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 two dozen books, including Reality Hunger (named among Lit Hub’s “100 Books that Defined the Decade” in 2020), 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 PEN USA and the National Book Critics Circle Award), Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity (PEN/Revson Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors’ Choice). His work has been translated into two dozen languages.

Shields 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. He is a contributing editor of Conjunctions and has received a Guggenheim fellowship and two NEA fellowships for his work. 

Shields has directed and written a range of films, including an adaptation of his book I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel (2017), which he co-wrote and co-stars in; his documentary Lynch: A History (2019), concerning former NFL player Marshawn Lynch’s use of silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of resistance; the feature film I’ll Show You Mine (2022), which he co-wrote and was produced by Mark and Jay Duplass; and How We Got Here (2024), which argues that Melville + Nietzsche ÷ (Allan)  √ Bloom × Žižek2 = Bannon, and for which Sublation Media has published two accompanying books. These films are streaming on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Fandango, Kanopy, and elsewhere.