Professor Michelle Ephraim talks about her book GREEN WORLD, Winner of the 2023 Juniper Prize for Creative Nonfiction from the University of Massachusetts Press, and the craft of memoir-writing.

At twenty-three, Michelle Ephraim was failing at everything. The only child of reclusive Holocaust-survivor parents who were dismayed by her literary studies, she found herself dumped by her boyfriend and bombing out of graduate school. Then, one night, she crashed a Shakespeare recitation party. Loopy from vodka and never having read a single line of Shakespeare, she was transfixed. Shakespeare, she decided, was the lifeline she needed.

Green World is the hilarious and heartbreaking story of Ephraim’s quest to become a Shakespeare scholar and to find community and home. As she studies Shakespeare, Ephraim’s world uncannily begins to mirror the story of the Jewish daughter in The Merchant of Venice, and she finds herself in a Green World, an idyllic place where Shakespeare’s heroines escape their family trauma. Green World reckons with global, historical, and personal tragedy and shows how literature—comic and tragic—can help us brave every kind of anguish.

Michelle Ephraim is a Shakespeare scholar and a Professor of English at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Her academic work includes the book Reading the Jewish Woman on the Elizabethan Stage and numerous articles on Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists. At WPI, she teaches courses on literature, memoir, and speculative fiction writing.

She’s the co-author of the literary humor book Shakespeare, Not Stirred: Cocktails for Your Everyday Dramas and the co-host of the Webby-honored Everyday Shakespeare podcast, which explores the uncanny (and often hilarious) ways that Shakespeare sheds light on our modern problems.