About

Born in Vineland, New Jersey, on March 8, 1949, Michael Blumenthal grew up in a German-speaking home in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. He received his BA in philosophy from the State University of New York in Binghamton in 1969, and his JD from Cornell Law School in 1974. In 1983, he was appointed as Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Poetry at Harvard University, where he served as Director of the Creative Writing Program from 1987-1992.

From 1985 to 1986, Blumenthal studied clinical psychology at Antioch University and later worked in private practice as a therapist with mostly Anglophone expatriates in Budapest. He also served as Fulbright Professor of American Literature in Budapest from 1992-1996 and in Berlin from 1999-2000. He ended his teaching career as Copenhauer Visiting Professor and Director of the Immigration Clinic at The West Virginia University College of Law, and now spends his time between Washington DC and the small Hungarian village of Hegymagas near the shores of Lake Balaton.

Blumenthal's debut collection, Sympathetic Magic (Water Mark Press, 1980), received the Water Mark Poets of North America First Book Prize. His other collections include, most recently, No Hurry: Poems 2000-2012 (Etruscan Press, 2012), AND (BOA Editions, 2009), Dusty Angel (BOA Editions, 1999), winner of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Prize, and Correcting the World: Poems Selected & New, 1980-2024 (The Ravenna Press, 2024). He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry in 1988 and his novel Weinstock Among the Dying (Zoland Press, 1992) was selected as recipient of Hadassah Magazine’s Ribelow Prize for the best Jewish novel of the year in 1993.

Seamus Heaney has described Michael Blumenthal as “one of the natural poets of his generation,” and W.D. Snodgrass wrote that “I have no doubt in saying that Michael Blumenthal is one of the most talented poets of his generation. In his foreword to Blumenthal's first book, Charles Fishman wrote: "Like Gerald Stern or David Ignatow, Blumenthal has a genuine comic gift as well as a broad, deep sensibility that encompasses and transforms nearly everything he touches—nearly everything that touches him." About his work, Grace Schulman has said, "Michael Blumenthal has the intelligence to sort out complexities, the innocence to see the world new, and the craft to combine those often incompatible qualities."