Daniel Shapiro, who presently serves as Director of Literature and Editor/Managing Editor of Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, has worked at the Americas Society since 1985.
In his dual capacity in the Department of Literature, he has organized numerous literature program series and edited many issues of Review magazine over the years. These have focused on topics including Argentine, Brazilian, Canadian, Caribbean, Central American, Chilean, and Mexican Literature and Culture; as well as on Latin American Jewish writing, Latin American performing arts, Latin American surrealism, Latin American women’s writing, Walt Whitman and Latin American writers, urban voices, and indigenous literature in the Americas.
During his tenure at the Society, he has presented hundreds of writers from throughout the Americas in public events and published their work in Review, including Claribel Alegría, Gioconda Belli, Carmen Boullosa, Kamau Brathwaite, Ernesto Cardenal, Cristina García, Edouard Glissant, Lorna Goodison, Jessica Hagedorn, Carlos Monsiváis, Octavio Paz, Caryl Phillips, Nélida Piñon, Elena Poniatowska, Luis Rafael Sánchez, Moacyr Scliar, and Mario Vargas Llosa. Dan has worked with countless literary scholars and translators—including Edith Grossman, Suzanne Jill Levine, Alfred Mac Adam, Alastair Reid, Gregory Rabassa, and Margaret Sayers Peden—and served as a liaison with many publishers, cultural institutions, and universities in the United States and abroad
He has been instrumental in developing proposals for various grants for the Department of Literature from institutions including the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Reed Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. He has participated in book-fairs and literary conferences in the United States and in Latin America.
In addition to his role at the Americas Society, Shapiro is the author of the poetry manuscripts “The Red Handkerchief and Other Poems” and “Child with a Swan’s Wings.” He also translated the poetry collection Cipango, by Chilean poet Tomás Harris, published to acclaim in 2010 by Bucknell University Press. Shapiro’s translations and poems have appeared in the literary magazines American Poetry Review (cover feature for Chilean poet Tomás Harris), Black Warrior Review, BOMB, Grand Street, and Poetry Northwest and in the anthologies Burnt Sugar, Mexico: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, The Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry, and Vapor transatlántico/Tramp Steamer (Fondo de Cultura Económica). He has also contributed entries to the Encyclopedia of Caribbean Literature (Greenwood Publishing).
Daniel Shapiro has received translation fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN. He has served on advisory boards and panels for BOMB magazine, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Writer’s Room in New York City.
