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 she took a degree in mathematics, and later, while raising two children, 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 newest calling as caregiver to her beloved husband, with whom she lives in New York City. Now she has returned to fiction. Both her fifth novel and a collection of her essays will be published in spring 2012.

In the 1960s she became a political activist--in the civil rights, anti-war, and feminist movements.

A member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), she named the NYC theater arts chapter, "7-Arts CORE." With them she attended the 1963 March on Washington, where, with hundreds of thousands, she saw Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. give his "I have a dream" speech.

She protested the Vietnam War both by counseling draftees on their rights and at countless demonstrations. In the mid-1980s, as a visiting professor at the Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, she attended weekly prayer vigils at the nearby Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility.

In 1967, she joined the new Women's Liberation Movement (WLM), becoming a member of the early groups Redstockings, WITCH, and New York Radical Feminists. Her activism on behalf of women's equality has ranged widely, from helping to plan the first national demonstration of women's liberation, the 1968 Miss America Pageant Protest in Atlantic City; advocating to make abortion legal through speak-outs and demonstrations; organizing (in 1992) a Hawaii branch of the reproductive rights protest group No More Nice Girls; to working with the political action group Take Back the Future. On behalf of seniors, she was on the board of THEA (The House of Elder Artists), a group trying to establish a retirement community for working artists and activists. She currently advocates for caregivers to people with severely disabling brain diseases, like TBI, Alzheimer's, and other dementias.

Alix began writing stories and essays for adults in the late 1960s. As a mother of young children to whom she read hundreds of children's books, some good, some bad, she thought she could do better than some of them and started writing her own. Since then she has written fourteen books--

five novels:
Ménage (May 2012)
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

selected essays:
A Marriage Agreement and Other Essays (May 2012)

two books on the anarchist-feminist 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, Ms., The Women's Review of Books, Dissent, Michigan Quarterly Review, Tikkun, Lilith, The Sun.

Her books have been published in 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. Recently she taught a master class at New York University's Graduate Writing Program on the topic "Fiction or Memoir: How to Choose."

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 received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction; in 1982-4 she was VP of the PEN American Center; in 1998 she was a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Center in Bellagio, Italy; in 2000 she received the Woman 2000 Trailblazer Award from the Mayor of Cleveland; in 2001 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Case Western Reserve University; and in 2010 she received the American Jewish Press Association's Simon Rockower Award. She is listed in Who's Who in America and in Feminists Who Changed America, 1963-1975 (2006).