MICHAEL SALCMAN was born in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia in 1946 and came to the United States in 1949. He began writing poetry while a student at Midwood High School in Brooklyn. He attended the Combined Program in Liberal Arts and Medical Education at Boston University where he received both the B.A. and M.D. in 1969. After a surgical internship, he trained in neurophysiology at the National Institutes of Health and did a residency in neurological surgery at Columbia University. He began his academic career at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 1976 and served as chairman of neurosurgery from 1984 through 1991. His early medical career was profiled by Jon Franklin and Alan Doelp in their book, Not Quite A Miracle (Doubleday, 1983). He was named a Distinguished Alumnus of Columbia's Neurological Institute in 1985 and of Boston University's School of Medicine in 2001. In 1991 he was elected President of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. He is the author of almost 200 medical and scientific papers and the author or editor of six textbooks, most recently the two-volume 2nd edition of Kempe's Operative Neurosurgery (Springer-Verlag, 2004).
He is past President of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. His essays on the relationship between the arts and sciences & the visual arts and the brain have appeared in Urbanite, Neurosurgery, Creative Non-Fiction and on-line at such venues as PEEKreview.net and artbrain.org. He has given a course on the History of Contemporary Art 1945 to the Present at a number of venues, including Roland Park Country School, the Contemporary Museum and Towson University.
He has been writing poetry for almost forty years. His earliest poems, some of which appeared in Bitterroot, date from 1963 through 1977. After a ten-year hiatus, he began to write again. The new poems have been widely published in such journals as New Letters, The Ontario Review, Harvard Review, Raritan, Barrow Street, Southern Poetry Review, River Styx, & New York Quarterly. He is the author of three previous chapbooks: Plow Into Winter (Pudding House Publications, Ohio, 2003), The Color That Advances (Camber Press, New York, 2003), ecphrastic poems on artists and works of art, and A Season Like This (Finishing Line Press, Kentucky, 2004).
His first collection, The Clock Made of Confetti (Orchises Press, Washington, D.C.) and fourth chapbook, Stones in Our Pockets (Parallel Press, University of Wisconsin-Madison) were published in 2007. Metonymy, a limited edition portfolio of etchings by Patrick Burns and poems by Michael Salcman is also in press.
His poetry has been heard on NPR's "All Things Considered", on WYPR's "The Signal" and in Lee Boot's award-winning feature-length documentary about the brain and creativity, Euphoria (2005).
He and his wife Ilene live in Baltimore with a demanding cat; they have two children who are presently out of the house.