Leonard Schwartz

Leonard Schwartz is a Jewish American poet and cultural journalist. His latest book, The New Babel: Towards A Poetics of the Mid-East Crises, published in 2016, includes poetry, essays and short interviews. As the title indicates, the book delves into the seemingly endless conflict in the Middle East and USA’s involvement, and the playful poems and essays try to find a linguistic (and thus human) alternative of freedom with the help of Arab, Jewish and American literature. If, published in 2012, is also a rather rare work when it comes to genres – it is a single philosophical poem in which the author explores the collective consciousness of humanity, the merging of the self and others in ‘us’ in a way that makes ontology and epistemology seem as natural as fear or hope. In addition to poems, Schwartz also published the collection of essays A Flicker at the Edge of Things: Essays on Poetics in 2008. Schwartz also hosts the radio programme Cross Cultural Poetics.