Recipient of the Gerald Cable Book Award
"Cliff Dwellers" by Harry Newman
Cliff Dwellers by Harry Newman
Recipient of the 2024 Gerald Cable Book Award
ISBN: 978-1-878851-28-4
Paperback $20.00
Release date: September 15, 2026
Harry Newman studied Chemistry and Mathematics at MIT before deciding to focus on writing. He’s the author of the chapbook, Led from a Distance (Louisiana Literature Press), a cycle of political poems on the social and moral costs of a culture of militarism and endless war. His poetry has appeared in Salmagundi, Rattle, Ecotone, Warscapes, Saranac Review and many other print and online journals. Also involved with theater, he has written several plays including The Occupation, Dry Time, The Dark, and a translation of Patrick Süskind’s Der Kontrabaß (The Double Bass), which have been performed at theaters around the U.S. and in Europe. He’s been a visiting writer at Utrecht University in Holland and playwright-in-residence at the Cincinnati Playhouse. The son of a groundskeeper and a working mother, Harry grew up in a working-class neighborhood of Miami. He has lived many years now in Queens, New York.
Harry Newman, recipient of the 2024 Gerald Cable Book Award
"Cliff Dwellers" is an interweaving of political and personal poetry on state violence and militarism and their compounding effects on our lives. The collection begins with poems on the consequences of decades of war, scenes of callousness and destruction often hidden. These are poems of the outer world, you could say but also include poems where the political seeps inward to the individual. As "Cliff Dwellers" unfolds, this balance slowly shifts towards more personal poems of destabilization and loss. The political realities build, then hangover poems of individual experience, the way state violence and its legacy of devastation, internationally and domestically, hangs over all of us now.
Cliff Dwellers, Harry Newman