Shapiro edited the prestigious magazine, "Poetry" for several years, and he was a professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he edited "Prairie Schooner", and at the University of California, Davis, from which he retired in the mid-1980s. His other works include "Person, Place and Thing" (1942), (with Ernst Lert) the libretto to Hugo Weisgall's opera "The Tenor" (1950)," To Abolish Children" (1968), and "The Old Horsefly" (1993). Shapiro received the 1969 Bollingen Prize for Poetry, sharing the award that year with John Berryman.