Director's Corner, Shapiro Center

Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism

Middletown, CT, CT 06457

Director's Corner

Welcome to the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism! We believe that, in order for creative writing and criticism to thrive, its practitioners must look both within the university and beyond it, to the many different publics they can serve. The Center's classes and extra-curricular initiatives model how creative writing and criticism can reach readers of many different backgrounds—readers who can take pleasure in every possible form, genre, and medium, from literary criticism to children's literature, from translated fiction to audiobooks.

As Director, I am fortunate that I get to work with some of the absolute best novelists, poets, translators, and critics in the world. I am equally fortunate that the Wesleyan leadership, alumni like John Shapiro and Shoni Silverberg, and our collaborators in the media and publishing industries have invested in a capacious vision of how literature and criticism should move through the world.

If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to email me directly at memre@wesleyan.edu.

Articles

, The New Yorker, July 10, 2023.
, The New Yorker, June 5, 2023.
, The New Yorker, May 23, 2023.
, The New Yorker, February 27, 2023.

Books

, ed. (New York: Norton, 2021). A Lit Hub Best Book of 2021.
, ed. (New York: Norton, 2021).
, co-author (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020). Winner of the 2021 PROSE Award for Humanities. Shortlisted for Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) Book Prize.
(New York: Doubleday, 2018). A New York Times Book Critics’ Best Book of 2018. NPR Best Book of 2018. CBC Best Book of 2018. Economist Best Book of 2018. Spectator Best Book of 2018. Mental Floss Best Book of 2018. Shortlisted for the British Society for the History of Science Hughes Prize. Translated into Swedish, Hungarian, Korean, Chinese, and published in the U.K. by William Collins under the title What’s Your Type. Adapted for film as the documentary “Persona,” which premiered on HBO in March 2021.
, ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018).
a (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). Public Books Editor Pick of 2017.