What Would You Like To Know?
If you want more than you can glean from either the official or irreverent bios below, check out my Scrapbook, where you can get a snapshot of what goes through my mind on a pretty regular basis. If you want a more intimate window into all things Richard Jeffrey Newman, take a look at the “Four Things About Me” section in the Four by Four issues of my newsletter, It All Connects, to which you can subscribe here. If you have a question you’d like to ask me directly, just let me know and I’ll do my best to answer. If it’s the “canned” stuff you're after, read on.
My Official Bio
Richard Jeffrey Newman is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, T’shuvah (Fernwood Press 2023), Words for What Those Men Have Done (Guernica Editions 2017), and The Silence of Men (CavanKerry Press 2006). He has also published three books of translation from classical Persian poetry, Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan and Selections from Saadi’s Bustan (Global Scholarly Publications 2004 & 2006) and The Teller of Tales: Stories from Ferdowsi’s Shahameh (Junction Press 2011). His essays and reviews have appeared in a range of publications, including The American Voice, On The Issues, Salon, Unlikely Stories, American Book Review, LitHub, and Solstice. He has been curating and hosting the First Tuesdays reading series in Jackson Heights since 2012. Newman is Professor of English and Creative Writing at SUNY’s Nassau Community College, where he’s been on the faculty since 1989.
The Irreverent Bio I Wish I Had More Opportunities To Use
That’s me, in the summer of 1985, in a classroom at Edinburgh University, proudly wearing the “smartass” tee shirt my mother, with great affection, bought me because I was indeed a smartass. Based on what I can see of the back cover of the book I'm reading, it's Liz Lochhead’s True Confessions. This is the bio that guy would write:
When Richard Jeffrey Newman was three years old, his mother thought he would make a great model for the new line of Lee’s jeans for kids that they were selling in the Lee’s store on Northern Boulevard. So she dressed Richard in cuffed-because-they-were-much-too-big-for-him jeans, suspenders, a fancy pair of shoes, and his favorite shirt. No matter how hard she tried, though, she couldn’t get him to stand still long enough for the Lee’s label just above his young butt to be clearly visible. His modeling career was over before it even started.
Nonetheless, Richard is convinced that writing makes him happier than modeling would have done. He’s published six books of poetry and translations; he runs a reading series; and he teaches English, creative writing, and, occasionally, Women’s and Gender Studies at an large, urban community college, where he served for six years as an elected officer on his union’s Executive Committee.
Some Of What Both Those Bios Leave Out
I am a father, a husband, a brother, a son, a friend. My favorite Korean food is agujjim. When I was just a little older than I am in the “modeling” picture above, my favorite song was Good Vibrations, by the Beach Boys. In junior high school, I planned to become either a computer programmer or a biologist. I've never been skinny dipping, but I have made love under the full moon in a forest. One of my favorite books is The Waves, by Virgnia Woolf. A piece of music I often turn to for comfort is Keith Jarret's Köln Concert. I am a survivor of childhood sexual violence. I started losing my hair at fifteen and smoked pot for the first time when I was seventeen. When I was in my late twenties and early thirties, I thought I might become a composer. During my teens, (often violent) antisemitism was a regular part of my life. My nickname in high school was Lurch, after the character on the original The Addams Family. My 11th grade English teacher predicted I'd grow up to play blues piano in a bar on Bleecker Street. That never happened, but I did play in 1986 at The Bitter End in a showcase featuring the guy who was my best friend at the time. It has been decades since I believed in a god. My first celebrity crush was Valerie Bertinelli in the original One Day At A Time. I speak three languages other than English–Hebrew, Korean, and Persian–none of them particularly well and Hebrew almost not at all anymore, since it has been decades since I last used it with any frequency. I'm a good cook and I will try almost any kind of food at least once. My superpower is that I can fold a fitted sheet.