THE POETS
“Now the time has come to forge an opening to feeling, to tumultuous emotion and to imagination, and to channel them into the world of creativity.”
Géza Röhrig was born in Budapest, Hungary. He has published eight volumes of poetry. In 2015, he starred in the Hungarian Auschwitz film, Son of Saul, which won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. He is currently starring in Terrence Malick’s new film, “The Way Of The Wind” as Jesus Christ.
Alicia Suskin Ostriker won the William Carlos Williams Award, is a two-time finalist for the National Book Award, a Jewish National Book Award and Paterson Award winner, as well as author of several books. In 2015, she was elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Paul Celan was a poet who survived the Holocaust. He wrote in German, his mother tongue which was also the language of his mother's murderers. Celan set out to create his own language. He committed suicide in 1970.
Yehuda Amichai is one of Israel’s most famous poets. His work, written in Hebrew, has been translated into 40 languages. He was awarded the Israel Prize for Poetry for effecting “a revolutionary change in poetry’s language,” and was nominated for the Nobel Prize. He died in 2000.
Christine Poreba is the winner of the 2014 Philip Levine Prize for her first book, Rough Knowledge. Her work examines the intersection of memory and language and has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.
Edward Hirsch received his Ph.D. in Folklore from the University of Pennsylvania. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal of Honor; and he is the author of many books.
Taylor Mali is one of the most well-known poets to have emerged from the slam poetry movement and appeared on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. He is the author of three books and teaches and performs spoken-word poetry across the country.
Walter Fiden, Auschwitz survivor
Cornelius Eady, a Pulitzer Prize nominee, received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He is co-founder of Cave Canem, a nonprofit organization serving African American poets, and is the author of several books.
Sabrina Orah Mark, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, is the author of The Babies, winner of the Saturnalia Book Prize, and Tsim Tsum, as well as the chapbook Walter B.’s Extraordinary Cousin Arrives for a Visit - Other Tales.
Janet R. Kirchheimer, the daughter of Holocaust survivors from Germany, is a Pushcart Prize nominated poet. Her work has appeared in print, online, and in anthologies. Her chapter, At The Water’s Edge: Poetry and the Holocaust, appears in The Psychoanalytic Textbook of Holocaust Studies (Routledge).