Jason Shinder

Jason Shinder (1955–2008) is an American poet who authored three books and founded the YMCA National Writer's Voice. His last book, Stupid Hope (Graywolf Press, 2009), was released posthumously.

He was born in Brooklyn New York in 1955, and published his first literary work in 1993, with the release of Every Room We Ever Slept In, which became a New York Public Library Notable Book. He went on to author Among Women and Uncertain Hours, he also edited numerous anthologies, including The Poem That Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later and The Poem I Turn To: Actors and Directors Present Poetry That Inspires Them. In addition to founding and directing the National Writer's Voice, Shinder also served as director of the Sundance Institute Writing Program, as a teacher in the graduate writing program at Bennington College, as a graduate teacher at New School University, and was a Poet Laureate of Provincetown. Shinder also earned a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2007.

Shinder died in April 2008. He had non-Hodgkins lymphoma and leukemia. “Cancer is a tremendous opportunity,” he said, philosophically, “to have your face pressed right up against the glass of your mortality.” Seeing cancer as a spiritual avenue was unfortunately incompatible with seeing illness as an ill: a problem to be combated with medical science. For half a year he was vaguely troubled by lumps in his throat before he got around to seeing an internist. The doctors wanted to start chemotherapy, he told me, but he didn’t want to ruin the summer — he had plans to go on a writing retreat in Greece and to spend time at his house on the Cape. He was careless with his medication; he was perpetually late to treatment; in the hours before chemotherapy, he could be found ice-skating with a date who didn’t know he was sick.

“We were all maddened by his denial about his illness,” his friend the poet Marie Howe says, “but when we read the poems and his journals after his death, we saw that he had been addressing it in a way he could never say in life.” In his brief poem “Company,” he writes:

I’ve been avoiding my illness

because I’m afraid

I will die and when I do,

I’ll end up alone again.

Published works

Full-length Poetry Collections

• Stupid Hope (Graywolf Press, 2009)
• Among Women (Graywolf Press, 2001)
• Every Room We Ever Slept In(Sheep Meadow Press, 1993)

Chapbooks

• Uncertain Hours (Arrowsmith Press, 2006)

External links

• POEM: The New Yorker > Poetry > Living by Jason Shinder > October 1, 2007
• ARTICLE: The New York Times > Arts > Jason Shinder, 52, Poet and Founder of Arts Program, Dies > by Margalit Fox > May 3, 2008
• POEM: Academy of American Poets > Jason Shinder > The One Secret That Has Carried
• REVIEW: The Los Angeles Times > Book Review by David L. Ulin of Stupid Hope by Jason Shinder > August 2, 2009