Judith Baumel

Judith Baumel (b. October 9, 1956 Bronx, New York) is an American poet.

Life

She grew up in New York City, attending the Bronx High School of Science. She graduated from Radcliffe College, magna cum laude, studying with Robert Lowell, Robert Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert B. Shaw, James Richardson, and Jane Shore. She graduated from Johns Hopkins University, where she studied with Richard Howard, Cynthia Macdonald, and David St. John. She taught at Boston University, and Harvard University.

In 1985, she married the poet and journalist David Ghitelman, an early editor of AGNI magazine. They divorced in 1999. Her current partner is Philip Alcabes, professor of Public Health at Hunter College, City University of New York, and author of Dread: How Fear and Fantasy Have Fueled Epidemics from The Black Death to Avian Flu (Public Affairs 2009).

She was director of the Poetry Society of America from 1985 to 1988.

Her work has appeared in The Nation, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Yale Review, AGNI, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.

She lives in New York City and teaches at Adelphi University, and City College of New York. Her blog is at http://www.judithbaumel.com

Awards

• 1987 Walt Whitman Award

Work

Books

Periodicals

Memoir

Anthologies

Reviews

According to Robert McDowell in his review of Now in The Hudson Review, “Unlike much of contemporary poetry, Baumel’s meditative poems succeed in moving beyond the self without becoming either unbearably politically correct, or hopelessly mired in grandiosity and pretension... The poet Mary Karr once said that poetry’s aim is ‘to disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed.’ Baumel triumphs on both counts as she makes an uneasy truce with a world she finds impossible to accept.”