Ish Klein

Poet and filmmaker Ish Klein grew up in Long Island and was educated at Columbia University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Klein’s poetry collections include Consolation and Mirth (2015), Moving Day (2011) and Union! (2009). Her poems have also appeared in the magazines Fence, Jubilat, and Epiphany, among many others.

With both vulnerability and humor, Klein’s lyrical poems measure the strata of daily social and literary engagement. “Klein’s work consistently explores the conflict between authenticity and literary convention,” observes Boston Review’s Kristina Marie Darling in a review of Union!, noting that the poet “creates a unique narrative space in which literary history coexists with modern life, ultimately contemporizing the loftiness of the Elizabethans, the melancholy of the Romantics, and Modernism’s fascination with the poetic image.”
 
Klein was awarded a Digital Filmmaker Residency from the National Endowment for the Arts, and her films have been screened at the Stuttgart Film Winter festival, Arlene’s Picture Show, and the Philadelphia Film Festival. The author of the plays The Storm, The D Men, The Orchids, Drummer 41, and “In A Word, Faust,” she is a founding member of the Connecticut River Valley Poets Theater (CRVPT).

She lives with her partner Greg Purcell in Chicago, Illinois and works in theater.