David Shields (he/him/his)

Professional Affiliations

PEN, Authors League, Writers Guild of America, Poets & Writers, Associated Writing Programs, MLA

Areas of Interest

Literary collage, lyric essay, personal essay, book-length essay, boundary-jumping work

Research interests

David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of more than twenty books, including Reality Hunger (which, in 2020, Lit Hub named one of the most important books of the past decade), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN America Award), Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity (PEN/Revson Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors’ Choice). The Very Last Interview was published by New York Review Books in 2022.

The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and two NEA fellowships, Shields—a senior contributing editor of Conjunctions—has published essays and stories in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, Yale Review, Salon, Slate, Tin House, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Believer, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Best American Essays.

His work has been translated into two dozen languages.

The film adaptation of I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, which Shields co-wrote and co-stars in, was released in 2017 and is streaming on Fandango at Home. Shields wrote, produced, and directed Lynch: A History, a 2019 documentary about Marshawn Lynch’s use of silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of resistance (streaming on Prime and Apple TV). I’ll Show You Mine, a feature film that Shields co-wrote and was produced by Mark and Jay Duplass, is also streaming on Prime and Apple TV.

On February 23rd, 2027, Autofocus Books (in partnership with NYU Press) is publishing David Shields’s 26th book, Failure Is the Only Subject. Undergoing psychoanalysis in the aftermath of divorce and in the throes of an addictive new relationship, Shields pieces his life back together by watching (and rewatching) documentaries about human disappointment by such groundbreaking directors as Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, Ross McElwee, Kitty Green, Adam Curtis, and Michael Winterbottom. Contemplating the filmmakers’ choices, Shields asks painful questions about his life, any life (including our own). What happens when the mask falls off and we come face-to-face with the abyss within? Is there a way to live with such harrowing knowledge—about ourselves and the world?