Through the unprecedented Rosenberg lens, our recent poetic history turns inside out. Before our eyes, he creates his own art form, an essay more alive than entertaining, more penetrating than insightful. Almost natural--like the nonhuman world he consist
Poet-scholar David Rosenberg is co-author of the New York Times bestseller, The Book of J (with Harold Bloom), and the former editor-in-chief of the Jewish Publication Society. A poet of Toronto Coach House, New York School, and Jerusalem Cricket lineage, he has published several volumes of poetry. A Literary Bible presents thirty years of his original translation from ancient Hebrew.
Rosenberg is a survivor of the writing programs at The New School (with Kenneth Koch and Robert Lowell), University of Michigan (with Donald Hall), Syracuse University (with Delmore Schwartz), and University of Essex, England, where he pursued doctoral studies. He taught for several years at York University (Toronto), the City University of New York, and as a Master Poet for the New York State and Connecticut Arts Councils.
At the age of thirty, Rosenberg retired from teaching. For two decades, while working as a literary editor and translator, he studied the origins of ancient Hebrew literature and the Bible, in New York and Israel (with Robert Gordis, Harry Orlinsky, and Chaim Rabin), while his work appeared prominently in Harper's, The New Republic, Hudson Review, Paris Review and elsewhere around the globe (most recently in Chicago Review, Jacket in Australia, and Open Letter in Canada). A Poet's Bible (1991) won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize, the first major literary award given to a biblical translation in the U.S.
Rosenberg is the author and editor of more than twenty books, including volumes of contemporary writers on the Bible that first raised the question of how Judeo-Christian culture can be newly reinterpreted. During the past decade he has studied the context for ancient biography, leading to a diptych: Abraham: The First Historical Biography (2006) and An Educated Man: A Dual Biography of Moses and Jesus (2010). He continues to publish critical essays on poetry, as well as his long poem, The Lost Book of Paradise (1993) and a literary version of Kabbalah, Dreams of Being Eaten Alive (2000).
