About the Author
Maxim D. Shrayer was born in Moscow in 1967 to a Jewish-Russian family. With his parents, he spent almost nine years as a refusenik and immigrated to the United States in 1987, after spending a summer in Austria and Italy.
Shrayer has studied at Moscow University, Brown University, Rutgers University and Yale University, where he received his PhD in 1995. He is currently Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College, wherehe co-founded the Jewish Studies Program in 2005. Among Shrayer's books are the acclaimed critical studies, The World of Nabokov's Stories and Russian Poet/Soviet Jew. He has edited and co-translated from Russian two books of fiction by his father, the writer David Shrayer-Petrov. For additional information about Shrayer's academic work, please visit his Boston College site.
Shrayer has been the recipient of a number of fellowships, including those from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation. He won a 2007 National Jewish Book Award for his two-volume Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature.
A bilingual author, Shrayer has published three collections of Russian poetry and also numerous poems, stories, and essays in both Russian and English. His English-language prose has appeared in Agni, Kenyon Review, Massachusetts Review, Partisan Review, Southwest Review, and other magazines. Shrayer is the author of the literary memoir Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration and a collection of stories, Yom Kippur in Amsterdam. For a complete list of available publications, please visit his Amazon page.
Shrayer enjoys reading from his literary works and also lectures for the general public on topics ranging from Jewish-Russian literature to Nabokov to the legacy of the refusenik movement. For more information, please contact him.
Shrayer lives outside Boston with his wife, Dr. Karen E. Lasser, and their daughters, Mira Isabella and Tatiana Rebecca.