Shakespeare Saved My Life (Bates)

Author Bio
• Birth—1957
• Raised—state of Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., Columbia College, Chicago; M.A., Northeastern
   Illinois University; Ph.D., Univeristy of Chicago
• Currently—lives in Terre Haute, Indiana

Laura Bates is a professor of English at Indiana State University, where she has taught courses on Shakespeare for the past fifteen years to students on campus and in prison.

Bates earned her B.A. degree from Columbia College in Chicago and her M.A. at Northeastern Illinois Univeristy. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Comparative Literature, with a focus on Shakespeare studies.

For more than 25 years she has worked in prisons as a volunteer and as a professor. She created the world’s first Shakespeare program in supermax—the long-term solitary confinement unit. Her work has been featured in local and national media, including two segments on MSNBC-TV’s Lock Up. She is the author of Shakespeare Saved My Life: Ten Years in Solitary with the Bard (2013). Happily married for nearly thirty years, she and her husband Allan Bates, a retired professor and playwright, live in Indiana.  (Adapted from the author's website.)