Blumenthal Poem Selected for Garrison Keillor Program

"What I Believe," a poem written by Michael Blumenthal, Old Dominion University's Mina Hohenberg Darden Chair in Creative Writing, will be the selected reading on Garrison Keillor's daily radio segment, "The Writer's Almanac," Saturday, Feb. 28.

The program, produced by American Public Media, is a five-minute public radio program during which Keillor reads short biographies of writers or other noteworthy individuals whose birthdays fall on that day, references historical events and reads one or two poems. Saturday's program can be read and heard at http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2009/02/28.

Blumenthal, who is on sabbatical from ODU this semester to serve as the Copenhaver Visiting Chair of Law at West Virginia University's College of Law, was recently awarded the 2009 Robert L. Kahn Prize for poetry from the Society for Contemporary American Literature in German.

Another poem written by Blumenthal, "And Even the Ampleness of the Flesh," appeared in the Feb. 4 edition of The New Republic, which may be read online at http://www.tnr.com/booksarts/story.html?id=964bd923-1bff-47dd-adeb-c77002137ac2.

Blumenthal 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.

His seventh book of poems, "And," will be published by BOA Editions in early 2009.