POWDER brings us poetry and personal essays from 19 women who have served in all branches of the United States military. Contributors to Powder have seen conflicts from Somalia to Vietnam to Desert Shield. Many are book authors and winners of writing awards and fellowships; several hold MFAs from some of the country's finest programs. The essays and poems here are inspired by an attempted rape by a Navy SEAL; an album of photos of the enemy dead; heat exhaustion in Mosul; a first jump from an airplane; fending off advances from Iraqi men; interrogating suspected terrorists; the contemplation of suicide; and a poignant connection with women and children in Bosnia. Their writing exposes the frontline intersection of women and soldiering, describing from a steely-eyed female perspective the horror, the humor, the cultural clashes and the fear.
Shannon Cain's debut short story collection is the winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for 2011. Her stories have been awarded the Pushcart Prize, the O. Henry Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has appeared in Tin House, The Colorado Review, the New England Review, American Short Fiction and Southwords: New Writing From Ireland. Shannon earned her MFA in 2005 from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
She is the co-editor, with Lisa Bowden, of Powder: Writing by Women in the Ranks, from Vietnam to Iraq (Kore Press, 2008) and co-adapter of Coming In Hot, the stage adaptation of the book.
Shannon has taught fiction writing at the University of Arizona, Gotham Writers' Workshop, Arizona State University and as a private coach and workshop facilitator. In 2011 she was the Picador Guest Professor in Literature at the University of Leipzig in eastern Germany. More information is at www.shannoncain.com.
She is the Artist-in-Residence for the City of Tucson's Ward One and the fiction editor for Kore Press. Shannon lives in downtown Tucson with her teenage daughter. Her current creative project is Tucson, the Novel: An Experiment in Literature and Civil Discourse.
