Michael C. Blumenthal is an American poet, essayist, novelist, and translator who began his career as a lawyer and earned his J.D. from Cornell Law School. He later went on to study clinical psychology at Antioch. Blumenthal’s poetry collections include Sympathetic Magic (1980), which won the Water Mark Poets of North America First Book Prize; Laps (1984), winner of the Juniper Prize; Dusty Angel (1999), winner of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Prize; And: Poems (2009); No Hurry: Poems 2000-2012 (2012); and Don't Die: Poems, 2013-2021. Blumenthal’s later books have also been praised for their gentle wit and penetrating insight. His novel Weinstock Among the Dying (1993) casts a baleful eye at academia, using the psychoanalytic process as a framing device. The book won the Ribalow Prize for Best Work of Jewish Fiction. He is also the author of the story collection The Greatest Jewish-American Lover in Hungarian History (2014). Blumenthal’s nonfiction includes When History Enters the House: Essays from Central Europe (1998), All My Mothers and Fathers: A Memoir (2002), Just Three Minutes Please: Thinking Around on Public Radio (2013), and “Because They Needed Me”: The Incredible Life of Rita Miljo and Her Struggle to Save the Baboons of South Africa (2015). The Briggs-Copeland lecturer in poetry at Harvard University from 1983-1992, Blumenthal ultimately became director of its creative writing program. From 1992 to 1996 he lived and worked in Budapest, Hungary as a senior Fulbright lecturer. Since then, he has been visiting professor at universities and colleges both in the United States and abroad. His many honors and awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram-Merrill Foundation. He received the Lavan Younger Poets Award in 1985, and the poetry prize of the Society for Contemporary Literature in German in 2009. He holds the Copenhaver Distinguished Visiting Chair at West Virginia University.
Michael Blumenthal
Studios
Star
Michael Blumenthal worked in the Star studio.
Funded by Alpha Chi Omega, a national fraternity founded in 1885, Star Studio — built in 1911–1912 — was the first studio given to the residency by an outside organization. To this day, Alpha Chi sorority pledges learn the story of Star Studio and its role in supporting American arts and letters. Beginning as a nicely proportioned…