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Michael Salcman (born 1946) is an American poet and physician who lives in Baltimore, Maryland. His poetical work is infused and vivified by his medical profession, his love of and expertise in contemporary art, and by the fact that his parents were Holocaust survivors. His work is characterized by a lushness of diction, a strong moral focus, and a sense of playful imagery.
The son of Holocaust survivors, he was born in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, and came to the United States in 1949. A graduate of the Combined Program in Liberal Arts and Medical Education at Boston University (B.A. and M.D, both 1969), he trained in neurophysiology at the National Institutes of Health and in neurological surgery at Columbia University. He was chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland from 1984 through 1991. [1] He is the author of many medical and scientific papers. His art reviews and essays on the arts and sciences and the visual arts and the brain have appeared in Urbanite Magazine, "Little Patuxent Review, Neurosurgery, "World Neurosurgery," "J.A.M.A.," Creative Non-Fiction and on-line sites such as www.PEEKreview.net and www.artbrain.org. He has also taught courses on the History of Contemporary Art at Roland Park Country School, the Contemporary Museum, and at Johns Hopkins and Towson Universities, and given seminars on the brain's visual system and art at the Cooper Union in New York and at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore. [2] His course on How The Brain Works appeared on The Knowledge Network of the New York Times.
Salcman's earliest published poems date from 1963. His poems have been widely published in such journals as the Alaska Quarterly Review, Arts & Letters, Harvard Review, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, Notre Dame Review, New Letters, Ontario Review, and Raritan. His poems have been heard on NPR's All Things Considered and in Euphoria an award-winning documentary on the brain and creativity. They have been nominated six times for a Pushcart Prize, twice for a Best of The Web Award, and have appeared on Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. Salcman is the author of four chapbooks, most recently, Stones in Our Pockets (Parallel Press, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2007). His poems have appeared in an award-winning film by Lee Boot on the brain and creativity, Euphoria. More recently, Baltimore composer Lorraine Whittlesey has set Salcman's poems to music (2012) and "Katya's Great Romance" was set to music by New York composer Richard Wilson in 2018. His widely praised anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors, patients, illness and healing, "Poetry in Medicine" (Persea Books, New York, 2015) is now used in medical school courses on Narrative Medicine. Salcman is the author of ten collections of poems, including "The Clock Made of Confetti"(Orchises Press, Washington, D.C., 2007), nominated for The Poets Prize and a Finalist for the Towson University Prize in Literature, "The Enemy of Good Is Better" (Orchises, 2011), and "A Prague Spring, Before & After," winner of the 2015 Sinclair Poetry Prize from Evening Street Press. "Shades & Graces: New Poems” won the inaugural Daniel Hoffman Poetry Prize (Spuyten-Duyvil, Brooklyn, 2020); Hoffman is a former Poet Laureate of the United States (1973). It received a glowing review in the 2021 Spring issue of The Hudson Review. In 2022, "Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems" was published by Spuyten Duyvil in New York. Also published by Spuyten Duyvil is "Crossing the Tape," his most rececent collection of poems (2024),
His poetry, though lyrical, is dense with information about cultural history, art, metaphysics, and brain theory. His major themes and subject matter is family history and the Holocaust, experiences with patients, and his love of sailing and for the Chesapeake Bay. His work is characterized by careful attention to metaphor, rhythm and internal music. David Bergman’s introductory essay to “Shades & Graces” discusses the late-life production and appreciation of Salcman’s oeuvre (3) and Meg Schoerke’s recent article in The Hudson Review (4), Poetry for a Pandemic Spring, discusses some parallels of Salcman’s poetry to early Modernists like Eliot and W.C. Williams.
Spuyten Duyvil is a neighborhood of the Bronx, New York City. It is bounded on the north by Riverdale, on the east by Kingsbridge, on the south by the Harlem River, and on the west by the Hudson River, although some consider it to be the southernmost part of Riverdale.
Julia Randall was an American poet, professor, and environmental activist; recipient of many honors for her poetry, she published seven books of poetry culminating in The Path to Fairview: New and Selected Poems . Described as “one of America's purest and most original lyric poets”, her honors include the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America (1980), the Poets’ Prize (1988) for her book Moving in Memory, as well as grants from the National Endowment of the Arts and the National Institute of Arts & Letters (1968), and a Sewanee Review Fellowship (1957).
Henry Hudson Park is a small park in the center of Spuyten Duyvil, Bronx in New York City, located at the intersection of Kappock Street and Independence Avenue. The park contains a small overlook above Spuyten Duyvil Creek, named Half Moon overlook after the ship Hudson sailed into the eponymous river.
David Mason is an American writer and the former Poet Laureate of Colorado.
Katherine Hastings is an American poet from Northern California. Her full length collections are “A Different Beauty”, "Shakespeare & Stein Walk Into a Bar", Nighthawks and Cloud Fire.
M. T. C. Cronin is a contemporary Australian poet.
Martin Nakell is an American poet and author.
Jeffrey Cyphers Wright is an American lyric poet, writer and publisher. Wright graduated from West Virginia University before coming to New York. Beginning in 1976, Wright studied with Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery. He also studied with Allen Ginsberg at Brooklyn College and received an MFA in poetry from there.
Stephen Sartarelli is an American poet and translator.
Valery Oisteanu is a Soviet-born Romanian and American poet, art critic, essayist, photographer and performance artist, whose style reflects the influence of Dada and Surrealism. Oisteanu is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, a book of short fiction, and a book of essays. He is the brother of Romanian historian of religion, cultural anthropologist and writer Andrei Oișteanu.
Barbara Henning is an American poet and fiction writer. She is the author of eight books of poetry, four novels and a series of photo-poem pamphlets. Her recent novelized biography of her mother, Ferne, a Detroit Story, was named by the Library of Michigan as a Notable Book of 2023. She is also the editor of a collection of interviews, [Looking Up Harryette Mullen: Sleeping with the Dictionary and Other Works] and The Selected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins. Her work has been published in numerous journals. Some recent books of poetry and prose are Digigram ; a novel, Just Like That ; and a conceptual project, a collection of sonnets composed from 999 passages from 999 books in her collection, entitled My Autobiography. Prompt Book: Experiments in Poetry and Fiction is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil 2020). Poets on the Road, a Blog, soon to be released by City Point Press, celebrates Henning and Maureen Owen's extensive reading road trip in 2018 across the USA.
Carol Bergé (1928–2006) was an American poet, highly active in the literary, performing and visual arts renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s in New York City. In the 1980s a scandal in academia and her choice to fictionalize it in her 1984 book Secrets, Gossip and Slander cost her teaching jobs as well as support from the publishing industry. From there she championed antiquing as a profession, taking an extended sabbatical from writing until the last few years of her life, when she completed two books, both published posthumously.
Adrian Blevins is an American poet. She is the author of four collections of poetry, including Appalachians Run Amok, winner of the 2016 Wilder Prize. Her other full-length poetry collections are Status Pending, Live from the Homesick Jamboree and The Brass Girl Brouhaha. With Karen McElmurray, Blevins co-edited Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia, a collection of essays of new and emerging Appalachian poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers. Her chapbooks are Bloodline and The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes, which won the first of Bright Hill Press's chapbook contests..
James Reiss was an American poet and novelist.
Lisa Russ Spaar is a contemporary American poet, professor, and essayist. She is currently a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia and the director of the Area Program in Poetry Writing. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently Vanitas, Rough: Poems and Satin Cash: Poems. Her latest collection, Orexia, was published by Persea Books in 2017. Her poem, Temple Gaudete, published in IMAGE Journal, won a 2016 Pushcart Prize.
Norman Finkelstein is an American poet and literary critic. He has written extensively about modern and postmodern poetry and about Jewish American literature. According to Tablet Magazine, Finkelstein's poetry "is simultaneously secular and religious, stately and conversational, prophetic, and circumspect."
Alice Fogel is an American poet, writer, and professor, who served as the state poet laureate of New Hampshire from 2014 to 2019.
Will Alexander is an American poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and visual artist. He was the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship for Poetry in 2001 and a California Arts Council Fellowship in 2002.
Larissa Shmailo is an American poet, translator, novelist, editor, and critic. She is known for her literary translations from Russian to English, particularly her translation of Victory over the Sun and the anthology Twenty-First Century Russian Poetry.
Joe Safdie is an American poet, critic, and educator. He's published seven books of poems as well as essays in journals including Jacket, Jacket 2, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, and most recently, in March 2021, Caesura. In February of 2020 he presented a paper entitled "Edward Dorn, Satire, and the Via Negativa" at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture; it was later published in Dispatches from the Poetry Wars and featured on academia.edu. While writer-in-residence at the Gloucester Writers Center in June 2016, he presented "Charles Olson and Finding One's Place," later published in the Journal of Poetics Research. He also edited the literary magazines Zephyr and Peninsula. After 28 years of teaching English at various colleges, he retired in 2019 and moved to Portland, Oregon, continuing a pattern of living in cities on the West Coast of North America including, in reverse order, Encinitas, California, Seattle, Washington, and Bolinas, California.
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