Shufran, Lauren: - Lauren Shufran holds an MA (English) and an MFA (Creative Writing: Poetry) from San Francisco State University, and a PhD (Early Modern British Literature) from UC Santa Cruz.
In her eight years of PhD candidacy at UCSC she taught a wide range of courses, from creative writing to
Biblical Poetics in Renaissance England to
The English Sonnet Sequence; but Shakespeare was the course she taught most consistently. She discovered yoga, meditation, and mindfulness practices while writing her dissertation.
Lauren's first major publication was a book of poetry called
Inter Arma (Fence Books, 2013), which won the Motherwell Prize. Her poetry has appeared in
Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University Press), as well as in
Postmodern Culture,
The Los Angeles Review of Books,
Emerge: An Anthology of Writing by Lambda Fellows, and elsewhere over the years. She's also had scholarly essays published in a handful of peer-reviewed journals.
Lauren presently works as a ghostwriter and content strategist for a startup in San Francisco.