Lisa Grunberger is an Assistant Professor in English and First Year Writing. She teaches courses in critical writing and reading, composition, creative writing, poetry, literature, and popular fiction. She holds a doctorate in Comparative Religions with a specialty in American Cultural History from the University of Chicago Divinity School. She has published on physical culture pioneer Bernarr Macfadden in Sex, Religion, Media (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). She has published two books – a collection of poetry, Born Knowing (Finishing Line Press, 2012) and Yiddish Yoga: Ruthie’s Adventures in Love, Loss and the Lotus Position (Harper Collins, 2009), which she is adapting as a stage performance called Yiddish Yoga: The Musical. She is a widely published poet in such journals as Mudfish, The Drunken Boat, Bridges, Philadelphia Poets, Paroles des Jours, and Dialogi, one of the principle Slovenian journals of literature and culture. Her poems have also been translated into Russian and Yiddish. Her one-woman show, A Prayer Collector, premiered at the Makor Center for the Arts/92 St Y.
Lisa Grunberger’s I Am Dirty gives us a perceptive eye in evocative poems in which an acute consciousness translates into perfect metaphors and surprising images. “On the night I betrayed you / my writer’s block ended.” gives us a taste of what’s to come. Or “On the night I betrayed you / the wind sounded like an ambulance / come to extinguish me.” These poems could only have been written by a woman, a woman deeply conscious of her condition even as her words soar beyond it.
- I Am Dirty
