Shannon Ravenel, born August 13, 1938, is an American literary editor and co-founder of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. There she edited the annual anthology, New Stories from the South, from 1986 to 2006. She was series editor of the Houghton Mifflin annual anthology, The Best American Short Stories, from 1977 to 1990.
Ravenel was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, as the daughter of Elias Prioleau Ravenel and Harriett Steedman Ravenel. She entered Hollins College in Virginia as an English major in 1956. There she met Louis D. Rubin, Jr., who became chair of the English Department during her second year, and with whom she would later found and lead Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
Ravenel graduated from Hollins in 1960 and moved to New York City to launch her publishing career, inspired in part by the 1959 film The Best of Everything, which romanticized the industry’s fast-paced environment. There she found a job as a copywriter for Holt, Rinehart & Winston. A year later she relocated to Boston, Massachusetts where she joined Houghton Mifflin Company, initially as a secretary to the editorial staff and eventually becoming an editor of trade books. Three Carolina writers whose work she acquired early on were Sylvia Wilkinson, Pat Conroy, and William Barnwell.
One of the Houghton Mifflin editors Ravenel assisted during her first two or three years there was Martha Foley, who had edited The Best American Short Stories annual anthology since 1941. When Foley died in 1977, the publishing house offered the series to Ted Solotaroff, who agreed to edited the 1978 volume but declined the permanent position, suggesting instead that the publisher use a different editor for each subsequent year. Houghton Mifflin agreed and asked Ravenel, who by then had moved to St. Louis, to act as series editor, a position she held through the 1990 edition, working with annual editors including Ann Beattie, John Gardner, Stanley Elkin, John Updike, and Margaret Atwood, among others. As series editor, each year she read an estimated 1,500 short stories in magazines and literary journals, selecting 120 to send to the annual editor, who then chose 20 to appear in the volume. In 1990 Ravenel edited her own Houghton Mifflin anthology, The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties, which collected 20 stories that had appeared in the annual during that decade.
In 1982 Louis Rubin wrote a letter to Ravenel proposing a new venture. “I am convinced (a) that publishing literary fiction is dying in NYC and (b) it can be done even so…I am therefore toying with the idea of doing it myself.” He closed the letter by asking if she would like to be involved in the enterprise and by Fall 1983 they had issued its first titles including a collection of short stories by Leon Driskell, Passing Through, and a memoir by Vermont C. Royster, My Own, My Country’s Time. The duo operated out of a woodshed behind Rubin’s Chapel Hill home, reincorporating from an earlier company name, Bright Leaf Press. The early years presented significant challenges, including securing initial funding—Ravenel contributed personal resources—and producing the first titles with limited print runs of just 1,500 copies each. Financial strains nearly led to bankruptcy shortly after launch. To navigate this, Ravenel sought advice from established publishers like Peter Workman, who recommended targeted advertising.
By 1989, to ensure sustainability, Algonquin partnered with Workman Publishing, retaining full editorial autonomy over fiction while gaining broader distribution. As a division of Workman Publishing Company, in 2001 Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill launched an imprint bearing the name, Shannon Ravenel Books and featuring books by Larry Brown, Jill McCorkle, Lee Smith, Clyde Edgerton, and Julia Alvarez, among others.
Ravenel continued to nurture literary talent until finally retiring in August 2013 at the age of 75. Her broader impact includes jury service for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rea Award for the Short Story, as well as receiving the 1990 Council of Literary Magazines and Presses Distinguished Achievement Award for elevating overlooked writers and journals.
See a select list of anthologies edited by Shannon Ravenel.
Read the Preface to the first volume of New Stories from the South (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1986), written by Shannon Ravenel.