Myra Shapiro papers

Myra Shapiro was born in Bronx, New York, the daughter of Ida Leader Stein and David Stein, a businessman who moved the family to northwestern Georgia when she was nine years old. She graduated from the Ward-Belmont School, a boarding school for girls in Nashville, in 1949. Shapiro briefly attended college before marrying her "college sweetheart," Harold M. Shapiro, in 1953. Together, they raised their family of two daughters in Chattanooga where Myra Shapiro returned to college in the early 1960s, receiving her BA in 1968 from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She credits her reading of Betty Friedan's now-classic,"The Feminine Mystique"(1963) with inspiring her to seek a life beyond marriage and motherhood. After working for several years as an English teacher and a librarian (and completing a Master's in English at the Bread Loaf School, Middlebury College, in 1973), Shapiro began writing in earnest in 1981. That year, with her youngest daughter off to college, Myra Shapiro sublet for a few months the first of several apartments in New York City so as to focus on her writing and attend poetry workshops with many of the renowned poets of the time. By the late 1980s, the Shapiros moved to New York year-round as a growing number of Myra Shapiro's poems appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. She completed a MFA in Writing at Vermont College in 1993. Myra Shapiro's first collection of poetry, "I'll see you Thursday," was published in 1996 (Blue Sofa Press), and edited by Robert Bly. Her memoir, "Four Sublets: Becoming a Poet in New York" was published in 2007, the same year she published the chapbook entitled "In Greenwich Village We Talk of Love," both published by Chicory Blue Press. In 2012, Shapiro published yet another collection of her poems, "12 Floors Above the Earth" (Antrim House Books). She has received numerous awards for her writing, including the Dylan Thomas Poetry Award, The New School (1981) and the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Contest, Honorable Mention (2014). Shapiro has held several fellowships and been invited to take part in many readings from the Library of Congress to the Cornelia Street Cafe in Greenwich Village. She serves on the Poets House Board of Directors and for many years has taught poetry workshops for the International Women's Writing Guild.