Claire Schwartz

Biography

Claire Schwartz is the author of the poetry collection Civil Service (Graywolf, 2022). Her writing has appeared in Poetry, the Believer, the Nation, the Iowa Review, the Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of a 2022 Whiting Award for Poetry and a Pushcart Prize, she received her Ph.D. in African American Studies, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies from Yale. She is the culture editor of Jewish Currents.

See Work

POETRY / Summer 2022

Death Revises Badly

By Claire Schwartz

In the Old Dictator’s obituary, a charming anecdote—

When the Old Dictator was a boy, his father saved his wages
for a month to buy his son a watch.

POETRY / Summer 2022

Meaning Well

By Claire Schwartz

We have come together, the Board Chair begins,
for obvious reasons. In a time of great division, this table—
he raps his knuckles against the oak
for emphasis

INTERVIEWS / Fall 2018

Forward Thinking

By Claire Schwartz ,  Illustration by Denise Nestor

Claire Schwartz: According to the poet Marie Howe, who studied with Joseph Brodsky at Columbia, Brodsky said: “You Americans are so naïve. You think evil is going to come into your houses wearing big black boots. It doesn’t come like that...
INTERVIEWS / Winter 2016

An Interview With Rita Dove

By Claire Schwartz

In Germany, I began to experience what it was like to think in another language. Also, the way Germans looked at me—with curiosity but no racial baggage—was so different than Americans. I began to understand a little bit more about my own...