Shawna Ervin, author
Poetry and Creative Writing
Shawna Ervin has an MFA from Rainier Writers’ Workshop. She most enjoys writing nonfiction and poetry. She teaches a variety of English courses at a community college, and is on the faculty of the Tupelo Press Teen Writers Center.
In 2022, she was named a finalist and semi-finalist in Ruminate Magazine’s prose and poetry contests and was chosen as a 30/30 poet for Tupelo Press. She is a recent alum of Bread Loaf, Tin House, and Kenyon Review workshops.
When she is not writing, Shawna enjoys mentoring foster youth through photography and writing. You might also find her savoring a cup of herbal tea, gardening, hiking, or studying nature through a camera lens. She lives in Denver with her family.
Mother Lines Chapbook
Perhaps the deepest paradox of becoming a parent is that one feels all the more the child one still is. These poems know that paradox. And so it is, these poems grapple with the legacy of Ervin’s own parents, and in doing so, seek a way to learn, to grow, to alter the form her own childhood took, to let her own children awake more gently into the shape their lives are taking. That is a tender mercy and an audacious courage, another paradox Ervin offers us, the frictive spark of which reveals the poem as a force of love’s complications and utmost care.
–Dan Beachy-Quick, longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award
Perhaps the deepest paradox of becoming a parent is that one feels all the more the child one still is. These poems know that paradox. And so it is, these poems grapple with the legacy of Ervin’s own parents, and in doing so, seek a way to learn, to grow, to alter the form her own childhood took, to let her own children awake more gently into the shape their lives are taking. That is a tender mercy and an audacious courage, another paradox Ervin offers us, the frictive spark of which reveals the poem as a force of love’s complications and utmost care.
–Dan Beachy-Quick, longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award
–Peggy Shumaker
–Patricia Colleen Murphy, Author of Bully Love