Monday, October 23, 2006

Very saddened by the news, which I read on Josh Corey's blog, that Deborah Tall, poet, memoirist, and longtime editor of Seneca Review, has passed away. I never knew her, but came to admire her greatly through some correspondence we had about Seneca Review, and through her new lyric essay/memoir, A FAMILY OF STRANGERS, which I read over the summer. It's an astonishing book, a very powerful account of a search for origins after the Holocaust scattered her family. She seems to me to have been a very positive and generous force in the American literary community. I'm sad indeed to hear she's gone.

1 comment:

Matthew Thorburn said...

I'm so sorry to hear this too. Seems like Deborah Tall was a good advocate for writers and definitely put together a journal I consistently enjoyed reading. In fact, Seneca Review was the first "big" journal a poem of mine appeared in, so I always thought kindly of her and appreciated her encouragement, though I never got to meet her.