Sam Cornish

Samuel James Cornish was Boston’s first poet laureate. He was associated with the Black Arts Movement. He taught at Emerson College.
Cornish was an educator, a bookseller, and a prolific poet who made sense of African American history and urban life through his poetry. As the first poet laureate of Boston, he worked to make poetry accessible to those not traditionally interested in the art form.

Biographical information

Early life (1935–1960)

Cornish was a born in Baltimore, Maryland. He lived his early life with his mother, grandmother, and older brother Herman in a small apartment on McCulloh Street in the Druid Hill section of West Baltimore, a primarily African-American neighborhood. Cornish did not grow up with his father. He wrote about this experience in his first book of poems:

It was the most natural thing being without a father. You just never saw him in the house. Suddenly you were in the world. No memories except you were moving around doing things. This is how it begins. It’s like you were always there, and he never was...

During the Depression-era economy, Sam’s mother Sarah supported the family by working mainly as a domestic, with seasonal work at the post office. She developed medical conditions that prevented her from doing physical labor, so Cornish and his brother were obliged to find employment. During his adolescence, Cornish worked as a hospital orderly, a janitor, a clerk in a kosher deli and an insurance salesman. He graduated from the Henry Highland Garnet School in the Upton neighborhood and attended the Frederick Douglass High School but left after one semester at the age of 17 because he was uncomfortable socializing with children from more affluent families. He attended both Goddard College and Northwestern University.
In 1958 Cornish was drafted into the army. After boot camp, he spent two years at Ft. Benning, Georgia, which he later regarded as a mainly positive experience because, he said, for the first time, he was able to have enough to eat and access to health care. Owing to fallen arches and extreme presbyopia, he was not a good candidate for military maneuvers so spent the remainder of his induction on K.P., peeling potatoes and as an army medic. He later claimed that doing this undemanding work left him ample time to continue his reading.

1961–1981

In 1962 Cornish published a chapbook titled People Beneath the Window. According to Carrington Bonner, writing for Black Books Bulletin, “…there’s an old man at New Era Bookstore in downtown Baltimore who will tell you he has sold over 1,000 copies…” He was interviewed by the Baltimore Sun about this period:

Back in Baltimore he knocked around for awhile, doing odd jobs and trying to figure out what to do with his life. He was drawn to the civil rights movement, which was starting to rumble, and took part in the 1963 March on Washington. That experience inspired him to write a poem, which appeared soon after in a newsletter. "I was really excited," he says of his first published work. "It gave me the chance to bear witness to an important moment of history."

By 1964, Cornish had become active in the small press scene and his poems were appearing in various literary magazines. Through these publications, he was making contacts—not only among poets but in the community of neighborhood activists and social workers. He formed associations with the Baltimore Multi-Service Center, a community-based organization, and with the Enoch Pratt Free Library, promoting not only his writing but the writing of others in the community, including writing by children.
At that time, there was increased interest in promoting the writings of inner-city youth and adults. In 1966, his efforts resulted in his first major publication, Chicory, an anthology of writings by children and adults that was published by the Association Press, a subsidiary of the YMCA. The Enoch Pratt Library currently features an article on the history of the magazine:

Chicory differed from a traditional literary magazine in several ways. It initially focused on writings by residents of the Baltimore community action target area in East Baltimore, an impoverished, predominantly African American neighborhood, though it would grow through neighborhood-based community centers to encompass the entire city. It published pieces with no editing and also published snippets of overheard conversations or poems told to one of the editors. It gave Baltimore’s poor communities an outlet for their thoughts and ideas. As the November 1969 issue proclaimed, “The purpose of this magazine is to publish work overheard by the editor which reflect the music of language in the inner city; to encourage more spoken and written comment by people in the community action area; and to inform those other people and agencies within the area of our ways of living.”

Chicory continued for some years after Cornish had moved to Boston. In fact, it was featured in a book on Baltimore's history. The Baltimore Sun described him as: “…...a local poet who has become a sort of literary talent scout in the inner city. Mr. Cornish launched “Chicory,” a magazine devoted largely to impromptu writing by children; he edits “Mimeo,” a poetry magazine that attracts work from across the county; and he started “”Bean Bag,” a magazine sponsored by the Methodist Church’s “Operation Crowded Ways” project. Mimeo published such poets as Ruth Whitman, Ron Schreiber and Ottone Riccio…. Beanbag Press published chapbooks by, among others, Emmett Jarrett, Norman Hoegberg and William Doreski.
In 1968 he married Jean Faxon, a graduate student in social work at the University of Maryland. He was working for Baltimore’s Community Action Agency. She was from Lenox, Massachusetts, so they decided to move to Boston, where he found employment in two local bookstores. On one visit back to Baltimore, he had a disagreement with personnel at the Lombard Junior High School and believed he was “banned from Baltimore.” An article in the Evening Sun, “Come Home, Sam,” sought to clear up the mistake. The article describes him as a “teacher at the Highland Park Free School” in Roxbury, MA, although he was hired specifically as a curriculum specialist because of his work on Chicory and similar community-based involvements.
By the late 1960s, he was settled in Massachusetts and connecting with the local poetry community. A flyer produced by the Harvard Advocate announcing a weekly poetry reading in Harvard Square on April 18 has an index card stapled to it: "Sam Cornish will be reading..." The flyer mentions Mimeo and his chapbook People Beneath the Window and that he worked in a local bookstore. Another small announcement in the Boston Globe states that he was reading with poet Ruth Whitman at the Arlington Street Church. In 1967 a chapbook entitled Winters was published by the Sans Souci Press and a broadside, The River, was printed by the Temple Bar Bookshop in 1969.
Cornish’s work on “Chicory” led to a job as an educational consultant and curriculum specialist for the Central Atlantic Regional Education Laboratory in Washington, DC, where his job involved designing reading materials for classroom use. In 1969, he was hired as an educational advisor by the Education Development Center work with their Project Follow Through in Newton, MA:

Follow Through was the largest and most expensive experimental project in education funded by the U.S. Federal Government that has ever been conducted … originally intended to be an extension of the federal Head Start program.... typically disadvantaged preschool children and their families.

In this position, he created writing materials such as booklets and broadsides for primary school students, and advised their teachers about the open education project. He also traveled to Paterson, NJ, Philadelphia and Washington to provide parents and teachers with information about open education. An article In the News of Paterson New Jersey describes a workshop:

…the purpose of which was to orient the Paterson staff to the philosophy of the Education Development Center Follow Through Model... Sam Cornish, EDC of Boston Mass, was in charge of the creative writing sessions…

At EDC, he photographed the communities to which he traveled, as well as the students and teachers with whom he worked. His employment with EDC Follow Through lasted through 1979.
Working with children’s writing through Chicory and Follow Through inspired him to write books for children. His first commercially-published children’s book, Your Hand in Mine, was issued by Harcourt, Brace in 1970. It was well received and, according to Black World, “His excursion into the field of children’s stories is a gem…” This was followed in 1974 by Grandmother’s Pictures, described by the New York Daily News as “Possibly the first black Mother’s Day book ever written.” Grandmother’s Pictures, evocatively illustrated by Jeanne Johns, is not, strictly speaking, a book for children but rather an all-ages reminiscence in verse that the author described as a “disconnected mood picture.” Grandmother’s Pictures was one of his most successful books. In 1976, Bradbury Press published a hardcover version and, in 1978, Avon published a mass market edition.
In 1971 Beacon Press issued his first full-length book of poems titled Generations. It was also the title of a chapbook he had self-published in 1967, although there is little similarity between the two beyond the title and one or two of the poems. The book-length Generations, unlike the chapbook, contained topics and themes that he would revisit many times in his later work. It was a very promising start and, according to Clarence Major, “The poems are clear and sharp, with no excess fat." According to various reviewers over the course of his career, Sam Cornish would become known for his “perfect pitch” and “unerring sense of cadence,”.
By 1972, his marriage to Jean Faxon had ended and, in 1976, he married his second wife, Florella Orowan, and they remained married until his death in 2018. She was a bookseller and together, they opened a small bookstore, Fiction, Literature and the Arts, in the Boston suburb of Brookline.
In 1979, Cornish began working as Literature Director at the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities. Cornish held the position for only three years, although during that time, he advocated vigorously for small and literary presses to receive matching-grants funding.
Cornish was Poet-in-Residence at Emerson College from 1979-1980.
His book Sam’s World was published by Decatur House Ltd. in 1980. In Black Books Bulletin, Carrington Bonner wrote that the poems “are clear images to the point of the themes, with perceptive acknowledgement of the dark beautiful/ugly realities of the inner city from which he came. Simplicity and sure hand are tools that are not easily contained by a poet. Sam’s World shows off these unique qualities.” In Callalloo, E. Ethelbert Miller wrote: “I was happy to discover that Sam’s world was real, not imaginary. It is one in which people occupy a major space.” Both reviewers were impressed that Cornish was not “seeking inner exile,” as poets tend to do, but rather writing about real world experience.