Bio

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A VERY BRIEF BIO

I was born in Chicago, the third of four children, raised in Highland Park, Illinois, educated in public schools, then Brown and Harvard, from which I graduated in 1972. I have sired two lovely daughters, Lucy and Isabel. I’m of Polish descent on my father’s side, Lithuanian on my mother’s. At different times I’ve been a book editor (Workman Publishing, ESPN Books), a writing teacher (Harvard, The Business of Sports High School in NYC), a television news producer (CBS, PBS) and a chef at a hippie restaurant.

I started by writing poetry as a teenager. At Harvard, where I studied poetry with Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, I won the American Academy of Poets Prize at Harvard in 1971. Ironically, by then I had already renounced poetry for prose. I speak French and many words of Yiddish.