David Grubin
Current City, State, Country
Birth City, State, Country
Biography
Before committing full-time to poetry, David Grubin produced documentary films for five decades. His films range across history, art, science and poetry, winning numerous awards in the field of documentary television, including two Alfred I. Dupont awards, three George Foster Peabody prizes, five Writers Guild prizes, and ten Emmys.
Grubin has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, been a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, and is the recipient of an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Hamilton College. He has taught documentary film producing in Columbia University’s Graduate Film Program and has lectured on filmmaking across the country. A former chairman of the board of directors of The Film Forum, he is currently a member of the Society of American Historians and sits on the board at Poets House.
This past June, Grubin graduated with an MFA in poetry from Pacific University. His essay “Stanley Kunitz and The Wilderness of Age” appeared this spring in the American Poetry Review. His poems have been published in Narrative and Gyroscope.
What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?
I’ve been surprised to find how often my Jewish heritage and education appears in my poems. This tells me that growing up Jewish in America touched me deeply, though my parents turned away from Judaism even as all their friends were Jews and they were steeped in Yiddishkeit. I’m still learning the ways in which being Jewish inflects my poems.
Education
Hamilton College, BA..
Harvard University, M.A.T.
Pacific University, M.F.A.