schey

CONTACT

Shoshauna Shy
Madison, Wisconsin

POTENTIALLY AVAILABLE TO GO TO SCHOOLS TO DO READINGS AND/OR WORKSHOPS

BIO

Shoshauna Shy is a member of the Prairie Fire Poetry Quartet which includes John Lehman, Richard Roe and Robin Chapman. They are available to perform at museum celebrations, art gallery openings, special events and evening soirées. In May 2004, she founded a program called Poetry Jumps Off the Shelf, in which the mission is to place poetry in public places where it is not expected. In August 2010, she began conducting a new call for submissions for the Jawbreaker Poetry Project, a partnership with Verse Wisconsin. Read up on it at poetryjumpsofftheshelf.com

Shoshauna also initiated the Woodrow Hall Jumpstart Award for other Wisconsin poets who want to implement programs where poetry is brought to the public in unconventional ways. Read up on this at the website as well.

Shoshauna Shy's poems have been published in numerous journals and magazines which include The Los Angeles Review, The Seattle Review, The Briar Cliff Review, Rattle, Rosebud and Poetry Northwest. She won First Place in the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Triad Contest in 2002; three of her poems were finalists in the Wisconsin Academy Review Poetry Contest in 2004 and the Wisconsin People & Ideas contest in 2010, and one of her poems was selected for the Poetry 180 Library of Congress program launched by Billy Collins. She was the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets' poetry editor for their quarterly newsletter from 2001-2004, and sponsored a contest in Free Verse in 2005. Her collection titled What the Postcard Didn’t Say won an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association in 2008, and her mixed media assemblage incorporating a poem titled "Saturday Night in Cheyenne" took second place Best of Show at the International Society of Human Ethology conference on the University of Wisconsin campus in 2010. Shoshauna works for the Wisconsin Humanities Council and has helped create, coordinate and facilitate poetry programs for the annual Wisconsin Book Festival in downtown Madison each October.

PUBLICATIONS

What the Postcard Didn't Say, full-length collection, Zelda Wilde Publishing, 2007 - $11.95 - Winner of an Outstanding Achievement Poetry Award from the Wisconsin Library Association
White Horses on Sale for a Song, Parallel Press, 2005 - $10.00
Lake Wingra Morning: Poems of the Dudgeon-Monroe Neighborhood, Woodrow Hall Editions in partnership with the Dudgeon-Monroe Neighborhood Association, 2003 - $5.00. Edited by Shoshauna Shy - SOLD OUT
Slide Into Light: Poems of the Brighter Moments, Moon Journal Press, 2001 - $8.00
Souped-Up on the Must-Drive Syndrome, Pudding House Publications, 2000 - $8.95

Shoshauna Shy's poems have been anthologized by Random House (Poetry 180), Grayson Books (Proposing on the Brooklyn Bridge, To Love One Another), Wisconsin Poets' Calendars, Samsara Quarterly, Pudding House Publications (The Pocket Poet Parenting Guide, Hunger Enough), Marion Street Press (Poem, Revised), Midmarch Arts Press (Mirror, Mirror: Reflections on the Way We Look ), Wild Dove Studio & Press (Jane's Stories), Sourcebooks, Inc. (Poetry Daily), Girlchild Press (Just Like a Girl), Paper Kite Press (Poem, Home), and Red Hen Press ( Letters to the World).

OTHER POEMS
loc.gov/poetry/180/068.html

poemeleon.org/shoshauna-shy/
madpoetry.org/madpoets/shyshosh.html

BOOKINGS

2010

January
Participant in The Winter Festival of Poets reading on January 24th at 2:00 PM with Russell Gardner, Fran Rall, Geoff Collins, Richard Swanson and Kimberly Blanchette at Avol's Bookstore in Madison

October
Presenting the program "Under the Influence" on October 23rd with the Prairie Fire Poetry Quartet at the Chippewa Valley Book Festival in Eau Claire

POEM

THE BEST WAY TO READ LORINE NIEDECKER'S POEMS

First wander through Emerald Grove's antique store
amongst fishing nets and rusty kerosene lamps
for a spitbox in which to plant Queen Anne's lace.

Unpin dishtowels from a clothesline
and notice how the leaves
of the neighboring poplar
shimmy in the wind.

Enter a cabin that has been sitting empty
while its owners take a cross-country train
to New York.

With her book on your lap, cup the chin
of a cat as it sprawls beside you
on a windowsill, the breeze thick
with the scent of cherry blossoms.

Remember how your husband's former fiancee
whose pregnancy was terminated
asked to come visit, couldn't take her eyes
off your little boy.

Published by Wisconsin Academy Review

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