Country of Memory - Softcover

Charles Fishman created the Visiting Writers Program at the State University of New York at Farmingdale in 1979 and served as director until 1997. He also co-founded the Long Island Poetry Collective (1973) and was a founding editor of Xanadu magazine and Pleasure Dome Press (1975). He served as final judge for the 1998 Capricorn Poetry Award; was founder and coordinator of the Paumanok Poetry Award competition (1990-97) and Series Editor for the Water Mark Poets of North America Book Award (1980-83); and served as Poetry Editor of Gaia, Cistercian Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Genocide Studies. Currently, he is a poetry consultant to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC (1995- ), Associate Editor of The Drunken Boat, and Poetry Editor of New Works Review. In addition, he serves as Director of the Distinguished Speakers Program at Farmingdale State.

Fishman’s books include The Firewalkers (Avisson Press, 1996), Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust (Texas Tech University Press, 1991), and The Death Mazurka (Texas Tech, 1989), which was nominated for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and listed by ALA Choice as one of the outstanding books of the year (1989). His other books include Catlives (1991), a translation of Sarah Kirsch’s Katzenleben; Mortal Companions (1977), a booklength collection of poetry; and nine chapbooks, including, most recently, Time Travel Reports (Timberline Press, 2002). His next booklength poetry collection will be Country of Memory (Uccelli Press, 2004).

Fishman’s poems, essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in more than 300 journals including Abiko Quarterly (Japan), Beloit Poetry Journal, Contemporary Poetics (Korea), Cyphers (Ireland), European Judaism (England), Full Circle, The Georgia Review, Grain (Canada), Midstream, New England Review, New Letters, Nimrod, Salmagundi, and Verse—and in such major anthologies as Bittersweet Legacy: Creative Responses to the Holocaust (University Presses of America, 2001), Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust (Northwestern University Press, 1998), Fathers (St. Martin’s Press, 1997), and Carrying the Darkness: The Poetry of the Vietnam War (Avon, 1985). The first full-length critical study of his work appears in Contemporary Jewish-American Dramatists and Poets (Greenwood, 1999).

Fishman’s awards include the Eve of St. Agnes Poetry Award from Negative Capability (1999), the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize of the Southern California Anthology (1996), and the Gertrude B. Claytor Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America (1987), and he has been a finalist or prizewinner in numerous other competitions, including the Pablo Neruda Poetry Award (Nimrod, 1998), the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award (PSA, 1994), and the New Letters Award for Poetry (1993). He has received NEH fellowships in poetry from Yale University (1982), the University of California at San Diego (1978), and Boston University (1974) and completed a Doctor of Arts (D.A.) in contemporary American poetry and poetry writing at SUNY Albany in 1982. In 1995, he received a fellowship in poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Fishman has given more than 250 readings throughout the United States and in Israel and has conducted numerous poetry workshops. He has had poetry residencies at Mishkenot Sha’ananim (Jerusalem, 1992), Ucross (Clearmont, WY, 1993 & 1997), the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (Sweet Briar, VA, 1997, 2003), the Millay Colony for the Arts (Austerlitz, NY, 1999), and the Jack Kerouac House in Orlando, Florida (2002), and he was a featured poet at the 1994 Asheville Poetry Festival.

Fishman uses words like a jackhammer, a searchlight, a scalpel... These words are crafted by an artist. -- Laurel Johnson, Midwest Book Review, May 1, 2004