Midge Goldberg
Current City, State, Country
Birth City, State, Country
Biography
Midge Goldberg is a poet and editor living and writing in New Hampshire. She is the author of three collections of poetry and a children’s book, and is the editor of the anthology Outer Space: 100 Poems, published by Cambridge University Press in December 2022. Her most recent collection, To Be Opened After My Death, was published by Kelsay Books in 2021.Goldberg’s awards include the Richard Wilbur Award for her second collection, Snowman’s Code, published in 2016 by University of Evansville Press, which also received the 2016 New Hampshire Literary Awards Readers Choice Award. She was the recipient of the 2016 Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award for her poem “Tennis Practice Against the Garage Door.”She is also the author of Flume Ride, (David Robert Books, 2006), and working with the artist Valori Herzlich, she wrote the children’s book My Best Ever Grandpa, published by Azro Press (2015).
Goldberg’s poems have appeared in Measure, Light, First Things, Northern Woodlands, Appalachia, and on Garrison Keillor’s A Writer’s Almanac. Her poems are included in several anthologies, including Poetry Speaks: Who I Am, Rhyming Poems, Hot Sonnets, and the Poets Guide to New Hampshire. She was featured on New Hampshire Public Radio’s The Bookshelf, where she was interviewed by Peter Biello about her poetry, favorite books, and her foray into writing mysteries.
Goldberg’s anthology, Outer Space: 100 Poems, addresses the idea that poets and astronomers often ask the same questions. Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? It includes poets, astronomers, and scientists from the 12th century BCE to today, from all around the world, to illuminate how we think about outer space, and ourselves. It was launched at the Cambridge University Press Bookshop in Cambridge, England, in November, 2022. The anthology was featured at the See the Dark Festival, hosted by the Appalachian Mountain Club, at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord, N.H., in an event in their planetarium, and at many other venues and virtual events. Goldberg also writes book reviews of poetry and fiction, and her reviews have been published in The Hopkins Review, Claremont Review of Books, The University Bookman, and others.
Midge Goldberg is a graduate of Yale University. She holds an M.F.A. from the University of New Hampshire, and has taught at colleges in the northeast. She regularly teaches and presents at festivals, events, and poetry conferences, including the Robert Frost Poetry Conference in Derry, New Hampshire. She lives in Chester, New Hampshire, with her family, two cats, and an ever-changing number of chickens.
What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?
While Judaism and Jewish culture are not the focus of my poetry, I feel as though many of my poems are informed by my Jewish background, and I do write poems explore growing up and living in predominantly non-Jewish communities. I grew up in central Florida, where I was one of only two Jewish children in the school. Currently I live in New Hampshire, where, while there is a synagogue, Jews make up only a very small percentage of the population. In one of my poems, I refer to it as the “minor league of Judaism”! My parents, while completely Jewish culturally, only practiced sporadically at home, and so much of what I’ve learned about Judaism, I learned from books or on my own. I have my own tug-of-war about God going on, half-cynical and half-questioning, expressed in poems about fruitcakes, whale watches, and baseball players who cross themselves before they go up to bat.
I’ve recently started writing poems about unnamed women in the Torah. I wrote “Pharaoh’s Daughter,” and my latest is “The Other Mother,” about the mother who supposedly wanted to kill the baby that King Solomon purportedly threatened to cut in half, both accepted by Light. I hope to write more poems along these lines.
Published Works
Poetry
To Be Opened After My Death (Kelsay Books, 2021)
Snowman’s Code (University of Evansville Press, 2016)
Flume Ride (David Robert Books, 2006)
Edited Works
Outer Space: 100 Poems, ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2022)
Author Site
Links to Sample Works
Video Reading
Education
Yale University, B.A., Economics
University of New Hampshire, M.F.A. in Writing-Poetry