Shanna Compton's books include For Girls & Others (Bloof, 2007), Down Spooky (Winnow, 2005), Gamers (Soft Skull, 2004), and several chapbooks. Her third and fourth poetry books are forthcoming from Bloof Books as a two-volume project; a collection called Brink in fall 2012, and a book-length speculative poem called The Seam in spring 2013.

Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poem-A-Day/PoemFlow by the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Daily, the Awl, Eoagh, No Tell Motel, Black Warrior Review, the Equalizer, Women's Studies Quarterly, Barrelhouse, Open Letters Monthly, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the New School, where she also served as the editor-in-chief of LIT.

Her poems and essays have appeared in dozens of publications and several anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2005, Poet's Bookshelf II, The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel, Bowery Women, Digerati, and the Poetry Foundation website.

Working as an editorial/publicity assistant in an industrial publishing house in the late 90s, Shanna came to believe that some literary work—especially poetry—is best presented on a less industrial, more intimate scale. From 2002-2005, she served as the Associate Publisher and Director of Publicity for Soft Skull Press in Brooklyn, where she also edited poetry collections and experimental fiction, designed books, and curated both the original Frequency Series (with Daniel Nester) and the Soft Skull Sneak Peek Series.

An advocate of DIY and small-scale publishing, she founded the DIY Poetry Publishing Cooperative in 2005 and published a series of poetry chapbooks and broadsides via her micropress Half Empty/Half Full, before expanding her publishing activities into the collective press Bloof Books in 2007. She also works as a freelance copywriter, editor, and designer, and occasionally teaches poetry and publishing.