The Poet and the Poem
2025-26 Series

Featured Tom Mandel
Click here for Tom Mandel podcast.mp3
Tom Mandel is the author/co-author of more than 20 books/chapbooks including Realism, Letters of the Law, To the Cognoscenti, and The Grand Piano, a ten-volume experiment in collaborative autobiography by San Francisco Language Poets. Two new books, Simple Syrup and Letter to Poetryare forthcoming in 2019. Mandel’s writing has been published in newspapers, literary journals and anthologies around the world, including the influential In the American Tree and The Norton Anthology of Post-Modern Verse (First Edition). His work has appeared in multiple volumes of Best American Poetry and in French in 49+1: Poètes Americain. Mandel has taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois and San Francisco State University, where he was Director of SFSU Poetry Center. He has also been a consultant to UNESCO and a technology entrepreneur. Active on the Internet since the early 1990s, he was an early thought leader in collaborative software and media.Tom Mandel grew up in Chicago and was educated in its jazz and blues clubs and on theUniversity of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. More at http://www.tommandel.com and on Wikipedia.