Dick Lourie (1937) is an American poet, editor, and musician and the author of eight books, with the most recent as of 2023[update] being Jam Session.[1][2]
Lourie was a student of Denise Levertov in her first class.[3]
In 1966 he was a co-founding editor of Hanging Loose Press, a small press in Brooklyn, NY, which publishes chapbooks, poetry, non-fiction, and fiction, as well as Hanging Loose Magazine.[4]
In 1968, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.[5]
He has edited, along with Mark Pawlak, two anthologies of high school writing Smart Like Me and Bullseye. In 2000, he released a CD, Ghost Radio Blues, a mix of blues and spoken word. He formerly worked as an editor for the University of Massachusetts.[6] Smoke Signals (film) ends with his poem "Forgiving Our Fathers." A 2001 song cycle by composer Robert Maggio includes texts by Lourie, Mark Strand, and Billy Collins is also titled "Forgiving Our Fathers".[7]
Lourie was born in 1937 and grew up in Brooklyn, in a family described by him as "Depression era-middle class-left wing-socialist-communist-Brooklyn-Jewish, not necessarily in that order".[8] He currently resides in Somerville, Massachusetts, with his wife, Abby Freedman.[9]
| Dick Lourie | |
|---|---|
| letter jacket | |
 Dick Lourie often wears a letter jacket with 'POET' on the back | |
 https://flickr.com/photos/chris_pix/11764182195 |
