
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.