About Teo:

Teo Shannon (formerly published under Teo Mungaray) was born on Kodiak Island in Alaska, home to the largest bears in the world. He lived there until his family moved to Jacksonville, FL in 1999. A year later, his family moved to the nearby city of St. Augustine, where he attended St. Joseph Academy.

In 2011, Teo attended college at Northwestern University. He graduated in 2015 with a BA in Cyberculture Studies and English. Cyberculture Studies was an ad hoc major he designed from courses in the College of Arts and Sciences and the School of Communications at NU. His capstone project was on the social commensuration of communication barriers in gay dating apps like Scruff and Grindr.

In 2015, he moved to Baltimore, MD and began an MFA there at University of Baltimore, but left the program and re-started his MFA education at Pacific University of Oregon in Forest Grove, OR. After his first residency, he moved to Portland, OR in 2016. In 2017, he started Cotton Xenomorph, a digital literary magazine with Chloe N. Clark and Hannah Cohen.

In 2018, he moved to Lincoln, NE to pursue a PhD program in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He specialized in Creative Writing (Poetry). Teo taught a variety of courses including Writing and Inquiry, Writing and Argument, and Intro to Poetry Writing.

In 2023, he moved to Lansing, MI to pursue a bonus MA in Linguistics at Michigan State University where he TA’d and taught courses in the IAH (Integrative Arts and Humanities) general education curriculum, including courses on Fanfiction and Fan Communities and Food Justice and Writing.

In 2025, Teo made the difficult decision to leave MSU and move to Winona, MN where he is now based, writing fulltime.

He has a cat named Lysistrata.