About
Gerald McCarthy is graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, and SUNY Geneseo. A recipient of awards and fellowships from the National Writers Union, the NYS Council on the Arts, the NEH, the CIC/Gilder Lehrman Center for American History the NAACP-Spring Valley Chapter, he has also had Visiting Artist residencies at The American Academy in Rome, and served on the Board of Directors of The African American Historical Society-Rockland County and Rivertown Film . He has taught writing in Attica Prison, migrant labor camps, schools, and colleges, and has recently completed a memoir, The Blue Hours, based on his experiences in the Marines during the Vietnam War and afterwards. “Flight”—a section from the memoir about going AWOL will appear in the Spring 2022 issue of Consequence Forum.
Featured Work
Door in the Wall
"Startlingly intimate and delicate--in an age of bombast and public shaming--drawing us, as only the best poetry can, into a quiet inner life and then subtly, but with acute sharpness, touching the horrific aftermath of war. McCarthy's poems are witty, contemporary, and funny, too from Amy Winehouse to the Vietnam War--he exposes the deep complexity and mystery of memory and time." David Means (author of Hystopia: (a novel), and Instructions for a Funeral.
Other Works
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Door in the wall
2020
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Trouble Light
2008
Awards and Recognition
- War Story (1977), Shoetown(1992), Trouble Light(2008) and Door in the Wall(2020). His poetry and non-fiction have appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies including: The New Anthology of American Poetry: Postmodernisms: 1950-present (Rutgers University Press), American War Poetry (Oxford) Carrying the Darkness—The Poetry of the Vietnam War (Texas Tech), The Vietnam War in Stories, Songs and Poems (St. Martin’s Press), TriQuarterly, The National Catholic Reporter, New Letters, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Poet Lore, America, The North American Review, etc.
