Shira J. Rodriguez is a novelist, filmmaker, and podcaster who writes stories inspired by classics and woven of words, wonder, and whimsy. She loves to explore themes of hope, beauty, and Christian  humanism in her stories.

Shira grew up in a vibrant Latino family in New Jersey, most of whom were bilingual or spoke primarily Spanish. This gave her a unique opportunity to see language and words not only as a vehicle of communication, but also a culture, as a rhythm, and an expression of love and home. As a little girl of five, her family moved to Colorado, where her mother felt a divine calling to pursue home education for her daughter. At first reluctant and afraid her daughter would never learn to write or read proficiently in English, her mother put  the experiment on trial for a couple of months.

Those few months became a year, and that year became a dozen.

Growing up in the company of Anne Shirley, David Copperfield, and the Pevensie children, she quickly fell in love with the magic of stories and the glorious beauty of a well-spun yarn as she nibbled on apples from her backyard tree and lost herself in a good book. (They may have turned her head a little.) 

Her childhood passion for English and words and wonder and beauty quickly grew and flourished into a thriving fascination in her adolescence. She’s found that, while people often think that their faults hinder God, the very opposite is true. It is their strengths that sometimes hinder God, because people think they can do it all alone. And it is their weaknesses, those little chinks and chasms within them, that in truth, best spill out His glory through people into the world.

At the age of eighteen, Shira graduated from thirteen years of home education, having studied English Literature at a College Prep Honors level for two years in High School and crafted her own creative writing curriculum in her senior year, which included composing several short stories and poems in imitation of the styles of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, Milton, Austen, Bronte, Dickens, and Virginia Woolfe.

It is her own life story that has brought her to find in words a precious, sublime gift from God. She loves stories that remind her of the gift it is to be alive and that make readers treasure every moment more than the last.

She revels in stories that explore what it is to be fully, divinely human, made in the imago dei and wants her stories to make someone’s day different. To give even one reader a glimpse, for a moment, of what it was to be loved through story; to be truly known.

When she’s not belting Broadway songs in her living room or perusing some new book that has caught her fancy, you can find her on Her Reading Life Podcast, her home-away-from home where she invites listeners to a cozy virtual coffee date to talk all things writerly, inspirational, and bookish. You can also catch her on her website bio.site/shirajrodriguez and on Instagram (@shirajrodriguez), where you can take a peek into her day or simply pop into her dm’s to have a bookish chat with a new friend.