Tom Healy (poet)
Tom Healy | |
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Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board | |
Years active | 1994–present |
Partner | Fred Hochberg |
Website | http://www.tomhealy.net/ |
Tom Healy (born 1961) is an American poet and public servant. From 2011-2014, Healy was the chairman of the
Healy taught in the creative writing program at New York University from 2010-2013 and was a visiting professor at the New School from 2010-2014. He has also taught at The Frost Place in New Hampshire and Anderson Ranch, the artist residency in Colorado. For more than a decade, Healy was a guest writer at the New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore College.
Personal life
Healy grew up on his family's small dairy farm in Mount Vision, New York. He received his bachelor's degree in philosophy from Harvard and later received an M.F.A. in creative writing from Columbia University.
He lives in New York City and Miami with his long-time partner
Career
Healy has had a long career in the arts and public service. He currently serves as chair of the O, Miami Poetry Festival and as a trustee of PEN America and The Bass Museum in Miami Beach. He is a juror for the Gotham Book Prize and a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
In his mid-twenties, Healy founded a consulting business offering public relations and sponsorship services to museums, film festivals and other not-for-profit institutions. Clients of The Healy Company included Film Forum, the Metropolitan Museum, PBS, Westminster Abbey, the Steinbeck Center, the Vatican Observatory, the Jerusalem Film Festival, the Serpentine Gallery and the Institute of Contemporary Art in London.
In 1994, Healy left arts consulting to open one of the pioneering art galleries in Chelsea. His gallery showed numerous young artists who later rose to prominence, including
. Healy sold his gallery in 2000 to return to graduate school to study poetry.After 9/11, Healy was named president of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, where he led rebuilding efforts for the downtown arts community. He was instrumental in establishing the Tribute in Light memorial and oversaw funding for local artists, numerous arts performances like the River to River Music Festival, and LMCC's highly regarded artist residency program. In 2006, Mayor Bloomberg awarded Healy the New York City Mayors Award for Arts and Culture, which is the city's most prestigious award for achievement in the arts.
In 2011, President Barack Obama appointed Healy to the
After his tenure at Fulbright, Healy joined the board University of the People, helping to establish the world's first non-profit, tuition-free, online academic institution that seeks to revolutionize higher education by making college-level studies accessible to students worldwide.
Healy has served on many other philanthropic and cultural boards, including The Vera List Center for Art and Politics, the Grey Art Gallery, the Flow Chart Foundation, which is the literary estate of poet
Healy, who is HIV+, has long been active in various HIV/AIDS causes and anti-poverty efforts and has traveled extensively around the world for microfinance projects and AIDS-prevention organizations. President Bill Clinton appointed Healy to serve on the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) and he served on the board of the AIDS Action Council in the late 1990s.
Poetry
Healy has written three books of poetry.
His first collection, What the Right Hand Knows, with an introduction by poet
Healy's second book, Animal Spirits, was released in 2013 by Monk Books and was a collaboration with artist Duke Riley. Poet Bianca Stone wrote that Animal Spirits brought "the world of raptorial desire out into the open, blurring, even bruising, the lines that divide us from animal. ...Healy works his eloquent sorcery on the crude but complicated facts of human desire. Animal Spirits conjures a complicated world of emotion in which we are stung by pain even as we are stunned into joy."
Healy's third book of poems, Velvet, was published in 2017 also from Monk Books. Healy again collaborated with an artist, this time filmmaker and artist, Van Neistat, brother of filmmaker Casey Neistat. LitHub named Velvet one of the best books of poetry for 2017.
Healy's poems and essays on culture and politics have been published in many magazines and journals, including the
Bibliography
Poetry
- What the Right Hand Knows (Four Way Books, 2009)
- Animal Spirits (Monk Books, 2013)
- Velvet (Monk Books, 2017)
References
External links
- The author’s website
- News article about Healy
- Four Way Books’ blog on Healy
- Tom Healy’s book on Amazon
- Bio on Four Way Books
- Tom Healy's poetry blog on Senator Ted Kennedy
- Healy's poems in Drunken Boat
- Tom Healy biography
- LA Times Book Prize nomination
- Lambda Literary Award nomination
- Healy's poem in the T Magazine blog
- Tom Healy's Fulbright Tumblr
- Fulbright Scholarship Board
- Harriet Monroe Institute