Tom Mandel

• Name — Tom Mandel • Born — 12 September 1942 • Birthplace — Chicago, Illinois, U.S. • Spouse — Susan Kaplan (1963–1969); Gaelyn Godwin (1980–1986); Beth Baruch Joselow (1994–) • Occupation — Poet • Education — University of Chicago • Website — https: www.tommandel.com/

Tom Mandel's name at birth was Thomas Oskar Poeller; he was the child of Jewish immigrants who fled Vienna (after the Anschluss) and then Vichy France. Mandel was educated in Chicago's jazz and blues clubs and at the University of Chicago, where he studied with philosophers Richard McKeon and Hannah Arendt, novelist Saul Bellow, classicist and translator David Grene, and art critic Harold Rosenberg on the Committee on Social Thought. A first marriage in Chicago produced two daughters. He has also lived in New York City, Paris, San Francisco and Lewes, Delaware. In his twenties, he taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois Chicago and was also an editor at the Macmillan Company and a consultant to UNESCO. Becoming interested in collaborative technologies and social computing in the early years of the Internet, he helped found several technology companies.

In San Francisco Mandel became involved with the vein of new poetry that arose there (and in New York) and later became known as Language Poetry. He co-curated a reading series with Ron Silliman at the Grand Piano, a coffee house in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, continuing a series founded by Barrett Watten, and edited and published six issues of the magazine MIAM. He was Director of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University in 1978–79. Mandel is the author or co-author of over 20 volumes, and his work has been anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Post-Modern Verse, In the American Tree, 49+1: Poètes Americain, and multiple editions of the annual Best American Poetry. Mandel is a co-author of The Grand Piano, an experiment in collective autobiography by ten San Francisco language poets. Mandel's papers are held by the Beinecke Library of Yale University.