Shanna Compton's books and chapbooks include For Girls (Bloof Books, 2007), Down Spooky, (Winnow Press, 2005), GAMERS: Writers, Artists & Programmers on the Pleasures of Pixels, (Soft Skull, 2004), Big Confetti (with Shafer Hall, HEHF 2004), Closest Major Town (HEHF, 2006), and Rare Vagrants (Dusie, 2010), among others. Her third poetry collection, The Blank Verge, is forthcoming from Bloof Books in 2012, and poems from it may be found in Poem-A-Day/PoemFlow by the Academy of American Poets, the Awl, Eoagh, No Tell Motel, Black Warrior Review, The Equalizer, Women's Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere.

Shanna's poems and essays have appeared in dozens of publications and several anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2005, Poet's Bookshelf II, The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel, Bowery Women, Digerati, and the Poetry Foundation website. (See the poems page of this site for links to recent work.)

Shanna worked as a publicity and editorial assistant for a division of Random House for two years back in the late 90s, focusing on poetry and fiction by authors such as Hal Sirowitz, Martin Amis, Frederick Busch, and many others, before coming to the conclusion that some literary work (especially poetry) is best served on a less industrial, more intimate scale.

She earned an MFA in Poetry at the New School, where she also served as the editor of LIT from 2002-2005, for which she remains an editor-at-large. She then went to work as Associate Publisher and Director of Publicity at Soft Skull Press from 2002-2007, editing poetry collections and experimental fictions, designing books, and curating both the orignal Frequency Series (with Daniel Nester) and the Soft Skull Sneak Peek Series.

An advocate of DIY and small-scale publishing, she founded the DIY Poetry Publishing Cooperative in 2005 and published poetry chapbooks and broadsides via her micropress Half Empty/Half Full, before expanding her publishing activities into the collective press Bloof Books in 2007. She works as a freelance copywriter and occasionally teaches poetry and publishing.