Rachel Shteir
Nonfiction
Chicago, IL
Nonfiction
Rachel Shteir is an award-winning writer and biographer and the author of four books. She is a 2025-26 Guggenheim Fellow. She recently received a Rockefeller Archive Center research stipend. Her most recent book, Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disrupter, in the Jewish Lives series, was a finalist in the National Book Critics Circle Award biography category and a New Yorker Best Book of 2023.
Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The American Scholar, and many other publications. Her other books are Striptease: The Untold History of The Girlie Show, Gypsy: The Art of the Tease and The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting. Striptease won The George Freedley Memorial Award and Gypsy was a San Francisco Chronicle Best Pick.
She has been awarded many residencies, including multiple ones at Yaddo and MacDowell. She teaches at The Theatre School at DePaul University.