Alan Shefsky

Alan Shefsky (June 22, 1959 – July 1, 2014) was, in his own words, "a poet and occasionally an essayist." He was a graduate of Northwestern University and worked there in the Department of Performance Studies for 25 years until 2011 when he was diagnosed with an inoperable glioblastoma. This diagnosis had a notable impact on his writing style, which he summed up succinctly as "my writings after are different from my writings before." He died three years later in 2014.

Shefsky was a resident of Cook County, Illinois and lived in both Chicago and Evanston, where he first studied then worked at Northwestern University. He was featured in TriQuarterly first in 1998 and again in 1999, and the same year he won the Illinois Arts Council Literary Award alongside USD $1,000. His work Glee and Other Poems was performed by the Northwestern school of performing arts in 2014 in the Wallis Theater. He was posthumously published in the Journal of Poetry Therapy in 2017. One of his poems was made into a song by the band Hen in the Foxhouse He is also featured in the acknowledgements of dozens of publications due to his long tenure at Northwestern University. An associate academic Paul Edwards dedicated a video essay in honor of Shefsky, published in 2017. He maintained a correspondence through letters with a friend and fellow poet Abe Young for over a decade. After his death the mass amount of letters were turned into an exhibition held in Evanston, Illinois, as well as in Austin, Texas.

Shefsky was influenced by notable poets, such as Emily Dickinson, William Blake, and E. E. Cummings. His eponymous work What Emily (2011) was largely written in the style of Dickinson, utilizing short rhyming lyric quatrains. This was in line with what his friend Abe Young, called his "unquenchable worldplay".

Not all of Shefsky's works, however, were written in quatrains nor did they always follow a strict rhyme scheme. Some of his works, such as the following, could be considered free-verse, yet demonstrate his love of word-play:

Professor Bacon speaks tenderly of tensive-
ness; I am less at ease.
That is, I am more at ease
being more at ease,
having taught myself
to be untaut, that is,
to run a quite tight ship.
Into my poetry I’ll permit
of it none, nor
syntactical mischief
disingenuous enjamb
mint or wintry wordplay.
No slant rhymes.
Or dithyrambs

• Amelia Absent, Amelia Present (Clay Springs Press, 1995)
• Blue Curtains— 2001-04
• Any May Be Swift— 2005-08
• If Bees are Few— 2009-11
• What Emily (Magnolia Press Collective, 2011)
• Glee (Magnolia Press, 2012)
• Throw Me from the Window an Apple— 2013