Shira Nayman, Psy.D. is a psychologist and writer, author of Awake in the Dark (Scribner), The Listener (Scribner), A Mind of Winter (Akashic Books), River (Guernica Editions), and Shoreline (Guernica Editions). She has published in The Atlantic, The Georgia Review, New England Review, and elsewhere, received some grants (Australia Council Literature Board; Cape Branch Award for Emerging Woman Writer; Hadassah Brandeis Institute), and taught at Columbia and Barnard. Shira is also a consultant who develops strategy for iconic American brands and political campaigns.
Shira worked on her book Shoreline (Guernica Editions, 2024) while at MacDowell. Shoreline is a fictionalized memoir exploring themes of historical and personal dislocation, as well as of the ways in which storytelling connects people and weaves into the self, but can also fail us. The book echoes with generations of exile and a quest for home, and perhaps offers a glimpse onto the artist’s mysterious double-helix emotional configuration of transcendence and despair—perhaps a marker of the human condition, creation in some sense always seeded with destruction. Shira wrote two new chapters and revised some earlier chapters. She also did some final revisions on her fourth book of fiction, River (Guernica Editions, 2020).
