Laurie Sheck

Laurie Sheck was born in the Bronx, New York, on July 10, 1953. She is the author of several collections of poetry, including Captivity (Knopf, 2007), which interacts, in part, with the journals of Gerard Manley Hopkins; Black Series (Knopf, 2001); The Willow Grove (Knopf, 1996), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Io at Night (Knopf, 1990); and Amaranth (University of Georgia Press, 1981).

Sheck is also the editor of the anthology Poem a Day, Volume 2 (Zoland, 2003), and the author of the hybrid work A Monster’s Notes (Knopf, 2009), which re-examines the unnamed monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Her poems have been included in two volumes of Best American Poetry and three volumes of The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses.

About Sheck’s work, the poet C. K. Williams has said, “Rarely, if ever, has the contemporary lyric been both so pure and so informed with varieties of experience.” The poet Rita Dove has said, “Laurie Sheck is a modern shaman.... ‘Listen carefully.’ she whispers; and you do, because your life depends on it.”

Sheck’s honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New Jersey State Council for the Arts. She has also been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at New York Public Library.

Sheck has been a member of the creative writing faculty at Princeton University, and currently teaches in the MFA. program at The New School. She lives in New York, New York.