Presently I am a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Emerita at SUNY New Paltz where I taught creative writing, memoir, creative nonfiction courses as well as American Literature, Women’s Literature, the Literature of Witnessing, and Holocaust Literature.
My poetry has been published in over one hundred journals including The Cream City Review, Kansas Quarterly, The Alaska Quarterly Review, Phoebe, The Chiron Review, Memoir(and), The Westchester Review, and Wind. A series of poems, “The Family Album,” based on old family photographs, was published in The Vassar Review. My work has been nominated for the Pushcart Press Prize Series. I had two volumes of poetry published by the Edwin Mellen Press (We Speak in Tongues, 1991; She had this memory, 2000). My chapbook, The Earth Was Still, was published by Finishing Line Press and another, Hieroglyphs of Father-Daughter Time, by Word Temple Press. My volume of poetry, Foraging for Light, was published by Finishing Line Press. And my chapbook about Bess Houdini, the wife of Harry Houdini, entitled Over the Moon Gone: The Vanishing Act of Bess Houdini, recently was published by Palooka Press.
A Smile, A Nod, A Reckoning
He once smiled at me with small brown eyes that had a yellow gleam. He once sat by my child’s bed and read me fairy tales, “Wynken, Blynken and Nod,” “The Sugar Plum Tree,” and the poems of Robert Louis Stevenson. In summer he held my six-year-old hand and delighted in taking me with daddy-longlegs steps up the hill to the big lake where we sat on our haunches and watched tadpoles skitter in the shallow water at the edge of the shore. I was his treasured soul—
Creative Nonfiction
August 2023 Issue
Birch Trees Circling a Clearing
I’m hiking with a friend on a trail next to a reservoir. On one side of us blue water, on the other, several white birch, striking amidst the dense foliage. I stop to take photos, the white streaks like long strokes of paint in a landscape of darker hues. I walk up to one, the scabbed bark so much more apparent on a closer view.
Creative Nonfiction
Issue 73
Jan Zlotnik Schmidt
Presently I am a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Emerita at SUNY New Paltz where I taught creative writing, memoir, creative nonfiction courses as well as American Literature, Women’s Literature, the Literature of Witnessing, and Holocaust Literature.
My poetry has been published in over one hundred journals including The Cream City Review, Kansas Quarterly, The Alaska Quarterly Review, Phoebe, The Chiron Review, Memoir(and), The Westchester Review, and Wind. A series of poems, “The Family Album,” based on old family photographs, was published in The Vassar Review. My work has been nominated for the Pushcart Press Prize Series. I had two volumes of poetry published by the Edwin Mellen Press (We Speak in Tongues, 1991; She had this memory, 2000). My chapbook, The Earth Was Still, was published by Finishing Line Press and another, Hieroglyphs of Father-Daughter Time, by Word Temple Press. My volume of poetry, Foraging for Light, was published by Finishing Line Press. And my chapbook about Bess Houdini, the wife of Harry Houdini, entitled Over the Moon Gone: The Vanishing Act of Bess Houdini, recently was published by Palooka Press.
A Smile, A Nod, A Reckoning
He once smiled at me with small brown eyes that had a yellow gleam. He once sat by my child’s bed and read me fairy tales, “Wynken, Blynken and Nod,” “The Sugar Plum Tree,” and the poems of Robert Louis Stevenson. In summer he held my six-year-old hand and delighted in taking me with daddy-longlegs steps up the hill to the big lake where we sat on our haunches and watched tadpoles skitter in the shallow water at the edge of the shore. I was his treasured soul—
Creative Nonfiction
August 2023 Issue
Birch Trees Circling a Clearing
I’m hiking with a friend on a trail next to a reservoir. On one side of us blue water, on the other, several white birch, striking amidst the dense foliage. I stop to take photos, the white streaks like long strokes of paint in a landscape of darker hues. I walk up to one, the scabbed bark so much more apparent on a closer view.
Creative Nonfiction
Issue 73