Shira Erlichman is a writer, musician, and visual artist. Her award-winning poetry collection Odes to Lithium centers around her experiences with mental illness & was celebrated for its “stylistic upheavals” & “tremendous malleability & verve” (NY Times). Be/Hold: A Friendship Book, the picture book she wrote & illustrated, uses compound words to illuminate what is possible when we come together. Her work, heralded for “destigmatizing Bipolar Disorder through candor, intimacy & creativity” (NY Times), has been featured in PBS, The Nation, The Huffington Post, The Seattle Times, and The New York Times, among others. She earned her BA at Hampshire College and is the founder of In Surreal Life, a portable creativity school known for its dynamic online writing community. She has been awarded a MacDowell Fellowship, the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, the James Merrill Fellowship by the Vermont Studio Center, the Visions of Wellbeing Focus Fellowship at AIR Serenbe, as well as a residency by Millay. She was a Finalist for the Lambda Award and a Silver Medalist for the Nautilus Award. She lives in Brooklyn.
