Blumenthal Featured in Washington Post Sunday Magazine
"Learning to Speak Baboon," Michael Blumenthal's latest account of his experience volunteering at an animal rehabilitation center in South Africa, appeared in the Oct. 19 edition of the Washington Post Sunday Magazine.
"... I am, in my adult life, a man obsessed with primates," observes Blumenthal in his article, "having always recognized something of myself within them, and of them within me."
Like many of the volunteers, Blumenthal learned of the Centre for Animal Rehabilitation and Education (C.A.R.E.) and the work of its founder and director, Rita Miljo, and her staff from watching a program called "Growing Up Baboon" on the Animal Planet network.
Blumenthal, who holds the Mina Hohenberg Darden Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University, has submitted a proposal to publishers for a biographical work on Miljo. His seventh book of poems, "And," will be published by BOA Editions in early 2009.
Blumenthal also is the author of the memoir "All My Mothers and Fathers" (Harper Collins, 2002) and "Dusty Angel" (BOA Editions, 1999). His novel "Weinstock Among the Dying," which won Hadassah Magazine's Harold U. Ribelow Prize for the best work of Jewish fiction, has just been re-issued in paperback, and his collection of essays from Central Europe, "When History Enters the House," was published in 1998. He will hold the Copenhaver Chair at the University of West Virginia Law School for the spring 2009 semester.
To read his article in the Washington Post Sunday Magazine, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/14/AR2008101402463.html.
More information about Blumenthal and his work is available at www.michael-blumenthal.com.