Shann Ray Ferch

Poet and prose writer Shann Ray Ferch teaches leadership and forgiveness studies at Gonzaga University. Dr. Ferch is the author of a work of leadership and political theory, Forgiveness and Power in the Age of Atrocity: Servant Leadership as a Way of Life (Rowman & Littlefield), and co-editor of Servant-Leadership, Feminism, and Gender Well-Being (SUNY Press), Servant-Leadership and Forgiveness (SUNY Press), Global Servant-Leadership (Rowman &Littlefield), Conversations on Servant Leadership (SUNY Press), and The Spirit of Servant Leadership (Paulist Press). In his role as professor of leadership studies with the internationally renowned PhD program in Leadership Studies at Gonzaga, he has served as a visiting scholar in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. In addition to his work in leadership studies, he has also taught poetry at Stanford University and the Center for Contemplative Leadership at Princeton Theological Seminary.

His novel, American Copper (Unbridled Press), is a love song to America revealing the life of Evelynne Lowry, a woman who transcends the national myth of regeneration through violence. The novel won the Foreword Book of the Year Readers’ Choice Award and the Western Writers of America Spur Award, and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, the High Plains Book Award and the Foreword Book of the Year Award for Literary Fiction.

A former professional basketball player in the German Bundesliga, his collection of stories American Masculine (Graywolf Press) was named a "3 Books Every Man Should Read" selection by Esquire Magazine, and won the American Book Award, the Bakeless Prize, and two High Plains Book Awards, for Best Story Collection and Best First Book. A finalist with Ted Kooser’s Splitting an Order and Erin Belieu’s Slant Six, his book of poems, Balefire (Lost Horse Press), won the High Plains Book Award for Poetry. He is also the author of atomic theory 7: poems to my wife and God (Resource Publications), a collaboration with painter Trinh Mai, Blood Fire Vapor Smoke (Unsolicited Press), stories on healing in the context of toxic masculinity; Transparent in the Backlight (Great Wide Open Publishing), a collaboration with panoramic photographer Craig Hergert; The Great Divide, an audiobook published by McSweeney's; a collection of essays called The Souls of Others (Unsolicited Press); and The Garment of Praise, a libretto. His work has appeared in Poetry, Esquire, Narrative, McSweeney's, Prairie Schooner, Diode, and Salon. He has served as a poetry mentor for the PEN America Prison and Justice Writers Program, as a visiting scholar of leadership and forgiveness for a group Fulbright between Gonzaga University and the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and as a visiting poet in collaboration with painter Makoto Fujimura on a United Nations Sustainable Development Grant entitled Intercultural Dialogues Through the Use of Beauty as a Language of Peace.