Shannon Pufahl is a PhD candidate in American Literature and Culture at the University of California, Davis. Her dissertation traces the animal welfare movement in the U.S. from its origins in the 19th-century through the Nature Fakers debate and the young adult animal novels of the early 20th-century. She was a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford, where she recieved a Centennial award, the University's highest honor for teaching assistants. Shannon is a now a Jones Lecturer in the Creative Writing Program, where she teaches fiction and creative nonfiction. She is at work on a novel set in the American West about three generations of gamblers, and on a memoir about the UC protests, the Occupy Movement, and her own religious education.