Bio
Photo Credit Kim Klein
Shana Deets is a native of Wisconsin who currently teaches novel writing in the Graduate Professional Writing Program at Mount Mary College in Milwaukee. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington in 2004, where she received the Philip Gerard Fellowship for most promising first year writer. Her work has appeared in Passages North, Poet Lore, and Potomac Review.
She has earned generous fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and the Willard Espy Foundation.
Deets has also taught in the University of Wisconsin system, as well as at Lesley College and the New England Institute of Art in the Boston area, where she was a finalist for the student-nominated Ina Beth Miller teacher of the year award.
In her novel writing workshops, she emphasizes the importance of students drawing on the power of the subconscious to create inventive, compelling, and vivid fiction. Students access the work of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell in the early stages of composition, and create work that resists the usual boundaries of contemporary fiction.
You will find her website devoted to her novel writing workshops at Mount Mary College at this link: