Bruce Black
Current City, State, Country
Birth City, State, Country
Biography
Since Bruce Black began writing poems about his Jewish experiences, he’s published more than 60 in various online and print journals including The MidAtlantic Review, The Reform Jewish Quarterly, The Amethyst Review, Write-Haus, Bearings, Super Poetry Highway, Poetica, The Lehrhaus, Soul-Lit, Hevria, Jewthink, and elsewhere.
It was his grandfather’s stories about growing up in a Polish shtetl, and, later, a beloved aunt’s love of poetry and literature that she shared with him, that led Bruce to books, and, eventually to studying literature in college and writing in graduate school. He received a BA in literature from Columbia University and holds an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
A one-year stint in law school convinced him that he belonged in publishing and he left law school to take a job as marketing assistant with an academic publisher before signing on as the marketing director of a Jewish children’s book publisher. A move to the midwest led to freelance assignments with a local newspaper, a handful of children’s stories, which he sold to Cricket and Cobblestone magazines, and three books for children.
After moving to Philadelphia, he assumed the role of children’s book editor at The Jewish Publication Society, a job that he held for almost a decade, while writing freelance stories for various newspapers and magazines, as well as teaching courses in writing books for children in Rosemont College’s Graduate Publishing Program. A subsequent move to Florida led to his discovery of yoga, as well as to his first book for adults — Writing Yoga: A Guide to Keeping a Practice Journal — which was published by Rodmell Press in Berkeley, CA (and is now distributed by Shambhala).
Currently, he lives in Highland Park, IL, where he continues to write poems and personal narratives while editing the work of other writers for The Jewish Writing Project, a site that he founded more than a dozen years ago to encourage writers from across the globe to write about and share their experiences of being Jewish.
What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?
I find poems in the liminal space between inhale and exhale, the words forged between between hope and despair, each word a bridge linking my Jewish present with the Jewish past, each line probing the silence that stole the voice of my father’s father and, at the same time, recapturing the joy I felt as a child listening to stories that my mother’s father told on Sunday mornings after working all night in the bakery. Each word, each poem, feels like a prayer, a plea, a way of searching for a new path, a promise that can bring me closer to the divine source of the universe. Through my poems I can embrace members of my family who are gone but who remain, nonetheless, part of my life serving as trusted guides, forever angels, mystical muses.
Published Works
Prose: Non-fiction
“Words are like rivers” included in New Voices: Contemporary Writers Confronting the Holocaust (Valentine Mitchell, 2023)
Writing Yoga: A Guide to Keeping a Practice Journal (Rodmell Press, 2010)
Ten People Who Discovered America (Willowisp Press, 1990)
The World of Insects (Willowisp Press, 1991)
Prose: Fiction
Ship of Terror (written as Jason Steele) (Willowisp Press, 1991)
Author Site
Links to Sample Works
Video Reading
Current Title
Education
Columbia University (BA)
Vermont College of Fine Arts (MFA)