Tom Healy (poet)
| Tom Healy | |
|---|---|
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| Born | 5 August 1961 Mount Vision, New York, United States |
| Occupation | Poet, writer, chairman of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board |
| Years active | 1994–present |
| Partner | Fred Hochberg |
| Website | |
| http://www.tomhealy.us/ | |
Tom Healy (born 1961) is an American writer and poet, public servant, and former gallery owner. Healy is the chairman of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, which oversees the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board program worldwide. He was appointed to the Fulbright Scholarship Board by President Barack Obama in 2011 and was later elected by the board to serve as its chairman. Under President Bill Clinton, Healy was a member of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA). Since the 1990s, Healy has played an active role in the New York City arts scene. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, he served as the president of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), where he led rebuilding efforts for the downtown arts community. In 2006, Mayor Michael Bloomberg awarded him the New York City Arts Award.
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[edit] Personal life
Healy was raised in Mount Vision, New York, where he lived on his family’s dairy farm. Healy writes on his website that he "left his family's farm and the dirt roads" of Mount Vision to study at Harvard, where he received his B.A. in philosophy. He later received an M.F.A. in creative writing from Columbia University.
He currently divides his time between New York City, Miami, and Washington, D.C. with his partner, Fred Hochberg, who is currently the chairman of the Export-Import Bank of the United States.
[edit] Career
For much of his early career, Healy ran a consulting company to museums, film festivals, and other art organizations around the world, including Film Forum, the Metropolitan Museum, PBS, Westminster Abbey, the Vatican Observatory, the Jerusalem Film Festival, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. Healy opened one of the first art galleries in Chelsea in 1994, showing numerous young artists who later rose to prominence, including Tom Sachs, Janet Cardiff, Kara Walker, and Karen Finley. Healy continued to run the gallery until 2000 but remains an active participant in the New York City and Miami arts scene. He is currently a trustee of both the O, Miami! Poetry Festival and Creative Time, an arts organization that promotes site-specific, socially-engaged art.
In the mid-1990s, President Bill Clinton appointed Healy to serve on the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA). Throughout his career, Healy has supported various HIV/AIDS causes and has traveled around the world for microfinance projects and AIDS-prevention organizations.
After 9/11, Tom Healy served as the president of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, where he led rebuilding efforts for the downtown arts community. As president, Healy oversaw funding for local artists, numerous arts performances like the River to River Music Festival, and LMCC's highly-regarded artist residency program. In 2006, Mayor Bloomberg awarded Healy the New York City Arts Award, which is the city's most prestigious award for achievement in the arts.
In 2011, President Barack Obama appointed him to the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. He was later elected by the board to serve as chairman.
[edit] Poetry
In 2009, Four Way Books published Healy’s first collection of poems, What the Right Hand Knows, with an introduction by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Richard Howard and a cover by John Ashbery. The book was a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2009 Lambda Literary Award in Poetry. In their review of the collection, Publishers Weekly writes, "Laconic yet passionate and sparely personal, the poems in this first book set urbanity and unfolding tragedy in common words and slow-moving, short lines. Healy's finest moments make him spare, elegiac and wry all at the same time." The poet Carol Muske-Dukes wrote in the Huffington Post of What the Right Hand Knows, “From the near-cheerful merciless poems about childhood on a farm and the brutal lives of animals to big city glamour with new possibilities of flight from a flawed paradise—there is the sharp edge of art … keeping things in perspective.”
Healy’s poems and essays on contemporary art have been published in a variety of journals, including the Paris Review, the Yale Review, BOMB, Salmagundi, Tin House, and Drunken Boat. His work has also appeared in a variety of artists books and anthologies.
A chapbook, Bruised, is forthcoming in spring 2012.
[edit] Bibliography
Poetry
- What the Right Hand Knows (Four Way Books, 2009).
