Helen Maryles Shankman

Originally, when I moved to New York to attend art school, I thought I wanted to be an illustrator, to tell stories with paint. A few years later, I discovered that what I really wanted to do was paint with words.

Helen Maryles Shankman lived in Chicago before moving to New York City to attend art school. She is the author of In the Land of Armadillos, a collection of linked stories illuminated with magical realism, published by Scrbner, following the inhabitants of a small town in 1942 Poland and tracing the troubling complex choices they are compelled to make. The paperback reprint, titled They Were Like Family to Me, is now available at bookstores everywhere.

Her stories have appeared in numerous fine publications, including The Kenyon Review, Cream City Review, Gargoyle, Grift, 2 Bridges Review, Danse Macabre, and JewishFiction.net. She was a finalist in Narrative Magazine's Winter Story Contest and earned an Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train's Short Story Award for New Writers competition. Two of her stories, They Were Like Family to Me and The Jew Hater have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Shankman received an MFA in Painting from the New York Academy of Art, where she was awarded a prestigious Warhol Foundation Scholarship. She spent four years as as artist's assistant and two years at Conde Nast working closely with the legendary Alexander Liberman. She lived on a kibbutz in Israel for a year, spending the better part of each day in an enormous barn filled with chickens, where she collected eggs and listened to the Beatles.

Shankman lives in New Jersey with her husband, four children, and an evolving roster of rabbits. When she is not neglecting the housework so that she can write stories, she teaches art and paints portraits on commission.