|
|
|
David Gershator graduated from the
City College of New York, same year as
Colin Powell who, like Gershator, was
assigned to remedial English. Both
agreed they were in the wrong class
and got out with no damage done. The
professor of that class later hired
Gershator to teach English at CUNY.
(Powell went on to other
battlefronts).
|
Following up on his
youthful discovery
of Poeta en Nueva
York, Gershator
studied
with Lorca’s brother,
Professor Francisco
García Lorca, at Columbia
University
and subsequently edited and
translated
the poet’s letters in Federico García
Lorca:
Selected
Letters
(New Directions). |
After receiving a doctorate in
Comparative Literature from New York
University, DG
taught over the years at various
universities, including Rutgers,
Brooklyn College, Long Island
University, and the University of the
Virgin Islands.
In the 1970’s and ‘80’s he co-edited Downtown
Poets, a small cooperative
poets’ press in New York, and
participated in readings in and around
Manhattan. He was a recipient of a
National Endowment for the Humanities
fellowship and a New York State
creative artists’ grant, among other
awards. Poet and translator Aaron
Kramer wrote that his work was
“powerful,” and that “the lyrical
thrust is of a high order.”
Gershator’s poetry can be
found in chapbooks, several
anthologies, numerous print
and online magazines,
including The Caribbean
Writer, and free
verse collections Elijah’s Child
(CCC, NY), Play Mas
(Downtown Poets, NY),
and Aztec
Autopsies (Solar
Noon Books, VI). His
creative non-fiction appears
in Home Planet News
and Contemporary
Haibun.
Next projects––two poetry
collections: Dividing
Jerusalem and American Alien.
|
|
Before and after Home
Planet News went online,
Gershator served as a reviewer for the
arts quarterly from his hermit’s
hideaway in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
As a visual artist, Gershator studied
print making at Blackburn’s
Printmaking Workshop and the Art
Students League in N.Y.C. He has
exhibited his acrylics, prints, and
multimedia work in group and solo
shows at several St. Thomas venues:
the Reichhold Center Gallery,
Caribbean Colour, St. Thomas Gallery,
St. Peter’s Greathouse, Lilienfeld
House, and Chase Manhattan Bank.
Gershator’s love of words and music
led him to songwriting
and creating a CD
of original children’s songs, several
based on children’s
books which he co-authored with
his wife, Phillis.
He and his wife also collaborated on
another project––raising a son and
daughter.
DG's other current projects: putting
together collections of haibun
and creative
non-fiction, including his childhood
experiences in Haifa during WW
II.
Portrait by Morton
Dimondstein
Acrylic on
paper |
|
|
|
|
|
|
