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David Gershator graduated from the City College of New York, same year
as Colin Powell who, like Gershator, was assigned to remedial English.
Both agreed they were in the wrong class and got out with no damage
done. The professor of that class later hired Gershator to teach
English at CUNY. (Powell went on to other battlefronts).
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Following up on
his youthful discovery
of Poeta en Nueva York,
Gershator studied
with Lorca’s brother, Professor Francisco
García Lorca, at Columbia University
and subsequently edited and translated
the poet’s letters in Federico
García Lorca:
Selected
Letters (New Directions).
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After receiving a doctorate in Comparative Literature from New York
University, DG
taught over the years at various universities, including Rutgers,
Brooklyn College, Long Island University, and the University
of the Virgin Islands.
In the 1970’s and ‘80’s he co-edited Downtown Poets, a small
cooperative poets’ press in New York, and participated in readings in
and around Manhattan. He was a recipient of a National Endowment for
the Humanities fellowship and a New York State creative artists’ grant,
among other awards. Poet and translator Aaron Kramer wrote that his
work was “powerful,” and that “the lyrical thrust is of a high order.”
As a reviewer for Home Planet
News, an arts quarterly, Gershator keeps up with the
contemporary poetry scene from his hermit’s hideaway in the U.S. Virgin
Islands.
As a visual artist, Gershator studied print making at Blackburn’s
Printmaking Workshop and the Art Students League in N.Y.C. He has
exhibited his acrylics, prints, and multimedia work in group and solo
shows at several St. Thomas venues: the Reichhold Center Gallery,
Caribbean Colour, St. Thomas Gallery, St. Peter’s Greathouse,
Lilienfeld House, and Chase Manhattan Bank.
Gershator’s love of words and music led him to songwriting.
He collaborated on a CD of
original children’s songs, several based
on children’s
books, six of them co-authored with his wife, Phillis. He and his
wife also collaborated on another project--raising a son and daughter!
Yonah is a professional musician and Daniel serves as an officer in the
Foreign Service.
DG's other current projects: putting together collections of haibun and
creative non-fiction, including his childhood
experiences in Haifa during WW II.
Portrait by Morton Dimondstein
Acrylic on paper |
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