Myra Sklarew was educated at Tufts University and the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She studied bacterial viruses and genetics at Cold Spring Harbor Biological Laboratory with Salvador Luria and Max Delbruck and conducted research on memory and frontal lobe function of Rhesus monkeys at Yale University School of Medicine. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry, fiction and essays including Harmless (Mayapple Press, 2010), The Witness Trees (Cornwall Books U.S./London/Dora Teitelboim Center for Yiddish Culture, 2000, reprinted 2007), Lithuania: New & Selected Poems (Azul Editions, 1995), and the forthcoming research study, A Survivor Named Trauma: Holocaust and the Construction of Memory as well as a new collection of poems, Sing, Little Collar Button. Awards include the American University Scholar/Teacher Award, PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, National Jewish Book Council Award in Poetry for From the Backyard of the Diaspora (Dryad Press, 1981), Anna David Rosenberg Award from the Judah Magnes Museum, and the Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, shared with Erica Jong. She is the former president of the Montgomery County Council of Cooperative Nursery Schools, former president of the Yaddo Artists Community, and professor emerita in the Department of Literature, American University. She serves on the advisory boards of Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University and the Center for Israeli Studies at American University. She currently serves on “A Splendid Wake,” an archival project to document poets and poetry activities in the nation’s capital from 1900 to the present.
