Gregg Shapiro is the author of 10 books including Speaking in Italics (Souvenir Spoon Books, 2026). Recent/forthcoming lit-mag publications include Pleiades, Bronze Bird Review, Oatleaf Poetry Magazine, Gargoyle, and BarBar, and anthologies White Winged Doves: A Stevie Nicks Poetry Anthology, America's Future: Poetry & Prose in Response To Tomorrow, and Visiting Joni: Poems and Short Prose Inspired by the Life and Work of Joni Mitchell.

An entertainment journalist, whose interviews and reviews run in a variety of regional LGBTQ+ and mainstream publications and websites, as well as an anchor on Queer News Tonight, Shapiro lives in South Florida with his husband Rick, and their dog Coco.

BOOKS

Speaking In Tongues

Poems by Gregg Shapiro

Souvenir Spoon Books - 2026

Julie Marie Wade:
“If you’re lucky enough to have heard Gregg Shapiro read his poems aloud, then you know he’s always speaking in italics: bold, clear, emphatic. This new chapbook hones the boldness and deepens the clarity. There are “moon-bright clouds,” women drinking coffee till “their lips are blue as tar.” It’s cinematic, with cameos by Joni, Marilyn, Madonna, Cinderella, too, and don’t forget those librarians of the 1970s, my favorite! “They married the library, like a nun/ married the church.” Above all, Speaking in Italics delivers on its lyric promise to probe “what if, what not, what else.”Sharon Mesmer:
“In this new chapbook, Gregg Shapiro alchemically blends quotidian and fraught experiences into a life-giving elixir. Like in "Librarians in the 1970s," where a close look reveals those "girdles, garter belts and bras that resembled / suits of armor. They married the library, like a nun / married the church." In "Situation," something darker encroaches: "Out of the snake pit, into the spider’s web. This must be / the way dinosaurs felt, feet heavy as planets ..." I am holding my breath as I climb his wonderfully warped stairs, following shimmering angles of light and shade.”Aaron Smith:
“Gregg Shapiro's Speaking in Italics is a lively, unflinching collection where humor and heartbreak sit side by side. Moving from Boston's North End stairwells to late-night insomnia, from love affairs to cockroach-infested apartments, these poems capture the eccentricities of queer life with wit, candor, and tenderness. Shapiro has a gift for the memorable image — a lover's "blood, black as the ink on your fingertips and lips" — that makes the ordinary shimmer with strangeness and desire. This is a book that speaks in many registers - playful, aching, sharp - but always in italics, always with emphasis.”Ruben Quesada:
“Gregg Shapiro’s Speaking in Italics lights up the night with animal eyes with electrifying poems where two people find harmony in discord (“We are us”), where even the “end-of-the-world tango” is performed with defiant grace. This is a declaration of fortitude for a world where authenticity and “sanity returns for a fleeting instant.” This is a life lived without apology proving passion is the ultimate defense against the darkness.”

Refrain In Light

Poems by Gregg Shapiro

Souvenir Spoon Books - 2023

The fourth volume in Gregg Shapiro's landmark series of memoir, meditation, and mythopoetic splendor.

Denise Duhamel:
“Shapiro is a cultural critic and scholar of the heart who asks “whose homeland is this anyway?” In fact, this book is full of questions — What does fire want? What does a tornado want? And Must we listen to songs from the Armageddon soundtrack? Read Refrain in Light to find out. It is only Once in a Lifetime that a poet like Gregg Shapiro comes around.”Caridad Moro-Gronlier:
“Shapiro’s poems are relentless in their take down of small minds, social injustice, and the entrenched socio-economic lines that wind their way along the map from Laramie to South Beach, but they are also tender, tinged with melancholy and the want for sweetness, for redemption, for love.”Kim Roberts:
“Gregg Shapiro is the supreme guide to the landscape of anxiety. He sees everywhere the looming possibility of disaster—fire, tornado, darkness, a ‘waning moon, covered by a flap of dark sky.’ Glimpsed through a car windshield, apprehension, ‘lurid and familiar,’ waits around every corner. My advice? Keep these magnificent poems close. They are the perfect talismans to ward off calamity.”John Weir:
“Gregg Shapiro’s Refrain in Light opens on the wrong side of the tracks and ends in the backyard with questions about the end of the world. From train tracks to apocalypse, the poems in this illuminating and incisive volume of “unguarded intimacy” trace a journey that is geographical, personal, and political. You may be startled to see yourself reflected in this wonderful collection, a picture of the way we live now.”

Fear Of Muses

Poems by Gregg Shapiro

Souvenir Spoon Books - 2022

In Fear of Muses, Gregg Shapiro's poems explore the evolving depth of love and becoming through a delicate and fine-tuned reckoning with familial and relational history. The third (and latest ) of his trilogy of poetic pop-culture explorations of family, love and memory from Souvenir Spoon Books. Get it today.

Brendan Walsh:
“Shapiro’s calm and sure voice guides us exactly where we need to go: inward, towards the things that ask us to remember what an odd and beautiful, confounding and frustrating, lovely and absurd world this is.”Caridad Moro-Gronlier:
“Part ode to memory, part keen-eyed deconstruction of popular culture, part homage to the amuses that lurk in every line, these irreverent, imagistic poems provoke, question and remember all that will never be forgotten.”Dustin Brookshire:
“I’m here to tell you the poems in Gregg Shapiro’s Fear of Muses are poems you’ll read aloud again and again. Fear of Muses is a collection to “be held close to [your] chest, like a good hand of cards.”Yvonne Zipter:
“This compact collection brims with life, doled out in tantalizing bites of detail. Gregg Shapiro has stories to tell—about family, about friends, about anger and merriment, about lives well-lived—and tell them he does, with his flair for the particular, in the poems that make up Fear of Muses.”

How To Whistle (Expanded Edition)

Stories by Gregg Shapiro

Rattling Good Yarns Press - 2021

Gay men communicate in many ways, sometimes a glance, sometimes a smile, and sometimes a whistle. In How to Whistle, Gregg Shapiro brings us men of all types sometimes seeking to be with each other and sometimes looking for themselves. They dance, they indulge, they camp, and they enjoy life. Shapiro employs his deft poetic voice to bring you men that will stay with you, men you'll find yourself thinking about for a long time.

Felice Picano:
"The stories in Gregg Shapiro's How to Whistle are so perfectly pitched in tone and execution, so novelistic in their differing densities and delightful variety, that they form a sure portrait of a time and place in gay life that is both specific and universal.”James Magruder:
"You don't have to be queer, or from Chicagoland, to fall hard for Gregg Shapiro's marvelous second collection, How to Whistle. These stories – tart, tender, sexed-up, and terribly wise on the subjects of love and memory – are a lesson for everyone”Brendan Walsh:
"Gregg Shapiro’s stories hum with sex, longing, and electric detail. How to Whistle journeys from the bathhouse to smoky concert venues, and through the confused mind of a culture-hungry teenage brain. This collection goes so many places, yet stays anchored, always, in the heart.”Daniel M. Jaffe:
"Shapiro’s How to Whistle brings to vibrant life young gay men's casual/intimate/kinky explorations of Boston, D.C., and Chicago in the 1980's. Deadpan humor alternates with delicious dish and quiet introspection in this witty collection of stories about sex, relationship, (in)fidelity, vengeance, and the meaning of friendship in a sometimes dangerous world. An entertaining, deeply insightful, and warmly nostalgic portrait of the way we were.”John D’Emilio:
"Shapiro’s Shapiro’s stories capture the breadth and variety of human relationships – friends, lovers and family; casual and deep; social and sexual. Funny, sad, tragic, and full of surprises, they will keep you reading to the very end and wanting more.”R. Zamora Linmark:
"Gregg Shapiro’s How to Whistle documents the 1980s with sharp observation, humor, and keen insights. A decadent decade when urban tastes and desires “lit in a faint orange glow” knew no boundaries, friends and lovers being rushed to the hospital was a typical lunchtime conversation, and pop icons went from tragic to martyred saints of the bullied. This short story collection is also an homage to 1980s Boston and Chicago, as hip as Tama Janowitz’ Manhattan in Slaves of New York, and as raw and sexy as Bret Easton Ellis’ L.A. in Less Than Zero.”Christine Sneed:
"In How to Whistle, Gregg Shapiro’s stories bring together a whole kaleidoscope of gay life – from tricks to lovers, passionate romances to bitter breakups, gentle tenderness to raw lust – with voice of singular and simple honesty.”

More Poems About
Buildings And Food

Poems by Gregg Shapiro

Souvenir Spoon Books - 2019

In More Poems About Buildings and Food, Gregg Shapiro explores the changing geographies of identity, relationship and a life lovingly lived. The second in a series of poetic pop-culture explorations of family, love and memory from Souvenir Spoon Books. Get it today.

Jericho Brown:
“You read the title right. And the irony of it works to buoy us through this handful of poems that remind us of our mortality with strong lines like, “…he’s had enough when he fits into his own pocket” and “When I turn sideways, I disappear.” Fitting in, disappearing, hiding in own’s on grief and view of the world, Gregg Shapiro means to manage these feats in this lovely little book.”Denise Duhamel:
“Gregg Shapiro’s poems know a lot about appetite—and all we do to indulge and suppress it. They also know a lot about restlessness, lust, and wanderlust—our address changes sometimes transformative (“the city where I was reborn at 21”) and sometimes not (“A new address with the same/ old face…”) In More Poems About Buildings and Food, Shapiro is yearning, vulnerable, authentically surprising. Reading these poems, I felt like I was sitting in my friend’s kitchen, dishing about everything—Shapiro writing so beautifully what needs to be said.”Jill Sobule:
“Gregg always was my favorite interviewer, asking the more interesting, insightful and challenging questions. I was the artist, he was the journalist. I had no idea he was the magnificent poet. Tables turned. I now have the questions. More Poems About Buildings and Food has not left my bed stand. I will never think of Nancy and Sluggo the same.”

Sunshine State by Gregg Shapiro

Sunshine State

Stories by Gregg Shapiro

NightBallet Press - 2019

Gregg Shapiro observes and writes about his adopted state with wisdom, passion, a quiet humor, and a sharp eye for detail.

Fifty Degrees

by Gregg Shapiro

Seven Kitchens Press - 2016

Robin Becker Series - Selected by Ching-In Chen.

Handbound chapbook. Limited to 100 copies.

Lincoln Avenue: Chicago Stories

by Gregg Shapiro

Squares & Rebels - 2014

With its twelve sharply observed stories filled with memorable characters and dialogue imbued with the pop music of the day, Gregg Shapiro reflects on what it meant to grow up gay in Chicago during the 1970s and 1980s.Relationships-family, boyfriends, and otherwise-are explored in stories such as "Lunch with a Porn Star," "Marilyn, My Mother, Myself," and "Your Father's Car."Only a gay Chicago native with a keen eye could give us such an insider's view of the Windy City from a more innocent time not too long ago.

Barrie Jean Borich:
“The men of Lincoln Avenue are in search of something, but don’t worry, they’ll find it before morning. In these unflinching and deeply located stories, Gregg Shapiro inhabits the cars, bars, and avenues of the gay metropolis that came of age in 1980s Chicago. This is fiction that embodies and pays homage to a world as fleeting as youth but as indelible as the city streets themselves.”Kelly Dwyer:
“Gregg Shapiro creates whole worlds with these stories, in which characters navigate everything from first lust to familial dramas, in narratives told with humor, understanding, and a keen sense of place. Stories such as ‘Lincoln Avenue’ pose the meaningful, unanswerable question: Why do we love the people we love? This is a memorable and entertaining collection.”Richard McCann:
“I love these great Chicago stories, so fresh and sharp, so excitable and hard-edged and tenderhearted. These stories remind once again why I’ve been a fan of Shapiro’s work for years.”Wayne Hoffman:
“A nostalgic ride through the streets of Chicago that starts in a 1975 Hornet and ends in a 1980 Cutlass wagon, the stories in Lincoln Avenue are like a stack of faded Polaroids from our collective gay past—each capturing the hopeful novelty and awkward uncertainty of youth in a single frame.”Jerry Rosco:
“These lovely stories from the streets of Chicago are filled with entertaining twists, turns and sudden stops, and include a title story that’s a sexy little masterpiece.”Jeff Mann:
“I’m delighted to discover that talented Gregg Shapiro has a collection of fiction out. These richly textured short stories portray the lives of gay men in the Midwest with wit, lyricism, and tenderness.”

“Shapiro has crafted a lively collection of stories that are fun, nostalgic, and sexy—sometimes all at the same time. And while Chicago natives will surely enjoy an added layer of meaning, the fact that readers of all ages and backgrounds can relate to something in these tales and chuckle at them with knowingness is a true testament to the author’s talent as a storyteller.”
John Bavoso, Lambda Literary Review:

Gregg Shapiro: 77

Poems by Gregg Shapiro

Souvenir Spoon Books - 2012

This second collection of poems by Gregg Shapiro delves into the memory and meaning of the 1970s.

Richard McCann:
“These terrific poems—a decade of them, one for each year from 1970 to 1980— are time capsules chock-full of the amazing but ordinary stuff of Midwestern suburban childhood. But these are not nostalgic poems. Ultimately, they are poems beautifully haunted by harm and hope, longing and desire. In a chapbook that is at once funny and affecting, Gregg Shapiro proves himself the Cavafy of Chicago.”Kathi Bergquist:
“Gregg Shapiro’s new collection evokes a working-class, Midwestern America of the 1970s, with an eye and ear that wizens through the pages, moving from wonder and awe to self-awareness. Between the lines, a narrative emerges of a father defeated by life (with echoes of Willy Loman), and a son coming into himself as a young gay man on the cusp of a new decade.”Regie Cabico:
“Shapiro tackles the Seventies with a poetic earnestness, self-effacing charm & a narrative that is full of edge. Ignited by the same fire of the Stonewall revolt, the years are documented with an unflinching truth and fierceness.”St. Sukie de la Croix:
“In this collection of poems, Gregg Shapiro catalogs a poet’s stepping stones across a fast-flowing life-stream, as he navigates the disco-fueled 1970s, in a journey from adolescence to adulthood. He tiptoes, and at other times leaps with gay abandon, from stone to stone, across a stream where the waters are sometimes high and menacing, other times a gentle babbling brook. Along the way, he loses his religion and finds life, loses his innocence and finds love. And then he flies away to create his own existence as all good fairies must do.”Jim Derogatis:
“A lot of rockers think they’re poets, and a few poets think they really can rock. It isn’t often that the spirit of the music and the gift of the muse combine, but they certainly do as Gregg Shapiro “opens the box marked 1971” and takes us on a hard-rocking rollercoaster ride through his formative years as both a rock fan and a poet.”Maureen Seaton:
“The appealing poems of Gregg Shapiro’s GREGG SHAPIRO: 77 leave me nostalgic, teenagery, vastly human, happily queer, and wanting more poems—right up to Gregg Shapiro: ∞. Shapiro gives us an astute and touching gift with no strings attached except guitar, nothing demanded of us, nothing expected. This little book is simply ours to keep or dismantle: scrapbook, amulet, bomb.”Craig Seymour:
“Gregg Shapiro’s book is a gift revealed in words. A collection of poems about coming of age in the ‘70s, it movingly captures the youthful feeling that the world is coming into being just for you.”Bob Smith:
“Gregg Shapiro’s wonderful collection of poems takes us on a young gay man’s journey through the 1970s that is beautifully written and evocative of a strangely innocent time of untarnished glitter.”Susan Werner:
“For anyone who rode around in a two door Ford LTD with a vinyl landau roof – who loved Necco Wafers – who got excited about the Bicentennial only to learn it wasn’t ALL that – who tried to stick with God but eventually gave up trying – who wrote on bathroom walls – who fooled around with boys – who finally left home – who survived the 1970s – this book is for YOU.”

Protection

Poems by Gregg Shapiro

Gival Press - 2008

Greg Herren:
"Gregg Shapiro's stunning debut marks the arrival of a new master poet on the scene. His work blows me away.”

"With equal parts hilarity and anxiety, the poems in Protection celebrate urban life and lust. In Shapiro's world, every experience, large or small contributes to his ironic fatalism. Whether the narrator listens to his mother swear, talks to an ex-lover, imagines his house burn, or orders Chinese take-out, all actions reveal his inescapable destiny."
Kim Roberts - Beltway Poetry Quarterly