Sam Cornish reads at the Gloucester Writers Center in Gloucester, Massachusetts, June 29, 2016. (Greg Cook)

Goodbye To Former Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish

August 22, 2018

Sorry to hear about the passing of Sam Cornish, who was Boston’s Poet Laureate from 2008 to 2015. He died on Aug. 20 at age 82.

“As a black writer there may have been anger in the book. It was not an anger directed at White America. It attempted to describe living in an America that is black and white, and all the other things that go with it,” he told Doug Holder in 2011 about his 1971 poetry collection “Generations.” “The book is arranged like most of my books are: from past to present. It begins with a slave funeral and it ends with a sense of Apocalypse. The history comes from things I heard from home, and things I picked up from the neighborhoods, not to mention popular culture.”

I photographed Cornish when he read at the Gloucester Writers Center in Gloucester, Massachusetts, on June 29, 2016. You can listen to the whole talk here.

WONDERLAND