Shannon Reed

Shannon's Affiliations: Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series

Shannon Reed is the author of the best-seller Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries, and Just One More Page Before Lights Out, which was a Next Big Idea Club and American Library Association pick, a Good Housekeeping Book Club selection, and was excerpted in George Saunders' Substack, Story Club. Her first book, Why Did I Get a B?: And Other Mysteries We're Discussing in the Faculty Lounge, was a semi-finalist for the Thurber Prize in American Humor in 2022, and a People Magazine Book of the Week, as well as a Target Reads selection. 

Shannon is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker's "Shouts and Murmurs" and "Daily Shouts" columns, as well as to McSweeney's Internet Tendency, where her "If People Talked to Other Professionals the Way They Talk to Teachers" was the most read piece in 2018. More recently, her work was one of the most shared pieces in 2022, and another piece was in the top 3 for 2023. For Buzzfeed, she wrote the (in)famous piece, "If Jane Austen Got Feedback From Some Guy in a Writing Workshop." Shannon contributes book reviews and op-eds to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Her essays have been published in The Paris Review, Slate, Guernica, Vela, Longreads, Ozy, The Guardian, LitHub, Vulture, and The Washington Post. Her fiction appeared in Mud River Journal, Kweli Journal and Litro Fiction, among others. Her plays have been performed or read in New York, Pittsburgh, Denver, Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles, and she has received support from The Heinz Foundation, The Pittsburgh Foundation, and the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Foundation, as well as the European Studies Center at Pitt.

Shannon teaches the full cycle of the Fiction Writing track in the undergrad program at Pitt: Intro to Writing Fiction, Intermediate Fiction, Readings in Contemporary Fiction and Senior Seminar in Fiction, as well as a course on Humor Writing. She also is the Director for Undergraduate Studies for the Writing Program. 

Shannon holds an MFA in Creative Writing: Fiction from Pitt, an MA in Educational Theatre/Teaching Secondary English from NYU, and a BFA in Theatre: Acting and Directing from Otterbein University. Before joining the faculty at Pitt, Shannon taught in the New York City public school system. She is at work on her third work of non-fiction, a book of essays about her disability, and her first novel, set at a fine and performing arts camp in Northeast Pennsylvania in 1997.