UChicago Law alumni have appeared on many prestigious lists, but it seems very unlikely that any have received the kinds of recognition that were accorded last year to Natalie Shapero, '11. She was nominated for a National Book Award for her poetry collection, Stay Dead, a collection that was listed as one of Time magazine's "100 Must-Read Books for 2025." 

When Shapero was a finalist for an international award for an earlier poetry collection, the judging panel wrote: “Every poetic instinct Shapero possesses, every decision of line, image, stanza, diction, and tone, results in poems that are limber, athletic, powerful, and balanced.”

Many attorneys might be pleased if a panel of judges said something like that about their legal writing. Shapero sees similarities: “I’ll go toe-to-toe with anyone who thinks legal writing is boring,” she told an interviewer. “It’s rigorous and structured, to be sure, but if those things equated with tedium, we wouldn’t write poetry, either.”

Shapero came to the Law School after earning undergraduate and graduate degrees focused on literature and poetry. “I had always had a broad interest in the law, and I had been active in political campaigns,” she said. “I wanted to study at a place that valued tough, rigorous thinking about all kinds of important issues, and UChicago fit the bill.”

She wrote her first published book of poems, No Object, during her time at the Law School, and she said her experience there significantly affected her work. “Con Law with Professor Huq was mind-blowing, as was Professor McAdams’s seminar on expressivism,” she said. “In poetry as in law, you do it best when you really dig in and examine language, ambiguity, symbolism, universality, and multiple possible meanings.”

Shapero worked at the Brennan Center for Justice during one of her law school summers, and after graduating she was a fellow at Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “I loved litigating, and I loved working with those good, brilliant people doing important work,” she said. “I think Establishment Clause law particularly called to me because so much of it is about symbols and their meanings.”

Poetry called more strongly, though, and she accepted a two-year fellowship for up-and-coming writers at Kenyon College, after which she joined the Kenyon faculty. Following a subsequent professorship at another university, she landed where she is now, as a professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, guiding students in literature and creative writing. “I really like it here,” she said. “My students are great and I love living in SoCal.”

In addition to No Object and Stay Dead, Shapero’s other published collections are Popular Longing and Hard Child. A review of Popular Longing began, “How often has a book of poetry scared you?” Of Hard Child, one commentary stated: “The poems come as close as lyric poems can to perfection… the purest evolutionary point of the lyric form.”

Shapero’s writings have also appeared in publications that include The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The London Review of Books, and The Nation, and she is an editor at large for Kenyon Review. Perhaps not surprisingly given her diverse interests, she appeared last fall as a contestant on the television game show, Jeopardy!.

One reviewer of her poetry wrote, “Shapero strikes a balance between the depressing and the humorous, triviality and wisdom—a rare feat in American poetry.” Since achieving those balances might be a rare feat for virtually anyone these days, it will not be surprising to see Natalie Shapero’s next works earning even more award attention and appearing on more must-read lists.