To the Cognoscenti

Poetry. Tom Mandel grew up in Chicago and was educated in its jazz and blues clubs and at the University of Chicago where he studied on the Committee on Social Thought with Hannah Arendt and Saul Bellow. He has lived in New York, Paris, San Francisco and Washington DC, and now resides in a small town on the Atlantic coast. He has taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois and San Francisco State University (where he was director of the Poetry Center). Mandel was closely associated with the rise of Language Poetry during its formative years in the 1970s and 1980s. This is is his first new book since the mid-1990s.