Michelle Ephraim is a Shakespeare scholar and a Professor of English at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Her book GREEN WORLD: A Tragicomic Memoir of Love & Shakespeare was awarded the 2023 Juniper Prize for Creative Nonfiction by the University of Massachusetts Press and published by them in 2024.
Her academic work includes 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’s the co-author of the literary humor book Shakespeare, Not Stirred: Cocktails for Your Everyday Dramas (Penguin/Scribe 2015), which has been featured in The Boston Globe, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, WGBH Boston Public Radio, WBUR “Here and Now,” The Huffington Post, The Improper Bostonian and other media outlets. Her latest venture is a podcast, Everyday Shakespeare, which explores the uncanny (and often hilarious) ways that Shakespeare sheds 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.