Shanna McNair is Founder and Director of The Writer’s Hotel and Founding Editor and Publisher of The New Guard literary review. Shanna writes prose, poetry and scripts and is an award-winning journalist. She recently served as a RISCA Fiction Fellow Competition Judge, and as an Interdisciplinary Study Adviser at Lesley University. Her debut novel, Soul Retrieval, is forthcoming from High Frequency Press in 2025.

Her creative writing has appeared on KGB Bar Lit online, The Galway Review, WAVEBACꓘ and in Maine Magazine, Naugatuck River Review and elsewhere; her work in journalism appears on Village Soup.

She was selected for writing residencies at Studio Faire (2022 and 2024) and Gullkistan (2025). She alshas been a writer-in-residence at Hewnoaks Artist Colony, at the Thomas Lynch Cottage and at the Stonecoast Ireland Residency. She is a graduate of the Dartmouth College Creative Writing MALS program, the Stonecoast MFA program and holds a Creative Writing Certificate from Oxford University, via Dartmouth. She has worked extensively in the visual and performing arts. Shanna lives and works in Maine.