A Lifetime of Olympiads..., by Shannon Frost Greenstein

Prose, chapbook, 44 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

How do you quantify the events of a human life? Utilizing every former gymnast’s favorite quadrennial cycle – the Summer Olympiad – author Shannon Frost Greenstein chronicles a lifetime of grief, growth, and geopolitics through the lens of USA Gymnastics and its many scandals.

Partially a factual record of the evolution of women’s gymnastics, partially a poignant memoir about mental illness and reclamation, A Lifetime of Olympiads highlights how the more things change, the more they stay the same…until the point when they don’t.

With musings on everything from gun control to the venerable Simone Biles, Greenstein conveys the butterfly effect of trauma and tragedy upon the individual and upon society, drawing from her own lived experience with gymnastics, adversity, and absolution. From Moscow to Los Angeles, A Lifetime of Olympiads is a collection of sense memories that says a lot about the Olympics…and about so many other things, too.

Shannon Frost Greenstein (She/They) resides in Philadelphia with her family and cats. She is the author of Through the Lens of Time (2026), a forthcoming fiction collection with Thirty West Publishing, and These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things (2022), a book of poetry from Really Serious Lit. Shannon is a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy and a multi-time Pushcart Prize nominee, with work in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Pithead Chapel, Nimrod Journal, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. Her passions include Friedrich Nietzsche, anti-racism, the Seven Summits, the Hamilton Soundtrack, and acquiring more cats. Find her at shannonfrostgreenstein.com or on Twitter and Bluesky at @shannonfrostgre. Insta: @zarathustra_speaks