alix kates shulman

Raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Alix attended public schools and planned to be a lawyer like her dad. But in college at Case Western Reserve University she was smitten by philosophy and upon graduation moved to New York City to study philosophy at Columbia grad school. After some years as an encyclopedia editor, she enrolled at New York University, where, while raising two children, she took a degree in mathematics, and later an MA in Humanities.

She became a feminist activist in 1967, published her first book in 1970, and taught her first class in 1973--all lifelong pursuits that have found their way into her books.

Having explored in her novels the challenges of youth and midlife, in her memoirs she has probed the later stages in the ongoing drama of her generation of women, taking on the terrors and rewards of solitude, of her parents' final years, and of her new calling as caregiver to her beloved husband, with whom she lives in New York City.

In the 1960s she became a political activist--in the civil rights, antiwar, and feminist movements. An early member of Redstockings, WITCH, and New York Radical Feminists, her activism has ranged widely, from helping to plan the first national demonstration of women's liberation, the 1968 Miss America Pageant Protest in Atlantic City, to organizing a Hawaii branch of the abortion rights street theater protest group No More Nice Girls, to working with the current political action group Take Back the Future.

Alix has written twelve books--

four novels:
Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen
Burning Questions
On the Stroll
In Every Woman's Life...

three memoirs:
Drinking the Rain
A Good Enough Daughter
To Love What Is:A Marriage Transformed

two books on the anarchist Emma Goldman:
To the Barricades (biography)
Red Emma Speaks (collection)

and three books for children:
Bosley on the Number Line
Awake and Asleep
Finders Keepers.

Her many stories and essays have appeared in The Nation, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Parade, Salon.com, Ms., The Women's Review of Books, Dissent, Michigan Quarterly Review, Tikkun, Lilith, The Sun.

Her works have been translated into twelve languages.

For descriptions of some of these works, click on WRITINGS on the main menu.

Alix has taught writing and literature at New York University, The New School, Yale, the Universities of Colorado, Arizona, Southern Maine, and Hawaii, where she held the Citizen's Chair. She leads writing workshops and has lectured widely throughout the United States.

In 1979 Alix was awarded the DeWitt Wallace/​Readers Digest Fellowship, in 1982 she was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome, in 1983 she recieved a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, in 1982-4 she was VP of PEN, in 1998 she was a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Center in Bellagio, Italy, and in 2001 she received an honorary doctorate from Case Western Reserve University. She is listed in Who's Who in America and in Feminists Who Changed America, 1963-1975 (2006).