1935—2018

Born in Baltimore, Sam Cornish was educated at Goddard College and Northwestern University. Associated with the Black Arts Movement, Cornish incorporated history and family and takes on topics such as race and class in his short-lined poems. He was the author of more than half a dozen collections of poetry, including Dead Beats (2011), An Apron Full of Beans: New and Selected Poems (2008), Songs of Jubilee: New and Selected Poems 1969–1983 (1986), and Generations (1971). A theatrical production of An Apron Full of Beans was presented in Boston in 2012.
 
Cornish wrote the children’s books Your Hand in Mine (1970) and Grandmother’s Pictures (1967) and co-edited the anthology Chicory: Young Voices from the Black Ghetto (1969). With Hugh Fox, he coedited The Living Underground: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (1969). Cornish’s work was featured in numerous anthologies, including Black Fire (1968), The New Black Poetry (1969), American Literary Anthology (1970), and The Poetry of Black America (1973).
 
Cornish’s honors include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Somerville Arts/Ibbetson Press Lifetime Achievement Award, and a grant from the Massachusetts Council on the Arts. Poet laureate of Boston from 2008 to 2015, Cornish has taught at Emerson College and for a number of years ran a bookstore in Brookline, Massachusetts. He also ran the small press Beanbag Press. He lived in Boston until his death in 2018.