Daniel Meltz
Current City, State, Country
Birth City, State, Country
Biography
Dan Meltz was born in Newfoundland and raised in New Jersey, 16 minutes from Times Square. He’s lived in Manhattan since 1975. He attended yeshiva grammar school in Union City and yeshiva high school in Jersey City. He’s a retired technical writer and teacher of Deaf young people, with a B.A. from Columbia (no honors). Both his first book of poems, “It Wasn’t Easy to Reach You,” from Trail to Table, and his first novel, “Rabbis of the Garden State,” from Rattling Good Yarns, were published in 2025.
What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?
I grew up in a strong Jersey Jewish environment, between vibrant Conservative synagogue life in Ridgefield Park and el-hi yeshivas in Hudson County, under the wide-ranging influences of Yeshiva U Soloveitchikism, Hasidism and garden-variety Garden State modern Orthodoxy. The folklore, the Talmud, the comedy, the wisdom, the suffering, the pathology are in my bones even though it’s over 50 years since I was a kosher, Sabbath-observing shul-goer. (Unfortunately, back in the early ’70s, there wasn’t any room for an out gay teenager in the Jewish worlds I lived in.)
Regardless, this upbringing is a big part of who I am and is evidenced in poems of mine like “Of a Special Type of Object Choice in Hasidic Males” and “Rabbi Stripped Naked.” I also think that if there is humor in my poetry (people tell me all the time that there is) it comes to a large degree from my long-standing connection to the great comics of Judaism–Philip Roth, Madeline Kahn, Joseph Heller, Henny Youngman, Erica Jong, the writers of Mad magazine, Woody Allen (before all the bad stuff came out), Elaine May, Edward Hirsch, and the commentator rabbis that festooned my Talmud, always arguing and joshing with each other like funnymen at a Friars Roast.
Published Works
Poetry
It Wasn’t Easy to Reach You (Trail to Table Press, 2025)
Novel
Rabbis of the Garden State (Rattling Good Yarns Press, 2025)
Author Site
Links to Sample Works
Video Reading
Current Title
Education
Columbia University, BA