Michael Salcman Biography

MICHAEL SALCMAN (b.1946) : in addition to poetry, he served as chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. He was born in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia and came to the United States in 1949. He started writing poetry at Midwood High School in Brooklyn and was published in little magazines in the 1970s. He entered the combined program in liberal arts and medical education at Boston University and received both his B.A. and M.D. magna cum laude in 1969. After a surgical internship he was a Fellow in Neurophysiology at the National Institutes of Health and trained in neurosurgery at Columbia University's Neurological Institute. He is the author of 200 scientific and medical papers and six textbooks. After a 10 year hiatus he started writing poetry in the mid-1980s and attended the summer writing program at Sarah Lawrence College under the mentorship of Thomas Lux. His poems have appeared in numerous fine journals such as Arts & Letters, Cafe Review, Harvard Review, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, New Letters, Ontario Review, Poet Lore, and Raritan. His first collection, The Clock Made of Confetti (2007) , was nominated for The Poets Prize by Dick Allen, his third, A Prague Spring, Before & After (2016) , won the Sinclair Poetry Prize, and his fourth, Shades & Graces: New Poems (2020) , was the inaugural winner of the Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize. His New & Selected Poems, Necessary Speech appeared in 2022.