Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) English professor and celebrated Shakespeare scholar Michelle Ephraim has been awarded the 2023 Juniper Prize for Creative Nonfiction for GREEN WORLD: A Tragicomic Memoir of Love and Shakespeare. Awarded annually by the University of Massachusetts Press, the Juniper Literary Prizes are highly competitive and a highly regarded showcase of distinctive and fresh voices who share their work with a wide array of readers.
“GREEN WORLD is so personal to me, and also my first book-length work in this genre,” says Ephraim, “I am thrilled it resonated with the judges.”
Drawing on her vast knowledge of Shakespeare’s life and work, GREEN WORLD (a term literary critics use to describe an idyllic place where Shakespeare’s heroines flee to escape their traumatic family homes) is a story of how, in Ephraim's quest to become a Shakespeare professor, the boundaries between her life and those of Shakespeare’s characters seemed to vanish. The memoir unfolds as a sort of literary detective drama; its five-act structure creates a story within a story, in which Ephraim's life uncannily starts to mirror that of the fictional Jewish daughter in Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice.