2025 Project Award

Shannon Kelly Donahue, a writer, who has witnessed tremendous ecological change and personal loss, will continue to work on “Listen for the Banshee’s Cry”, a hybrid memoir and historical manuscript. Donahue explores her own personal healing and ecological grief through reconnecting with places, Irish ancestors, language and folklore. She will travel to Ireland to access archives and records, visit ancestral cottages, interview relatives and locals about banshee folklore and death customs.

When asked what she would like the public to know, she shared: Shannon’s writing is informed by her decades of work in wildlife conservation and clean water protection, her background in poetry, and her study of the Irish language, traditional music, and folklore. Shannon has spent the last 18 years witnessing the seasonal migration of polar bears to the Hudson Bay coast as the sea ice forms and has been deeply moved by both the changes she’s seen there and what she’s witnessed back at home on Southeast Alaska’s Chilkat Peninsula. Shannon believes that making art is a life-affirming act that can cut through oppression and sustain humanity when political systems fail to protect us.

Watch this video of Live from Storyknife, a series by Storyknife Writers Retreat, where Shannon Kelly reads her lyric essay, Salt Cures. (Starts at 10:13)