Sharon Leiter

Sharon Leiter has written and published poetry and fiction, as well as literary criticism and creative nonfiction. She is the author of a volume of poetry, The Lady and the Bailiff of Time (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1974) and a literary study of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, Akhmatova's Petersburg (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983; European edition: Cambridge University Press, 1983). This work was republished in 2000 under the Authors Guild backinprint.com imprint.
In 1990 she won a Virginia Prize for Fiction for a short story manuscript, Dream Fatigue. A revised version of that manuscript was a semi-finalist in the 1995 Iowa Short Fiction/John Simmons Short Fiction Awards. Her poems and stories have been published in numerous literary journals. One of her published stories was selected for "100 Other Distinguished Stories of 1987" in Best American Short Stories of 1988.
Most recently, her fiction and poetry have appeared in Cimarron Review, The Georgia Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Pembroke Magazine, and The New Delta Review, Street Light, Oasis, Dream International Quarterly and many other literary reviews. New work is forthcoming in The Cimarron Review. She won the 2003 poetry competition co-sponsored by the Charlottesville Writing Center and WMRA, Central Virginia's National Public Radio Station. Her nonfiction articles have appeared in Moment, The Albemarle Review, and Virginia.
She is the recipient of several fellowships to the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Sweet Briar, Virginia.
She teaches poetry workshops at the Charlottesville, Writing Center.
She is currently working on Emily Dickinson A to Z: The Essential Guide to Her Life and Work, scheduled for publication by Facts on File, New York, in 2005.
She is represented by The Jodie Rhodes Literary Agency.

Background information:
Sharon Leiter was born on August 12, 1942, in Brooklyn, New York, to a family of Russian-Jewish immigrants. She received a B.A., magna cum laude, with honors in Comparative Literature, from Brandeis University in 1963, and a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1976. A specialist in 20th century Russian literature, who wrote her dissertation on the poet Osip Mandelstam and has published several articles on Russian poetry, she taught at the University of Virginia between 1976 and 1983. She went on to a career as a government analyst in Russian affairs, and is currently a consultant for the Washington think-tank, RAND. Leiter served for four years as co-president of the Charlottesville Chapter of the Virginia Writers Club. Since 1994 she has made her home in Palmyra, Virginia, with her husband, Darryl, an astrophysicist.