David Swerdlow
Professor of English, Westminster College
Biography
David Swerdlow is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, including Nightstand (Broadstone Books, 2023). His work has appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, West Branch and many other distinguished journal and anthologies. The recipient of several awards, Swerdlow has received two grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, as well as an Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for poetry with a Jewish theme. He served as a Fulbright Professor of American Literature in Peru, as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, and as visiting faculty on two Semester at Sea voyages. Since 1990, he has taught literature and creative writing at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania.
What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?
While my poems don’t often delve directly into Jewish subject matter, I feel the culture at work in most everything I write. I feel the culture’s music, its attention to matters of justice, its candles in the night. Throughout and perhaps because of my Jewish upbringing, I developed an attachment to doubt and intellectual skepticism that is both at odds with and cherished within my experience of Judaism.
Published Works
Poetry
Nightstand (Broadstone Books, 2023)
Bodies on Earth (WordTech Editions, 2010)
Small Holes in the Universe (WordTech Editions, 2003)
Prose
Television Man (Czykmate Productions, 2019)
Links to Sample Works
- Poetry, “Buy a chimney cap, I think, then”
- Sheila Na-Gig, “Having Words in Alexandria” and “Threshold”
- Iowa Review, “Looking for Berries”
