BIO

Faculty, George Washington University, 1970-1971. Faculty, American University, 1970-1987,founder and first director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing; president, Yaddo Artist Community 1987-1991; faculty, American University, 1992-2007.She founded and directed summer writer’s conferences at American in the 70’s that included Lewis Thomas (head of Memorial Sloan-Kettering), Michael Harper, Leonard Randolph, Richard Shelton, Stanley Kunitz, William Stafford, Lucille Clifton, Kay Boyle, Ahmos Zu Bolton, May Miller. O.B. Hardison, William Matthews, Joachim Neugroschel, Dolores Kendrick, Larry Neal, Howard Neverov, Stanley Elkin and many others.

​​Author of four chapbooks and ten collections of poetry, most recently Harmless, MayApple Press (May 2010), and Lithuania: New & Selected Poems,Azul Editions (1995, 1997), The Witness Trees, Cornwall Press (2000, 2008); a collection of short fiction, Like a Field Riddled by Ants, Lost Roads Publishers (1998); essays, Over the Rooftops of Time, SUNY Press (2003); and a co-edited work with Bruce Sklarew, The Journey of ChildDevelopment:Selected Papers of Joseph D. Noshpitz, Routledge (2010). A study of trauma and memory, A Survivor Named Trauma: Holocaust Memory in Lithuania, is forthcoming from SUNY Press. Invitation to a Country Called Aging, co-written with Patricia Garfinkel, is due out in August 2018. A chapter, “Leiser’s Song,” in The Power of Witnessing Routledge (2012), “Crossing Boundaries: Memory and Trauma” appeared in SAJL, Purdue University Press 2010, and “Trauma Made Manifest: Its Hidden Forms” in International Psychoanalytic Press 2018. ”What Am I Going to Say,” appeared in Now Write Nonfiction: Memoir, Journalism and CreativeNonfiction Exercises, Tarcher/Penguin, 2010,“Charlotte Sorkine: A Partisan’s Destiny” in Prism Journal 2018. Eating the White Earth, translated by Poet Moshe Dor into Hebrew was published by Tag Press in 1994.

​​Her poetry has been recorded for the Library of Congress’s Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature. Lie Perfectly Still: Essays on Mortality and Healing is a recently completed work, as is Sing, Little Collar Button, poetry manuscript on resilience. Awards and grants include the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Littauer Foundation grant, National Jewish Book Council Award in Poetry, Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award from the Judah Magnes Museum, University Scholar/Teacher Award from American University , di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, shared with poet Erica Jong, and others.

​​Myra Sklarew has given readings from her work at the Library of Congress, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Tennessee Poetry Circuit, and many other places. She 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, at the Radcliffe Institute, and in the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University under Elliott Coleman. At NIH, she has studied immunology and, for six years, a remarkable course called Demystifying Medicine, created by Dr. Win Arias.

​​She served as director of the Montgomery County Council of Cooperative Nursery Schools (28 schools), and with the Infant Education Project, a model program in early education in the KenGar Community, sponsored by NIMH and Home Study, Inc. She has worked in the Department of Neurophysiology at Yale University School of Medicine studying frontal lobe function and delayed response memory in Rhesus monkeys. Between 1993 and 2018, she has made fourteen extended visits to Lithuania, talking with local people,  survivors, witnesses, rescuers of the World War II era and visiting the villages of her forebears.

​​She has served on the advisory boards of The Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University , committed to cultivating, honoring, and promoting the diverse voices of African American poets by making the genre accessible to a wide audience and collaborating with educational and cultural institutions, literary organizations and artists;A Splendid Wake, which arose from a desire among contemporary DC poets to honor the poets of the past decades, to document and preserve the remarkable literary history of Washington, D.C. poetry from 1900 through the present; and the Center for Israeli Studies at American University, a national and international hub for the creation and dissemination of knowledge about Israeli contributions in literature, economics, environmental science, law and society, public administration, the visual arts, performing arts—dance music, and theatre, and Jewish studies.

​​Myra Sklarew played piano as a teenager in a dance band on Long Island and with her remarkable earnings (seven dollars a night), she went to Birdland to hear the music of the great jazz musicians. She worked with Bill Taylor and Seymour Gresser to learn wood carving.

​​Her first students included those returning from the Vietnam War.