ISSUE 3
December 2002


MILKWOOD REVIEW




Charles Fishman
POETRY: "LEARNING TO DANCE," "SATURDAY MATINEE," and "SWANS IN THE MIST,"


CHARLES FISHMANcreated the Visiting Writers Program at SUNY Farmingdale in 1979 and served as director of this regional program until his retirement in 1997. He also co-founded the Long Island Poetry Collective (1973) and was a founding editor of Xanadu magazine and Pleasure Dome Press (1975). He served as final judge for the 1998 Capricorn Poetry Award and the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award of the Judah L. Magnes Museum (1998), and was founder and coordinator of the Paumanok Poetry Award competition (1990-97). He was Series Editor for the Water Mark Poets of North America Book Award (1980-83); Associate Editor for The Drunken Boat, a Web-based review of poetry; Poetry Editor of Gaia (in both its paper & Web-based formats), Cistercian Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Genocide Studies; and Contributing Editor for Esprit, Wordsmith, and other magazines. Currently, he serves as a poetry consultant to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC (1995- ). In addition, he has just been appointed Director of the Distinguished Speakers Program at SUNY Farmingdale.

His most recent books include The Firewalkers (Avisson Press, 1996) and Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust (Texas Tech University Press, 1991). Both Blood to Remember and his collection of poems on the Holocaust, The Death Mazurka (Texas Tech, 1989), were Selections of the Jewish Book Club, and The Death Mazurka was nominated for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and listed by ALA/Choice as one of the outstanding books of the year (1989). His other books include Catlives (1991), a translation of Sarah Kirsch’s Katzenleben; Mortal Companions (1977), a booklength collection of poetry; and six chapbooks. Both Mortal Companions and The Firewalkers are available as eBooks at http://www.write-on-line.co.uk/Frames/works.htm, as is a seventh chapbook, In Spanish Light. A new chapbook of poems, Time Travel Reports, will be published by Timberline Press in 2002.

His poems, essays, reviews, fiction, and translations have appeared in more than 300 magazines including Abiko Quarterly (Japan), Atlanta Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Boulevard, Contemporary Poetics (Korea), Cyphers (Ireland), European Judaism (England), The Georgia Review, International Quarterly, Grain (Canada), The Jewish Chronicle (New Zealand), New England Review, New Letters, Nimrod, Poetry International, Rattapallax, Salmagundi, and Verse—and in such major anthologies as Bittersweet Legacy: Creative Responses to the Holocaust (University Presses of America, 2001), And What Rough Beast: Poems at the End of the Century (Ashland Poetry Press, 1999), Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust (Northwestern University Press, 1998), Fathers (St. Martin’s Press, 1997), and Carrying the Darkness: The Poetry of the Vietnam War (Avon, 1985). The first full-length critical study of his work appears in Contemporary Jewish-American Dramatists and Poets (Greenwood, 1999). My poems have also appeared in online at a wide range of websites, including Kota Press Poetry Journal, New Works Review, The Drunken Boat, Recursive Angel, Samsara Quarterly, and Switched-on-Gutenberg. A 52-page retrospective of his work is currently online at www.threecandles.com.

His awards include the Eve of St. Agnes Poetry Award from Negative Capability (1999), the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize of the Southern California Anthology (1996), and the Gertrude B. Claytor Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America (1987), and I have been a finalist or prizewinner in numerous other competitions, including the Pablo Neruda Poetry Award (Nimrod, 1998), the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award (PSA, 1994), and the New Letters Award for Poetry (1993). He has received NEH fellowships in poetry from Yale University (1982), the University of California at San Diego (1978), and Boston University (1974) and completed a Doctor of Arts (D.A.) in contemporary American poetry and poetry writing at SUNY Albany in 1982. In 1995, I received a fellowship in poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

He has given more than 250 readings throughout the United States and in Israel and have conducted numerous poetry workshops. I have had poetry residencies at Mishkenot Sha’ananim (Jerusalem, 1992), Ucross (Clearmont, WY, 1993 & 1997), the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (Sweetbriar, VA, 1997), the Millay Colony for the Arts (Austerlitz, NY, 1999), and the Jack Kerouac House in Orlando, Florida, and I was a featured poet at the Asheville Poetry Festival (1994).

To order:
The Glacier's Daughters

The Death Mazurka

The Firewalkers

Catlives

Blood to Remember


To Visit:
The Drunken Boat