Lois Leveen: About the Artist

Click here to listen to her interview.

Award-winning author and historian Lois Leveen dwells in the spaces where literature and history meet. Her most recent novel, JULIET’S NURSE (Simon & Schuster), imagines the fourteen years leading up to the events in ROMEO AND JULIET, all told from the point of view of one of Shakespeare’s most memorable, bawdy, and tragic characters.  Leveen holds degrees in history and literature from Harvard, UCLA, and USC–but her preparation for writing JULIET’S NURSE was also very hands-on.  She traveled to Verona, Italy, to research JULIET’S NURSE, as well as apprenticing herself to an urban beekeeping group in her adopted hometown of Portland, Oregon, to write accurately about the life cycle of hives.  Lois has given talks throughout the US, Canada, and Europe about the historical research behind JULIET’S NURSE, and about how she approached challenging themes of teen violence, suicide, and plague epidemics in adapting Shakespeare for contemporary readers.