Tom Healy (poet)

Tom Healy
Born (1961-08-05) 5 August 1961
Mount Vision, New York, United States
Occupation Poet, writer, professor, chairman of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board
Years active 1994–present
Partner(s) Fred Hochberg
Website http://www.tomhealy.net/

Tom Healy (born 1961) is an American writer and poet, professor, public servant, and arts professional. Healy is a fellow of the Harriet Monroe Institute at the Poetry Foundation. From 2011-2014, Healy was the chairman of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, which oversees the Fulbright scholars program worldwide. He was appointed to the Fulbright Scholarship Board by President Barack Obama in 2011 and was elected by the Board three times to serve as its chairman. Healy currently serves on the Board’s executive committee. 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 Mayors Award for Arts and Culture. Healy taught at New York University from 2010-2013 and was a visiting professor at the New School from 2010-2014.

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.

Career

Early in his career, Healy owned a consulting company offering public relations and sponsorship services to museums, film festivals, and other art organizations including Film Forum, the Metropolitan Museum, PBS, Westminster Abbey, the Steinbeck Center, the Vatican Observatory, the Jerusalem Film Festival, the Serpentine Gallery 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 sold his gallery in 2000.

Healy, who is HIV-positive, has long been active in various HIV/AIDS causes and anti-poverty efforts and has traveled extensively around the world for microfinance projects and AIDS-prevention organizations. President Bill Clinton appointed Healy to serve on the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) and he served on the board of the AIDS Action Council in the late 1990s.

After 9/11, Healy was named president of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, where he led rebuilding efforts for the downtown arts community. He was instrumental in establishing the Tribute in Light memorial and 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 Mayors Award for Arts and Culture, which is the city's most prestigious award for achievement in the arts.

In 2011, President Barack Obama appointed Healy to the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. He was subsequently elected Chairman, a position to which he was re-elected in 2012 and 2013. As Chairman, Healy traveled extensively for the State Department, visiting more than thirty countries on six continents. Healy wrote regularly about the Fulbright experience for the Huffington Post and many of his popular speeches appear on his website.

Furthermore, Tom Healy has contributed greatly to the success of the University of the People. As a member of the Board of Trustees, his work has helped establish the world's first non-profit, tuition-free, online academic institution that seeks to revolutionize higher education by making college-level studies accessible to students worldwide.

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, Drunken Boat and the New York Times. His work has also appeared in a variety of artists books and anthologies.

Healy's second book, Animal Spirits, released in 2013 by Monk Books, was a collaboration between Healy and the tattoo artist Duke Riley. According to the publisher’s website, Healy's "intense, diamond-hard poems ... brings the world of raptorial desire out into the open, blurring, even bruising, the lines that divide us from animal. The poems in Healy’s second book range from recollections of life on a farm to the writings of a dying grandmother to the heights of Everest, tracking Healy’s (read our) experience of the precarious, the provisional, and the immaterial terror that daily couples with our thrill and wonder at life on earth ... In the tight, but generous economy of these poems, Healy works his eloquent sorcery on the crude but complicated facts of human desire. Animal Spirits conjures a complicated world of emotion in which we are stung by pain even as we are stunned into joy."

As a fellow of the Harriet Monroe Institute, Healy is currently co-editing an online anthology of 20th century American poetry with poet Adam Fitzgerald and a documentary archive of poet John Ashbery’s home in Hudson, New York with Ashbery biographer, Karin Roffman.

Healy remains active in the New York City and Miami arts scenes. He is currently a trustee of PEN America, University of the People, O, Miami Poetry Festival, Creative Time and the Flow Chart Foundation, the literary estate of poet, John Ashbery. Healy is also a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Bibliography

Poetry

References

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