Resume

Charles Fishman created the Visiting Writers Program at Farmingdale State College in 1979 and served as its director until 1997. He also created the Distinguished Speakers Program for the college and managed that series from 2001 until 2007. Dr. Fishman co-founded the Long Island Poetry Collective (1973) and was a founding editor of Xanadu magazine and Pleasure Dome Press (1975). He was final judge for the 1998 Capricorn Poetry Award; was founder and coordinator of the Paumanok Poetry Award competition and series editor for the Water Mark Poets of North America Book Award; and has served as poetry editor for the Journal of Genocide Studies, poetry consultant to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, associate editor of The Drunken Boat, and poetry editor of New Works Review. He is currently poetry editor of PRISM: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Holocaust Educators.

Dr. Fishman’s books include Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust (2007) & Chopin’s Piano (2006), both from Time Being Books, Country of Memory (Uccelli Press, 2004), and The Death Mazurka (Texas Tech University Press, 1989), an ALA/Choice Outstanding Book of the Year that was nominated for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Water under Water, his most recent collection of poems, will be released by Casa De Snapdragon in December 2009.

His poems, essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in more than 350 journals, including Abiko Quarterly (Japan), Contemporary Poetics (Korea), Cyphers (Ireland), European Judaism (England), The Georgia Review, Grain (Canada), The Jerusalem Review (Israel), New England Review, New Letters, Nimrod, Salmagundi, The Seventh Quarry (Wales), and Verse — and in such major anthologies as The Sorrow Psalms: A Book of Twentieth Century Elegy (Iowa University Press, 2006), 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).A major selection of his poems on the Holocaust appears at http://www.thehypertexts.com/.

His awards include the 2007 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence, the 2006 Long Island School of Poetry Award from the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association, 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 he has been a finalist or prizewinner in numerous other competitions, including the Paterson Poetry Award (2005, for Country of Memory), 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 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, he received a fellowship in poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

He has given more than 400 readings throughout the United States and in Israel and has conducted numerous poetry workshops. He has had poetry residencies at Mishkenot Sha’ananim (Jerusalem), Ucross (Clearmont, WY), the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (Sweet Briar, VA), the Millay Colony for the Arts (Austerlitz, NY), and the Jack Kerouac House (Orlando, FL), and he was a featured poet at the 1994 Asheville Poetry Festival (NC).