About

Hudson River Zeitgeist was a project in 2015 and 2016, part journalistic, part anthropologic. It centered on oral history, feature stories exploring forgotten history, and travel writing. Seventeen of the transcribed interviews were compiled in a book which sold out of a 300-copy run.

Billy Shannon, the founder and primary writer for Hudson River Zeitgeist, was a crime reporter for the Hudson Register-Star and the Poughkeepsie Journal and also a magazine editor. As a freelancer, he wrote stories for The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Minneapolis Star-Tribune and  interned at The New York Daily News. He earned an M.S. in print journalism from Columbia University in 2012.

After focusing on journalism early in his career, he focused on real estate and on his work for a nonprofit. He’s currently the Associate Director at Camphill Hudson and he and his wife have fixed up seven houses. He lives in Germantown, N.Y. with his wife, Rena, and their daughter, Arabella.