Lauren Shufran is a poet and literary scholar whose work connects rigorous poetic form, war, queer politics, Renaissance literature, Shakespeare, and contemplative practice. She holds an MA in English and an MFA in poetry from San Francisco State University and a PhD in Early Modern British Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Her poetry collection Inter Arma was published by Fence Books in 2013 after winning the Motherwell Prize. Her later book The Buddha and the Bard brings Shakespearean passages into conversation with Buddhist teachings on attention, love, mortality, and presence.
Inter Arma
Inter Arma uses meter and inherited forms to confront militarism, sexuality, nationalism, and the political language surrounding war. Rebecca Wolff, who selected the manuscript for Fence Books, described the project as a book concerned with the relation between poetic form and social relations.
The collection’s formal rigor is central to its argument. Meter, parody, literary allusion, and historical forms carry political pressure rather than serving as decorative technique.
Shakespeare and contemplative practice
Shufran’s doctoral work focused on early modern British literature, and she taught courses on Shakespeare, Biblical poetics, and the English sonnet sequence. During that period she also developed a sustained meditation and mindfulness practice.
The Buddha and the Bard, published in 2022, brings those fields together by pairing Shakespearean language with Buddhist ideas about impermanence, presence, love, death, and inward life. The book extends her interest in literary inheritance into a contemplative register.
Poetry, scholarship, and reading
Shufran’s poetry has appeared in Best American Experimental Writing, Postmodern Culture, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. Her scholarly essays have appeared in peer-reviewed journals, creating a body of work in which criticism and poetry continually overlap.
This combination gives Shufran a distinctive place within contemporary American poetry: formal experiment, historical scholarship, queer inquiry, and close reading all operate inside the same intellectual practice.
Further reading
Simon & Schuster provides Shufran’s current biography and books. The Poetry Society of America presents Rebecca Wolff’s introduction to Inter Arma, while the Poetry Center Digital Archive preserves Shufran’s 2013 reading and conversation.