Shannon Pufahl

Bio

Shannon Pufahl is a Jones Lecturer in the Creative Writing Program. She teaches fiction, creative nonfiction, and writing across genres. She was a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford, where she received a Centennial award, the University's highest honor for teaching assistants. She has published essays in The Threepenny Review, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere, on topics ranging from John Brown and the Antebellum Midwest, to personal memoir. Her novel, On Swift Horses, about gambling, sex, and the post-war American West, was published in 2019 by Riverhead Books.

Shannon also holds a PhD in American Literature and Culture from the University of California, Davis. Her dissertation traces the animal welfare movement in the U.S. from its origins in the 19th-century, through the intense debates about animal life, suffering, and intelligence at century's end, and into the young adult animal novels of the early 20th-century.

She is the co-coordinator of The Writer's Studio, a weekly workshop series sponsored by the Creative Writing Program, the Stanford Storytelling Project, and the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking. She also teaches in the Stanford Arts Intensive and online in Summer Session.

Academic Appointments

• Lecturer, Creative Writing

Honors & Awards

• Stegner Fellowship, Stanford University (2011-2013)
• Centennial Teaching Award, Stanford University (2013)

Professional Education

• PhD, University of California, Davis, English -- American Literature & Culture (2020)
• M.A., University of Kansas, English -- American Literature (2006)