To the Cognoscenti

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). He has also been a consultant, marketing executive and entrepreneur.
 
Tom Mandel has published in dozens of newspapers, literary journals and anthologies, including the influential In the American Tree and The Norton Anthology of Post-Modern Verse. His books include: Ency, Erat, Ready to Go, Realism, Central Europe, Some Appearances, Three Strange Books, Letters of the Law, The Prospect of Release, Absence Sensorium (a collaboration with Daniel Davidson), and Ancestral Cave.