Leonard Schwartz

Leonard Schwartz earned his BA in creative writing and literature from Bard College and his MA in philosophy from Columbia University. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Heavy Sublimation (Talisman House, 2018); Salamander: A Bestiary (Chax Press, 2017), with painter Simon Carr; If (Talisman House, 2012); The Library of Seven Readings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008); and Gnostic Blessing (Goats & Compasses, 1992).  Poet Forrest Gander wrote, “Leonard Schwartz's poems introduce philosophical meditation to emotional sensibility in a way that has become unusual in contemporary poetry. In his work, one feels the risk, even the vertigo, of the mind orienting itself to otherness, to world, and to language.”

Schwartz is also the author of the multi-genre books of poetics The New Babel: Toward a Poetics of the Mid-East Crises (University of Arkansas Press, 2016), Language as Responsibility (Tinfish Editions, 2006), and A Flicker at the Edge of Things: Essays Towards a Poetics (Spuyten Duyvil, 1998). He edited and cotranslated Benjamin Fondane's Cine-Poems and Others (NYRB Poets, 2016), and hosts the radio program Cross Cultural Poetics, archived online at the University of Pennsylvania’s PennSound.

Schwartz teaches at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and divides his time between there and New York City.