Kate Schapira is a poet, nonfiction writer, teacher, and climate-justice practitioner whose work connects language, place, care, weather, environmental crisis, and collective life. She is an Associate Teaching Professor in Brown University’s Nonfiction Writing Program and has spent years developing public conversations around climate emotion through her Climate Anxiety Counseling project.
Schapira is the author of six books of poetry and the nonfiction book Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth. Her poetry books include TOWN, The Bounty: Four Addresses, The Soft Place, How We Saved the City, and Handbook for Hands That Alter As We Hold Them Out.
Kate Schapira in Shampoo
Shampoo published Schapira in Issues 20 and 28. Across five poems, bodily irritation, abandonment, travel, weather, language learning, domestic detail, and the estrangement of ordinary life move through short, shifting scenes.
These appearances place Schapira within Shampoo’s archive of contemporary poets and connect her early work with a wider field of experimental poetry shaped by associative movement, altered syntax, and attention to place.
Travel, weather, and looking
The Issue 28 poems move through neighborhoods, Shanghai television, typhoon weather, art galleries, supermarkets, food, bicycles, houses, and street observation. Language learning becomes part of perception: the speaker watches, translates, misunderstands, and keeps moving.
Weather is especially active. Pressure, smell, rain, wind, and heat enter rooms and bodies, making atmosphere part of social experience. That attention anticipates Schapira’s later work around climate, place, care, and collective response.
Climate Anxiety Counseling
Schapira began the Climate Anxiety Counseling booth as a public listening practice. Over the following decade, conversations about fear, grief, anger, helplessness, and climate responsibility became part of a larger body of teaching, organizing, and writing.
Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth, published in 2024, develops exercises for connecting climate emotion with community, mutual aid, organizing, imagination, and purposeful action. The work extends a concern already visible in her poetry: how private feeling meets public conditions.
Poetry, place, and community
Schapira’s poetry repeatedly returns to cities, streets, bodies, environmental pressure, and social responsibility. Her work belongs within contemporary American poetry that treats ecological crisis and civic life as lived, intimate conditions rather than distant abstractions.
Further reading
Kate Schapira’s official site documents her books and climate work. Brown University provides her current faculty role, and Hachette documents Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth.