Leonard Schwartz is the author of numerous books of poetry, including, most recently, Heavy Sublimation (Talisman House, 2018) and Salamander: A Bestiary (Chax Press, 2017), with painter Simon Carr. His work in poetics The New Babel: Toward a Poetics of the Mid-East Crises (University of Arkansas Press, 2016), is inclusive of poetry, essays, and interviews. Other titles include If (Talisman House, 2012), and At Element, which explore the idea of an eco-poetics, as well as A Message Back and Other Furors (Chax Press, 2008), The Library of Seven Readings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008), and Language as Responsibility (Tinfish Editions, 2006). He also edited and co-translated Benjamin Fondane’s Cine-Poems and Other, with New York Review Books. Schwartz hosts the radio program Cross Cultural Poetics, archived online at the University of Pennsylvania’s Pennsound. About his poetry Forrest Gander writes “Leonard Schwartz’s poems introduce philosophical meditation to emotional sensibility in a way that has become unusual in contemporary poetry. In his work, one feels the risk, even the vertigo, of the mind orienting itself to otherness, to world, and to language. The sublimating and uplifting rhythms of his poems are pierced with veins of divinity. One might say in fact that the body of his work unwinds a long Gnostic inquiry that begins to articulate the contradictions and complexities of a significant and richly felt thought.” About The New Babel, Joseph Houlihan writes in Entropy: “Through his poetry, Cross Cultural Poetics, as well as his work as an editor of poetry in translation, Leonard Schwartz engages in an explicit project to deepen bonds across cultural difference, in the service of creating a society that allows these differences. The New Babel offers a brief and worthwhile glimpse into this expansive and generous project.”  Schwartz splits his time between Washington State and NYC.