About the Author
Maxim D. Shrayer was born in Moscow in 1967 to a Jewish-Russian family. With his parents, Emilia Shrayer and David Shrayer-Petrov, he spent more than eight 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, Rutgers, and received his PhD at Yale in 1995. He is currently Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College, where he co-founded the Jewish Studies Program in 2005. Shrayer has published more than twenty-five books of nonfiction, biography and criticism, fiction, translations, and poetry. Among Shrayer's books are the acclaimed critical studies The World of Nabokov's Stories, Russian Poet/Soviet Jew, Genrikh Sapgir (co-authored with D. Shrayer-Petrov), I SAW IT, and Bunin and Nabokov: A History of Rivalry, which was a national bestseller in Russia. He edited the anthology Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature. He has also edited and co-translated from Russian four books of fiction by his father, writer David Shrayer-Petrov. For additional information on 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. In 2012, Shrayer received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on poets as witnesses to the Shoah.
A bilingual writer and translator, Shrayer is the author of the memoirs Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration and Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story, Immigrant Baggage; a collection of novellas, A Russian Immigrant: Three Novellas; the travelogues With or Without You and Soviet Phantoms Travel in Chile, and five collections of poetry, most recently the volume Kinship. For a complete list of available publications, please visit his Amazon page, and for information on his publications in Russian, visit his Russian-language page. Shrayer's works have been translated into thirteen languages.
Shrayer enjoys reading from his literary works and lectures for the general public on topics ranging from the Shoah in the USSR to Russian émigré culture and the legacy of the refusenik movement. For more information, please contact him.
Maxim D. Shrayer lives in Brookline and South Chatham, Massachusetts, with his wife, Dr. Karen E. Lasser, and their daughters, Mira Isabella and Tatiana Rebecca.
