Alan Shapiro, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has published ten books of poems: After the Digging (Elpenor Books, 1981), The Courtesy (University of Chicago Press, 1983), Happy Hour (U. of Chicago Press, 1987) which won the 1987 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Covenant (U. of Chicago Press, 1991), and Mixed Company (U. of Chicago Press, 1996), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry

He is also the author of The Dead Alive and Busy (U. of Chicago Press, 2000), winner of the 2001 Kingsley Tufts Award from Claremont Graduate University, Song and Dance, which Houghton Mifflin published in February, 2002, and which won the Roanoke-Chowan Award from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Society, and the following collection, Tantalus in Love (2005).

His most recent book, Old War, appeared in 2008 and won the 2009 Ambassador Book Award in poetry from the English Speaking Union of the United States. His new book, Night of the Republic, is due out from Houghton Mifflin/Harcourt in 2011.

Shapiro is the author of one novel, Broadway Baby (under contract with Algonquin Books), two memoirs, The Last Happy Occasion (Chicago, 1996), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography in 1997, and Vigil (Chicago, 1997) winner of the New England Bookseller’s Discovery Designation, and one book of criticism, In Praise of the Impure: Poetry and the Ethical Imagination (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern U. Press,1993. The poetry editor of the Phoenix Poets Series at the University of Chicago Press from 1994 to 2000, and co-editor of Greek Tragedy in New Translation at Oxford University Press, Shapiro has published (with Oxford) a translation of The Oresteia by Aeschylus (2003) and The Trojan Women by Euripides (2009).

Shapiro has received numerous awards and honors, including two awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, the O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C., the Sarah Teasdale Award from Wellesley College, and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was also a 1991 recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award. The William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina, Shapiro has also taught in the MFA Creative Writing program at UNC, Greensboro, Warren Wilson, and at Northwestern University. From 1975 to 1979, he was a Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.