Michelle Ephraim is a Shakespeare scholar and a Professor of English at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Her book GREEN WORLD: A Tragicomic Memoir of Love and Shakespeare was awarded the 2023 Juniper Prize in Creative Nonfiction by the University of Massachusetts Press and will be published by them in 2024.

Professor Ephraim is the author of Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage (Routledge, 2008) and numerous articles on Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists. At WPI, she teaches literature courses, as well as memoir and speculative fiction writing.

She and Caroline Bicks (University of Maine), a fellow Shakespearean and longtime partner in crime, wrote a blog that became the inspiration for their literary humor book, Shakespeare, Not Stirred: Cocktails for Your Everyday Dramas (Penguin, 2015 and Scribe, 2015). Shakespeare, Not Stirred has been featured in The Boston Globe, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Guardian, WGBH Boston Public Radio, WBUR “Here and Now,” The Huffington Post, The Improper Bostonian and other media venues. Their latest adventure is a podcast, Everyday Shakespeare, which explores all the weird, wonderful, and hilarious ways that Shakespeare can shed some light on our modern problems.

Professor Ephraim’s essays have appeared in venues such as The Washington Post, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Lilith, Tikkun, Cleaver Magazine, The Morning News, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She has spoken widely on the topic of Shakespeare’s relevance to everyday life. You can listen to her story about Shakespeare and a run-in with an ex-boyfriend’s mother on The Moth Radio Hour.

photo credit: Leah Ramuglia