Shifra Sharlin

Shifra Sharlin is a writer based in New Haven and New York City. She was born in Trenton, New Jersey, started school in Manhattan, and graduated high school in Ames, Iowa. She has raised four children with her husband David Sorkin, an academic. They have moved house often. Each of their children was born at least 3000 miles from the previous child's birthplace. 

Shifra earned her Ph.D. at age 54 with a dissertation on the Ukrainian avant-garde artist, Kazimir Malevich. In her first published essay, she returned to her earlier training in ancient Greek to write mischievously about Thucydides and Colin Powell. It was featured in an NB column in The Times Literary Supplement. Her essay on her marriage, de Sade, and Jane Austen was included in The Contemporary American Essay, edited by Phillip Lopate (Pantheon 2020).

She loves to make things – dolls, challah, the five platonic solids, Superman capes, and essays. Her work addresses the intimate and emotional everyday and also all kinds of intellectual play. 

She taught writing at the University of Wisconsin – Madison and the City University of New York – Grad Center, ending her teaching career at Yale as a senior lecturer where she taught and co-directed a popular course on reading and writing the modern essay.

She now volunteers at Manhattan's immigration court and has been writing about it on her Substack. She is studying Spanish.