Harry Newman

SUMMER 2025: New collection Cliff Dwellers receives Gerald Cable Book Award from Silverfish Review Press (available August 2026)

Harry Newman divides his time between writing poetry and writing for theater. His plays and poetry often revolve around loss, struggle, and the effects of power on individuals and society.

He is the author of the full-length collection Cliff Dwellers — forthcoming from Silverfish Review Press in 2026 — an interweaving of political and personal poetry on state violence and militarism and their consequences on our lives, and the chapbook, Led from a Distance, a sequence of poems exploring the impact of years of war fought at a distance and mediated mainly through screens, when seen at all. His poetry has been published widely in American literary journals over the last 20 years. Sample poems can be read online at Ecotone, Rattle, and Warscapes.

Newman’s plays include The Occupation, the story of the military occupation of a country told from the perspective of the occupied; Dry Time, written in the early 1990s and likely the first climate change related play; one-acts, The Dark and Correspondence; and a translation of Patrick Süskind’s The Double Bass. They have been workshopped and produced at the Contemporary American Theatre Festival, the Public Theater in New York, the Cincinnati Playhouse, the Guggenheim Works & Progress series, the Segal Theatre Center, and many other theaters across the U.S., as well as in Germany.

Press and Media: 

"Led from a Distance," (review), The Rumpus

"How We Fail to Humanize War," PBS NewsHour

Readings:

Brackett Creek Exhibitions, Brooklyn, NY, March 2024 (video)

Elk River Books, Livingston, MT (video), July 2023