Shira Erlichman is a writer, visual artist, and musician. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has been featured in The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed Reader, Nomadic Press, The Rumpus and PBS NewsHour’s Poetry Series, among others. She earned her BA at Hampshire College and was awarded a residency by the Millay Colony, the James Merrill Fellowship by the Vermont Studio Center, and the Visions of Wellbeing Focus Fellowship at AIR Serenbe. Her first children’s book Be/Hold was published by Penny Candy Books. She is half of the Odes for You Tour with poet Angel Nafis. As a musician she’s performed across the US, sharing stages with TuNe-YaRdS, CocoRosie and Mirah. She’s independently released seven albums, including Subtle Creature which premiered in BUST Magazine and was hailed as a "spectacular mystery." Born in Israel, raised in Massachusetts, she now lives in Brooklyn. Learn more at www.officialshira.com.

"[Erlichman is] sharp and precise while illustrating the often untethered emotion that comes with mania or psychosis ... Reading this book enabled me to feel connected in ways I didn’t think were imaginable"
—Dani Janae, Autostraddle

"There is something incredibly biting and honest about Erlichman’s portrayal of mental illness, where the pain of her disorder also reveals the beautiful mechanics of the brain."
—Steph Wong Ken, The Rumpus

"[Odes to Lithium] is a perfect bridge between generations, between neurotypical and neurodivergent, between the quiet and the unquiet mind."
—The Poetry Question

"Erlichman’s [poems] bring a new kind of wonder to our conversations about mental illness, a tenderness not just towards the self, but towards the medication that makes the self’s continued existence possible."
—Mass Review

"[Odes to Lithium] is rooted in the sense of wonder that can permeate even the darkest moments — how surprising that we find ourselves here, alive and breathing, unerased."
—Seattle Times

"[Erlichman] pounds words into one, into transparent fusions that give away their own origin, the crash making the new words gallop inside of themselves. Like a heart."
—Émilie Kneifel for the Adroit Journal

"Odes to Lithium is a testament to how treating mental illness isn’t the death knell of creativity, but rather a conduit.”
—Corinne Engber for JewishBoston

“Oh, Radiance. Survival and Surviving Field. How rare, an Eye like this, so able to access its marrow language—original, honest, dear, strange. These poems document and enact processes of finding a language imaginative and struggling enough to carry one’s life. Moving us through imagistic splay and shift, the line is Erlichman’s measure: ‘I know what the sea knows / with the bottom of its mind / unfathomed.’ These poems, I think, are little ‘sight’-engines—miraculous, fevered, whirring things. I’m astonished by breath and lasting at all. I ‘pull a flower / from her skull / & weave it into mine.’ I love her way, her mind.”
—Aracelis Girmay, Whiting Award Winner and author of The Black Maria, Kingdom Animalia, and Teeth.

“Shira Erlichman’s poems transmit experience that nearly defies language, leaving the reader drenched with a new reading of the human: the effects of the mind’s rupture, the enigma of the body’s messages, the terror of one’s own infinitely ingenious yet alien logic. The voice of these pages comments wryly on others’ wary, frightened reactions that increase anguish in the name of helping. The poems trace encounters with mental illness that could not be encompassed by anything but Shira’s honed and startling language and her visual accompaniment of images, each page burnished into a glittering object.”
—Annie G. Rogers, Ph.D., author of A Shining Affliction, The Unsayable and Incandescent Alphabets: Psychosis and The Enigma of Language.

“Odes to Lithium is a remarkable book: it is beautiful, deeply perceptive, haunting, and original. It is wonderful.”
—Kay Redfield Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind and Pulitzer Finalist, Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire

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