Jason Shinder Tribute

Jason Shinder, a poet, anthologist and teacher who founded the Y.M.C.A. National Writer’s Voice program, one of the country’s largest networks of literary-arts centers, died on April 25th at his home in Manhattan. He was 52 and also lived in Provincetown, Mass.

His death was announced by the Academy of American Poets, which said that Mr. Shinder had been ill with lymphoma and leukemia for several years.

At his death, Mr. Shinder was the director of arts and humanities for the Y.M.C.A. of the U.S.A., the Y’s national organization. He had founded its national arts and humanities program in the 1990s; in addition to the Writer’s Voice, it comprises a range of offerings for children and adults in the visual and performing arts.

A former assistant to Allen Ginsberg, Mr. Shinder started the original Writer’s Voice in 1981, at the West Side Y.M.C.A. in Manhattan. It offered high-level instruction in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and dramatic writing at far less than the cost of a graduate writing program. It also held readings by distinguished poets and authors.

Mr. Shinder expanded the Writer’s Voice into a national program in 1990; it is currently offered at more than two dozen Y.M.C.A.’s nationwide. Among the writers who have taught in the program over the years are the poets Adrienne Rich and Galway Kinnell, the novelists Michael Cunningham and E. L. Doctorow and the playwright Wendy Wasserstein.

Mr. Shinder was the author of two volumes of poetry, “Every Room We Ever Slept In” (Sheep Meadow Press, 1993) and “Among Women” (Graywolf Press, 2001). He edited many anthologies, among them “The Poem That Changed America: ‘Howl’ Fifty Years Later” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006), a collection of essays on Mr. Ginsberg’s best-known work.

Reviewing “The Poem That Changed America,” Publishers Weekly said, “For those who have been moved by Ginsberg’s words, this collection serves as a stirring confirmation.”

Jason Scott Shinder was born on Oct. 19, 1955, in Brooklyn and reared there and in Merrick, N.Y. He received a bachelor’s degree in English from Skidmore College in 1978. He later taught at Bennington College and elsewhere.

Mr. Shinder is survived by a brother, Martin, of Jacksonville, Vt., and a sister, Nina, of Merrick.

His other books include several anthologies he edited, “Divided Light: Father and Son Poems” (Sheep Meadow, 1983); “Lights, Camera, Poetry! American Movie Poems, the First Hundred Years” (Harcourt Brace, 1996); and “Tales From the Couch: Writers on Talk Therapy” (Morrow, 2000).