Jeff Schwartz
Current City, State, Country
Biography
Jeffrey Schwartz grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, attended universities in Boston and Pittsburgh, and settled in Connecticut where he has taught for Greenwich Academy, Global Online Academy, and Fairfield University. His first collection was published by Alice James Books and more recent poems have appeared in Hanging Loose, Paterson Literary Review, Pedestal, Naugatuck River Review, the Berru Poetry Series sponsored by the Jewish Book Council, and elsewhere. Picture Houses, a hand-stitched, limited edition of poems about film, was published in 2018. Small Talk will appear in 2025. He has also written for books and journals on student-centered learning, including his co-edited Students Teaching, Teachers Learning.
What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?
All of my poems are Jewish. Some in Small Talk (2025) have explicit references to my Torah study. Story characters appear, such as Noah and Jacob. The poems deal with grief and redemption from personal experience or from tragedies such as Babi Yar and the Pittsburgh shooting in a synagogue. More indirectly, the poems center on Jewish values of family and justice. God’s house is imagined. When I’m present at my father’s final days, we’re listening to Debbie Friedman as well as one of his jazz favorites, Stan Getz. As in Judaism, there’s a sense of ancestry, tradition, holy language, and—in my concept of religion—a fair amount of questioning. Torah study, along with writing poetry for more than 50 years, has taught me to examine every word and every space. The poems are filled with meditation on when to pay attention (or not), when words are enough (or not), and when silence is a powerful reply. I see poems as approximations of truth and clarity that can be compressed into meaningful, organic packages. These poems address the inexpressible and help to make sense of a troubling world. My poems have appeared in Jewish publications such as Drash, Verklempt, the Jewish Poetry Collective Journal, the Mizmor Anthology, Poetica, and the Berru Series sponsored by the Jewish Book Council.
Published Works
Shaving Sonnet (Kitchen Table Quarterly, 2025)
All the Empty Spaces (The Book of Jobs Anthology, 2025)
Postcard from Coast (Jewish Poetry Collective Journal, 2025)
Small Talk (Finishing Line Press, 2025)
Letter from 5th Ave (Hanging Loose, 2024)
The Weight (Hanging Loose, 2024)
The Singer Machine (Connecticut Literary Anthology, 2024)
Witness in Verklempt (Ein Millen issue, 2024)
When We Were Young (Away from Home Anthology, 2024)
Prosopognasia (Poetica, 2023)
Lee Road (Naugatuck River Review, 2023)
The Joy of Aging (Abandoned Mine, 2023)
Saturday Morning, Beach 3 (Pedestal, 2022)
Lockdown (English Journal, 2022)
Joseph’s Silence, Berru Poetry Series (Jewish Book Council, 2022)
The First time I Contemplated Eternity (Abandoned Mine, 2022)
Ulysses Returns to the Suburbs (Snapdragon, 2022)
Time (Porter Gulch, 2021)
Florida Vote (Iron City, 2020)
Angels on Elevators (Paterson Literary Review, 2019)
The Old Man and the Maid (Mizmor Anthology, 2019)
Hold on Tight! (Mizmor Anthology, 2019)
Mary, Mary (Paterson Literary Review, 2016)
Links to Sample Works
Education
Boston University, B.A.
UMass Boston, M.A.
Carnegie Mellon, D.A.