About Me

Shira Nayman was born in South Africa, moved with her family to Australia as a small child, and was raised in Melbourne. She has lived in Israel and in Mexico, and spent many summers living in various countries (Spain, Holland, Germany, Australia), but makes her home in Brooklyn, New York.

Nayman graduated with honors from Monash University, in Melbourne, Australia, with a Bachelor of Science degree in physiology and psychology, and spent a year at Hebrew University in Jerusalem studying literature and history. Nayman then moved to the United States where she received her doctorate in Clinical Psychology from Rutgers University. After completing a two-year post-doctoral fellowship in psychology at New York Hospital-Cornell University Medical Center in Westchester, she received a merit scholarship to study English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York, earning her masters degree in 1990.

Shira Nayman is the recipient of three year-long grants from the Australia Council for the Arts Literary Board (most recently in 2009). She will be teaching at Barnard College in 2011, where she is the recipient of the Cape Branch Award for Emerging Women Writers. She has given numerous invited addresses around the country, including at the Westchester Institute for Human Rights, through the Hadassah Brandeis Institute, and also at JCC's through the Jewish Book Council. She is also a regular author guest at book clubs in the New York area, as well as elsewhere via Skype.

Nayman has published fiction and non-fiction in a variety of literary journals and newspapers, including The Atlantic Monthly Magazine, The Georgia Review, The New England Review, Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, Boulevard, and Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Prose. Her first book, “Awake in the Dark,” written while Ms. Nayman was living with her family in Mexico, was published by Scribner in October, 2006. The paperback edition of “Awake in the Dark” is scheduled for release in September, 2007.

Nayman has a variety of projects underway, including a novel for the Young Adult audience, titled “River,” which is about a young girl’s journey to discover her true self; a novel set during and after World War II in three different countries; and two further collections of short stories also set against a backdrop of the Holocaust.

Shira Nayman has taught in the psychology department at Rutgers University and in the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. While writing fiction over the past fifteen years, Nayman has also built a career as a marketing consultant, working with Fortune 100 companies and national political campaigns to develop positioning strategy for major brands, product launches, and political candidates. Her clients have included Hershey, Microsoft, AOL, Citibank on the corporate side, and The Center for National Policy and Hilary Clinton’s senate campaign in the political sphere. Shira Nayman currently divides her working life between fiction writing and consulting.

Contact

You can email me at shiranayman {at} gmail.com

Copyright © 2010 by Shira Nayman

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