About

Jerry Mirskin was born in the Bronx, NY, and has lived in California, Wisconsin and Maine. He has worked as a herdsman on a dairy farm, as a carpenter, and as a New York State Poet-in-the-Schools. He is a Professor at Ithaca College and teaches select classes at Cornell University. His poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, and he has presented his work and given workshops at universities, colleges, public libraries, art centers, and on public television and radio. Jerry won the Arts & Letters Prime Poetry Prize for a selection of poetry.  His manuscript, Picture a Gate Hanging Open and Let that Gate be the Sun, was the winner of the Mammoth Books Prize for Poetry, a national poetry competition. As a result of that prize, Jerry’s first and subsequent books were published by Mammoth Books.  His second collection is entitled In Flagrante Delicto. Jerry’s poems have been anthologized In Roots & Flowers: Poets Write About Their Families, edited by Liz Rosenberg (Henry Holt and Co.) The Prairier Schooner Anthology of Contemporary American Jewish Poetry, edited by Hilda Raz (University of Nebraska Press) the Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, edited by Deborah Ager and M. E. Silverman, The Working Poet II edited by Scott Minar, (Mammoth Books)  The Heart is Improvisational an anthology edited by Carol Lipszyc (Guernica) and forthcoming in Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets edited by Valerie Fox and Lynn Levin (Texture Press).   His recent collection is entitled, Crepuscular Non Driveway.  An essay, “The Hard Part Is Knowing What To Say: The Poetry Of Jerry Mirskin,” written by the poet Howard Nelson about Jerry’s writing, was featured in  The Hollins Critic.  Copies of Jerry’s collections are available by emailing the editor at Mammoth Books: info@mammothbooks.org

A sample of Jerry’s poetry can be found here and elsewhere online by clicking here,

The Hollins Critic essay about Jerry’s writing can be found by clicking here.