Sharon Leiter

Sharon Leiter has written and published poetry and fiction, as well as scholarly works, book reviews, and magazine articles. She is the author of two volumes of poetry, The Dream of Leaving (Charlotte, N.C.: Main Street Rag, 2007) and The Lady and the Bailiff of Time (Ann Arbor, Michigan: Ardis, 1974), and two works of literary scholarship, Critical Companion to Emily Dickinson: A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work (New York: Facts on File, 2006) and Akhmatova's Petersburg (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983; European edition: Cambridge University Press, 1983), a literary study of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. This work was republished in 2000 as an Authors Guild Backinprint.com Edition. Leiter is the poetry editor of Streetlight , a journal of arts and letters featuring Virginia-based writers and artists.

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 Atlantic Review,Cimarron Review, The Georgia Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Defined Providence, Pembroke Magazine, The New Delta Review, Street Light, Oasis, Poetry Depth Quarterly and many other literary reviews. She won the 2003 poetry competition co-sponsored by the Charlottesville Writing Center and WMRA, Central Virginia's National Public Radio Station. Her essays and articles have appeared in Moment, The Albemarle Review, Virginia, and,most recently, in the anthology Desire: Women Write About Wanting (Seal Books, 2007).


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, later, as 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 Leiter, an astrophysicist. She is an adjunct professor in the Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies Program at the University of Virginia, where she teaches literature and writing courses.She also teaches poetry workshops at different venues and is the recipient of several fellowships to the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Sweet Briar, Virginia.