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Shickshinny is a borough in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, that was incorporated on November 30, 1861, from land taken from Salem and Union townships.

The first white settlers in the Shickshinny area, the Austin and Crossley families, arrived in 1782, and Lizzie James is remembered as the first permanent settler.

Shickshinny takes its name from Shickshinny Creek, and the meaning of the name is disputed: George Donehoo's book Indian Villages and Place Names in Pennsylvania translates it as 'Fine Stream,' while the Shickshinny Historical Society says it means 'Five Mountains,' for the five mountains — Newport, Knob, Lee, River and Rocky — that encircle the creek and the borough.

A farm covering nearly the whole present borough was established by Matthias Hollenback, passed to his daughter Cist, who married Chester Butler, and was sold in 1857 to the proprietors of the Shickshinny Company.

Shickshinny grew quickly in the 1860s and 1870s: a toll bridge was built in 1865, a flour mill opened in 1865, a foundry followed in 1866, a planing mill in 1874, and the area's first newspaper, The Mountain Echo, began publishing in 1873.

Shickshinny sits at the lower end of the Wyoming Valley anthracite coal deposit, and the rich Red Ash vein was worked just across the river at Mocanaqua.

Shickshinny lies on the west bank of the Susquehanna River along U.S. Route 11, midway between Nanticoke and Berwick, and covers just 0.49 square miles.

The 2020 census counted about 630 residents in Shickshinny, down from 959 people in 415 households in 2000, and the borough's population has fallen steadily from a peak of more than 2,100 in the early 1900s.

Children in Shickshinny attend the Northwest Area School District — the smallest school district in Luzerne County — whose junior-senior high school stands on Thorne Hill Road in the borough and whose teams are known as the Rangers.

The Susquehanna Warrior Trail, a rail trail running along the river, passes through Shickshinny.