Dani Shapiro

Dani Shapiro
at Fall for the Book, 2014
Born	(1962-04-10)April 10, 1962 New York City, United States
Occupation	Novelist
Nationality	American
Spouse	Michael Maren
Children	1

Daneile Joyce "Dani" Shapiro (born April 10, 1962) is an American writer who is the author of five novels and the best-selling memoirs Slow Motion and Devotion. She has also written for magazines such as The New Yorker, The Oprah Magazine, Vogue, and ELLE.

Shapiro attended the Pingry School, a prep school in New Jersey, then Sarah Lawrence College, where she was influenced by Grace Paley, who was one of her teachers. Shapiro has also written for the screen, having adapted Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince for HBO in 1999. In 2000, she co-wrote a screenplay based on her memoir, Slow Motion, with her husband, journalist and screenwriter Michael Maren. She has been a professor of creative writing at Wesleyan University and an instructor at the New School and Columbia University.

In a 2011 interview with the Jewish Ledger, Shapiro described being raised in a family with an Orthodox Jewish father and a mother from South Jersey who had grown up in a non-Orthodox home. Her parents agreed to observe Judaism and Shapiro attended a Solomon Schechter Jewish day school through 6th grade. After moving from New York City to Connecticut in her 40s, Shapiro recounts her "vestigial feeling" connecting her to Judaism was reawakened and that she "could no more reject my Judaism than reject being female, or being a mother, or a wife, or a writer, or any of the things that most define me".