Steve Dalachinsky

Avant-garde poet and collagist Steve Dalachinsky grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and briefly attended Brooklyn College. In his youth, he sold books and records on the street in SoHo, alongside street-peddlers and artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat. He is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Where Night and Day Become One: The French Poems (2018); The Final Nite & Other Poems: Complete Notes from a Charles Gayle Notebook, 1987–2006, which won the 2007 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Book Award; and A Superintendent’s Eyes (2000). With his wife, Yuko Otomo, he cowrote the collection Frozen Heatwave (2017). Dalachinsky’s honors include the 2013 Acker Award. In a review of A Superintendent’s Eyes in A Gathering of the Tribes, Alan Kaufman wrote, “The poems, assembled over 20 years, are a sometimes joyous, sometimes shattering glimpse of life seen from behind the headlines.” 

Dalachinsky also collaborated with musicians such as Loren Connors, and he was a beloved figure in the New York music scene. He frequently attended free-jazz concerts—sometimes several in one night—and many of these performances inspired his poems. In an interview with Lisa Chau in HuffPost, Dalachinsky notes writers William Blake, Federico García Lorca, Allen Ginsberg, Franz Kafka, and Amiri Baraka, as well as musicians John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, and Charles Mingus as inspirations for his work “because they are challenging and have challenged the limits of their art—craft of sound, of space, of hardship and personal limitations.”

Dalachinsky died in 2019.