About
Roger Greenwald grew up in New York, where he attended The City College and the Poetry Project workshop at St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery before completing graduate degrees at the University of Toronto.
Greenwald has published five books of poems: Connecting Flight, Slow Mountain Train, The Half-Life, An Opening in the Vertical World, and Keener Sounds: A Suite, a book-length sonnet sequence with eight paintings by Arielle Sandler (Black Widow Press, 2025).
He has earned several major awards for his poetry, including the prize for poetry of the Norma Epstein National Competition, the CBC Radio / Saturday Night Literary Award for poetry, the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Award, and the Littoral Press Poetry Prize. He has also won major awards for his translations of poetry from Scandinavian languages.
Featured Work
Keener Sounds: A Suite
The poet, when young, listened to a violinist practicing and wondered: “Could words as well be made to say the wordless?” This question animates Keener Sounds: A Suite, a sequence of contemporary sonnets in which music as both subject and inspiration accompanies evocative explorations of love, grief, time, and memory. With a bold lyricism, Roger Greenwald makes the sonnet form his own, both vital and new. Paintings by Arielle Sandler serve as intermezzos between the sections of this moving poetic suite.
