"Music is the breath of our being."

— William Wordsworth

Shawn Craver makes elemental, pre-industrial music shaped by Old-World and American folk traditions, whilst writing original songs that resist inheritance, genre, and expectation. Shawn has appeared at universities, festivals, and concert series, including as a panelist with New York Times bestselling author Maria Dahvana Headley.

Craver's journey began in Appalachia and carried him west, where he slept in deserts and caves among train porters, poets, and vagabonds in places like Yosemite and Santa Fe. A writer as well as a wanderer, his poems have appeared in Coelacanth Journal, And/Both Magazine, and America's Best Emerging Writers. A novel is at hand, populated by grave diggers, witches, and wart cures.

Not to be outdone by his fellow "no-accounts and ne'er-do-wells," Shawn is a five-time Maryland State Banjo Champion and former Mid-Atlantic Mandolin Champion—a title he jokes he won "only because I had the most strings in tune, seven out of eight."  As he adds, "In Jewish mysticism, seven signifies the completion of nature and eight the transcendence of it—so that's the best I can make winning a mountain picking contest sound."