Jewish woman becomes Kansas Poet Laureate

Ever since she was a child, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg wanted to be a poet. Now, the state of Kansas has honored her work by naming her poet laureate, starting July 1.

A committee organized by the Kansas Arts Commission chose Mirriam-Goldberg based on her artistic excellence, professional accomplishments and her ideas on advancing poetry in Kansas.

“The Kansas Arts Commission is proud to honor Dr. Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg as the state’s new poet laureate,” said Kansas Arts Commission Chair Anita Wolgast in a written statement. “She is a talented literary artist who brings a wealth of experience and inspiration to Kansans.”

It wasn’t always a clear path to poetry for Mirriam-Goldberg, because “I had to figure out how to make a living,” she said.
A Brooklyn native, she attended the University of Missouri-Columbia and nearly got a degree in journalism. Three credits short of that degree, she switched her major to labor history, with a minor in poetry.

After that, she was a political organizer, working with labor unions on energy conservation and environmental reform. She moved to Lawrence, Kan., in 1983 and married Ken Lassman two years later. They now have three teenage children together.

Living so close to the University of Kansas gave her the opportunity to earn a master’s in creative writing and a Ph.D. in literature. Mirriam-Goldberg, 49, taught everything from basic composition to children’s literature as an adjunct professor at KU for 10 years. She’s also taught at Lawrence’s Haskell Indian Nations University and currently teaches classes at Goddard College in Vermont.

At Haskell, “students would ask me what tribe I was from, and I would say, ‘A very old one,’ ” Mirriam-Goldberg said, referring to her Jewish heritage.

Activist, writer
She’s very proud of her Jewish roots. For a while, she used her Hebrew name, “Miriam” as her last name, but added an “r” to it. When she went back to “Goldberg,” she didn’t give up the “Mirriam,” choosing to hyphenate her name instead.

Mirriam-Goldberg considers her first published collection of poetry, entitled “Lot’s Wife,” (The Woodley Press, 2000) to be “very much a midrash (that is a) retelling of the story from the women’s point of view.”

These days, she does a lot of work with people who are living with serious illnesses at Turning Point, a non-profit organization that supports such individuals. Mirriam-Goldberg is a breast-cancer survivor and draws on her personal experiences for this work.

“We all find populations that we feel like we’re gifted to work with,” she said. “When people live with a serious illness, the veneer is off, and they’re ready to create something of great meaning.”

She has conducted many writing workshops, including several for low-income women of color through the Douglas County Housing Authority. This work ties in to her new position, she said.

“The poet-laureate position is really an activist, writing position; doing programs that help people enrich their lives through the written word,” she said.

Part of her job will be to travel throughout Kansas, conducting poetry workshops and teaching locals in different communities how to sustain writing circles in their locales, to encourage people all over the state to develop their writing skills.

New opportunities
With her experience teaching and working with different groups, Mirriam-Goldberg says she’s ready for the responsibility of her new position and excited for the new opportunities she’ll get to both work with new people and do more readings of her own poetry.

As poet laureate, she’ll also conduct a writing-related radio show on High Plains Public Radio, a regional network of National Public Radio affiliates whose flagship is KANZ-FM 91.1 in Garden City, as “a special way to reach people in the western part of the state who don’t have the resources we have in the Kansas City area,” she said.

Mirriam-Goldberg has three books coming out this year: “My Tree Called Life: Writing And Living Through Serious Illness” and “Landed,” a poetry collection, both from Mammoth Publications; and “The Sky Begins At Your Feet: A Memoir on Cancer, Community and Coming Home to the Body,” published by Ice Cube Press. For more details on the books, visit Mirriam-Goldberg’s Web site:
www.carynmirriamgoldberg.com.

She’s also currently working on a book about the war experiences of local Holocaust survivor Lou Frydman and one-time Polish resistance fighter Jarek Piekalkiewicz.

Trackback(0)

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)

Write comment