Michael Salcman
Michael Salcman (CAS’69, MED’69) of Baltimore, Md., a recipient of a 2001 BU School of Medicine Distinguished Alumni Award, writes, “On September 30, 2019, I closed my neurosurgical office after 50 years of medical practice, including my service as chair of neurological surgery at the University of Maryland in Baltimore, six textbooks on medical and scientific subjects, and more than 200 scientific and medical articles. For about five decades, I was involved with three different careers: art, medicine, and poetry. I have written poetry since high school and had my poems published in magazines since the 1970s,” including in Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, Cafe Review, Harvard Review, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, New Letters, and Raritan. “Many of my poems have been on medical subjects and many others are ekphrastic poems about art and artists,” he writes. He also has published five poetry collections: The Clock Made of Confetti (Orchises Press, 2007), nominated for the Poets’ Prize; The Enemy of Good is Better (Orchises Press, 2011); A Prague Spring, Before & After (Evening Street Press, 2016), winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize; Shades & Graces (Spuyten Duyvil, 2020), inaugural winner of The Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize; and Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022). “In addition to my own poetry I spent six years putting together Poetry in Medicine (Persea Books, 2015), a best-selling anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors, patients, illness, and healing. In the art world, I have served as president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore and have taught history of modern and contemporary art at a variety of institutions, most regularly as special lecturer in the Osher Program at Towson University.” Learn more at www.salcman.com.
From the Fall 2022 issue.