Dani Shapiro

Dani Shapiro is a novelist, memoirist and essayist whose latest memoir, Devotion, was released in February 2010. Her first best-selling memoir, Slow Motion, is a favorite among college students and young adults for its brutally honest portrayal of her tumultuous coming-of-age. Raised in a strict, traditional Orthodox Jewish family, Shapiro rebelled during her college years; she was living a life unrecognizable to even herself when her parents were in a terrible car accident that badly injured her mother and cost her father his life. The trauma of what followed—the grief, loss, and need to grow up very quickly—has already spoken to generations of young people.

Shapiro once again mines her own life in Devotion, but this time as an attempt, in early midlife, to understand the longing she feels to believe in something after having fled the rules and rituals of her youth. A story of motherhood, daughterhood, modern midlife and spiritual crisis, Devotion is an exploration of one woman's winding path in search of her own definition of grace. Along the way, she meets a Rabbi, a Buddhist and a Yogi who become her teachers, guides and friends. Shapiro's story is a universal one, appealing to skeptics and believers alike.

Shapiro's material, both fiction and nonfiction, centers on family: what people do—and don't do—in the name of love, in the name of best intentions and their own inherent human frailties. Her novels Black & White and Family History, along with her memoirs, form a rich body of work that makes her a dynamic speaker on topics ranging from the complexities of mothers and daughters to questions of meaning and faith. A respected teacher, Shapiro has taught in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University, NYU, The New School, Wesleyan, and is co-founder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy, which has quickly become one of the finest international writers' conferences in the world.