“When I was in college, I found out that my major professor was also from Charleston, where I grew up. That was Louis Rubin. He kindly, subtly, pointed me towards publishing. Not writing. I was in a lot of writing workshops and he told me I would make a better editor than writer (laughs), which was great advice.”

After graduation from Hollins College in Virginia, Shannon Ravenel joined the staff of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., in New York and then worked for 11 years for Houghton Mifflin, accepting the publisher’s invitation to serve as series editor of Best American Short Stories in 1977. She co-edited 11 volumes of that anthology. In 1982 she joined her former Hollins teacher Louis Rubin Jr. to establish Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, with the aim of publishing nonfiction and literary fiction of unpublished young writers. She edited the series New Stories from the South and became editorial director in 1991 when Rubin retired.

New Stories from the South is an annual compilation of short stories published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill and billed as the year’s best stories written by Southern writers or about the Southern United States. The stories are collected from more than 100 literary magazines, including The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, the Oxford American, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review. Shannon Ravenel, then the editor of the annual Best American Short Stories anthology, launched the New Stories from the South series in 1986.

New Stories from the South has collected the work of many prominent modern American writers, including Steve Almond, Russell Banks, John Barth, Madison Smartt Bell, Wendell Berry, Roy Blount Jr., Larry Brown, James Lee Burke, Robert Olen Butler, Andre Dubus, William Faulkner (a newly discovered story), Barry Hannah, Nanci Kincaid, Aaron Gwyn, Barbara Kingsolver, Bobbie Ann Mason, Reynolds Price, Keith Lee Morris, John Sayles, Lucy Corin, Lee Smith, and Peter Taylor.