Shawn Sturgeon
Shawn Sturgeon was educated at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the University of North Texas, and the University of Cincinnati where he received a Ph.D. in English Literature in 1998, specializing in Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Fiction. He has been a frequent contributor to The Paris Review, who published seventeen of his poems. More than fifty other poems, translations, and stories have also appeared in The New Republic, StoryQuarterly, Western Humanities Review, Pleiades, Confrontation, the Southeast Review, Meridian, Willow Springs, Witness and other literary journals. As a Charles Phelps Taft Fellow (1996-97), he lived in Mexico where he studied Mexican culture and literature. In 1999, Fables for Beasts, a poetic sequence about the Native American Trickster Coyote, was one of two finalists for the Kent State University Press/Wick Chapbook Award. He was a Tennessee Williams Scholar (2000) and Walter E. Dakin Fellow (2002) at the Sewanee Writers' Conference/University of the South and the Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry (2001-2003) at Emory University. He was a founding editor with Scott Cairns of The North Texas Review and has been an editor of two other literary journals. His first book, Either/Ur (2002) was a finalist for The Paris Review Prize in Poetry (2000), a semi-finalist for the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award (2001) and a finalist for The Independent Publisher Book Awards in Poetry (2003). He has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes in literature, twice in poetry and once in fiction. He has taught at the University of North Texas, The University of Cincinnati, the Art Academy of Cincinnati, Adelphi University and Emory University. He is a member of the Kosovo Writers League and is currently the Director of Academic Affairs at the American University in Kosovo.