Dick Lourie is an American poet, editor, and musician and the author of eight books, with the most recent as of 2023 [update] being Jam Session. [1] [2]
Lourie was a student of Denise Levertov in her first class. [3]
In 1966 he was a co-founding editor of Hanging Loose Press, a small press in Brooklyn, NY, which publishes chapbooks, poetry, non-fiction, and fiction, as well as Hanging Loose Magazine. [4]
In 1968, he signed the " Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. [5]
He has edited, along with Mark Pawlak, two anthologies of high school writing Smart Like Me and Bullseye. In 2000, he released a CD, Ghost Radio Blues, a mix of blues and spoken word. He formerly worked as an editor for the University of Massachusetts. [6] Smoke Signals (film) ends with his poem "Forgiving Our Fathers." A 2001 song cycle by composer Robert Maggio includes texts by Lourie, Mark Strand, and Billy Collins is also titled "Forgiving Our Fathers". [7]
Lourie was born in 1937 and grew up in Brooklyn, in a family described by him as "Depression era-middle class-left wing-socialist-communist-Brooklyn-Jewish, not necessarily in that order". [8] He currently resides in Somerville, Massachusetts, with his wife, Abby Freedman. [9]