Myra Sklarew

Myra Sklarew (b. 1934), former president of the artist community Yaddo and currently professor of literature at American University, is the author of three chapbooks and six collections of poetry, most recently Lithuania: New & Selected Poems (ISBN 1885214022) and The Witness Trees (ISBN 0845345257), a collection of short fiction, Like a Field Riddled by Ants (ISBN 0918786363), and a collection of essays, Over the Rooftops of Time (ISBN 0791455769). Her book Eating the White Earth (ISBN 9654870037 ?) was translated into Hebrew by the Israeli poet, Moshe Dor, then published in Israel.

Myra Sklarew's poetry has been recorded for the Contemporary Poets' Archives of the Library of Congress. She is the recipient of the National Jewish Book Council Award in Poetry, the Di Castagnola Award, and the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award.

Myra Sklarew was educated at Tufts University where she studied biology, at the Cold Spring Harbor Biological Laboratory where she worked with Salvador Luria and Max Delbruck, studying bacterial genetics and bacterial viruses, and in the Writing Seminars with Elliott Coleman at the Johns Hopkins University. She has worked in the Department of Neurophysiology at Yale University School of Medicine where she studied frontal lobe function and delayed response memory in Rhesus monkeys. Myra Sklarew's claim to fame was working in a dance band on Long Island in the late 1940s as a pianist where she earned seven dollars a night. She began her work at American University in 1970. Her first students included those returning from the Vietnam War.

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This brief biography was adapted on 26 November 2003 from The MFA in Creative Writing Program at American University.