Anna Shechtman

Last updated

Anna Shechtman
Anna Shechtman (2024 ACPT) 01.jpg
Shechtman in 2024
Born1990or1991(age 34–35)
NationalityAmerican
Education Swarthmore College
Yale University
Occupation(s)Critic and crossword constructor

Anna Shechtman (born 1990 or 1991) is an American critic and crossword constructor. Shechtman is an assistant professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University and critic who constructs crossword puzzles for The New Yorker and The New York Times . She is an editor-at-large at the Los Angeles Review of Books. [1]

Contents

Early life

Shechtman grew up in a Jewish family in New York City's Tribeca neighborhood. [2] [3] She earned her bachelor's degree from Swarthmore College. [2] In 2020 she received her PhD in English literature and film and media studies from Yale University. [1]

Career

Shechtman writes film criticism for the New York Review of Books, oftentimes with literary and film critic D.A. Miller [4]

Crosswords

Shechtman was 19 when her first crossword appeared in the New York Times. [2] [3] Until she was 25, she created most of her puzzles by hand using graph paper and dictionaries rather than crossword software. Shechtman is the second youngest female crossword creator to be published in the New York Times. After graduating college, Will Shortz asked Shechtman to be his assistant at the New York Times. [5]

In May 2019, The Guardian called her "the new queen of crosswords". [3]

Book publication

Shechtman's memoir The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle was published on March 5, 2024. [6] In it, she recovers the overlapping histories of the crossword and US feminism, demonstrating that the experience of gender is lived in language. The women she writes about adopted a formal, sometimes painfully rigid, relationship to language to negotiate a life under patriarchy. Some were self-identified conservatives; some were avowed feminists. All shared a preoccupation with word puzzles and an oftentimes punishing relationship to their bodies and the body of language. [7] One figure she highlighted in the book is Margaret Farrar, the first editor of crossword puzzles for the New York Times. [6]

Bibliography

Bibliography notes

  1. ↑ Online version is titled "Escaping into the crossword puzzle".

References

  1. 1 2 "Masthead".
  2. 1 2 3 Basu, Tanya (March 8, 2019). "Anna Shechtman Is Revolutionizing Crosswords. Can She Save Them?". The Daily Beast. Retrieved May 12, 2019.
  3. 1 2 3 Moshakis, Alex (May 12, 2019). "Anna Shechtman, the new queen of crosswords". The Guardian. Retrieved May 12, 2019.
  4. ↑ https://www.nybooks.com/contributors/anna-shechtman/
  5. ↑ Wallis, Lucy (April 3, 2022). "The 'real outlier' in the crossword puzzle-making community". BBC News. Retrieved April 3, 2022.
  6. 1 2 Shechtman, Anna (2024). The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle. HarperOne. ISBN   9780063275478.
  7. ↑ "'Queen of crosswords' recovers the puzzle's feminist side". as.cornell.edu. March 5, 2024. Retrieved March 12, 2024.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.