Mitchell Waldman

Mitchell Waldman, born in 1957 in Chicago, Illinois, is a fiction writer who works generally in the realist tradition and tends to use dialogue to bring his characters to life. He is the author of the novel, A Face in the Moon (Writers Club Press, 2000), a belated coming-of-age story told from a male first person viewpoint. Waldman's novel has been described as "a Shakespearean-like tale with a twist," as "a story readers won't soon forget," and as "an emotionally deep story that takes the reader so deep inside a lonely, sad young man readers will hold their breath knowing that they cannot escape until the book is finished." The novel has further been described as showing Waldman's "great talent for developing characters who are people you feel you know, then placing them in life settings we can all understand and believe," , as demonstrating his "tremendous talent for genuine characters in real life settings," and as showing the author's application of "skill in his flowing narrative complete with a skillful portrayal of psychological grapplings."
Waldman's short stories, poetry, and essays focus in great part on relationships, broken families, and men's and women's issues. His work also deals, in some part, with the effects of war on families and their participants, as well as with alienation, in some instances in the context, specifically, of being a Jew in a largely Christian society.
His work has appeared in many publications, including Wind Magazine, new aesthetic, (which called his story Glass Slippers, "a brilliant short story, the work of a master-craftsman... belongs to the tradition of pithy dialogue, swift story telling of james m cain"") The Battered Suitcase, eFiction Magazine, worldwide hippies, Fiction Collective,</ref> Shorelines Literary Magazine, Wilderness House Literary Review, Greatest Lakes Review, Eclectic Flash Literary Journal, Moronic Ox Literary and Cultural Journal, Five Fishes Journal, Girls With Insurance, Ink Monkey Magazine, 13th Story, 63 Channels, Poetpourri, Poetry Motel, Poetic Hours, Poetalk, Poetry Peddler, Poetry Forum, Poetry Forum Newsletter, The Poet's Haven, Woven Worlds, The Advocate, Desperate Act, Malcontent, CWG Newsletter, Verbal Expression, Bold Print, First Literary Review, HazMat Review, Mobius, Innisfree, The Parnassus Literary Journal, Unknowns, Long Story Short, Rochester Shorts, The Rochester Times-Union, Groggy, and the anthologies, Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust (Northwestern University Press, 1998) Messages from the Universe (iUniverse, 2002), and America Remembered (Virgogray Press, 2010).
Waldman also co-edited (with Diana May-Waldman), Wounds of War: Poets for Peace (PublishAmerica, 2006), which includes the work of many notable writers and poets, including William Heyen, Brandon Wilson and Patricia Janus.
His poem, Hello, which appears in Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust (Northwestern University Press, 1998) was written based on a personal incident occurring while he was visiting his hometown of Skokie, Illinois during the time of the infamous proposed Nazi (National Socialist Party of America) march in that town in the late 70's (National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie), later portrayed in the .
In addition to his fiction, poetry, and essay, Waldman's legal articles, especially dealing with computers and the Internet, such as "Computers and the Internet" (American Jurisprudence 2d) and "Expectation of Privacy in Internet Communications" (92 American Law Reports 5th) have also been widely cited in legal and related documents and research.
Waldman grew up in Skokie, Illinois, where he attended Niles North High School. He was subsequently a student at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, where he was taught by noted fiction writer, Mark Costello. He later studied at the University of Texas at Austin, for a short time, and subsequently received a JD at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois.
He currently lives in Rochester, New York, with his partner, poet Diana May-Waldman.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu