Eli Goldblatt

Eli Goldblatt is a professor of English at Temple University. He was born in 1952 in Cleveland, Ohio, and grew up on Army posts in the U.S. and Germany. After earning his B.A. at Cornell University, he attended a year of medical school, traveled in Mexico and Central America, and taught high school for 6 years in Philadelphia. He completed a Ph.D. in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1990. Since moving to Temple from Villanova University in 1996, he has served as University Writing Director, co-director of the Writing Center, and Director of First Year Writing. He is the director of New City Writing, an institute focused on community literacy in North Philadelphia, and has served in 2009-10 as the founding director of a university-wide initiative called Community Learning Network. Through New City Writing, Temple students and faculty have participated in many projects since 1997 in the Latino and African American communities near the university. His most active current involvement is with Tree House Books, an after school literacy program near the Temple campus, and Philadelphia Public School Notebook, an investigative publication dedicated to education in the city.

Goldblatt works both as a composition/literacy researcher and as a creative writer. His first research book, Round My Way: Authority and Double Consciousness in Three Urban High School Writers (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), focused on the individual writer and institutional sponsorship, but in recent years he has published on community-based learning and literacy autobiography. He and Steve Parks co-authored the College English article “Writing beyond the Curriculum” in 2000, and his essay “Alinsky’s Reveille: A Community-Organizing Model for Neighborhood-Based Literacy Projects” won the 2005 Ohmann Award in College English. He expands the theme in Because We Live Here: Sponsoring Literacy Beyond the College Curriculum (Hampton P 2007), which won the National Council of Writing Program Administrators’ Best Book Award in 2008. His most recent book is Writing Home: A Literacy Autobiography (S. Ill UP, 2012). His poems have appeared over the last thirty years in many small literary journals, most recently in magazines such as The Pinch, Cincinnati Review, Hambone, Paper Air, Another Chicago Magazine, Madison Review, Louisiana Literature, and Hubbub. His books of poems include Journeyman’s Song (Coffee House, 1990), Sessions 1-62 (Chax Press, 1991), Speech Acts (Chax Press, 1999), and Without a Trace (Singing Horse Press, 2001).

In addition, Goldblatt published two children’s books, Leo Loves Round and Lissa and the Moon’s Sheep, both from Harbinger House in 1990.

Selected Publications

Composition/Literacy Books:

• Literacy, Economy, and Power: Writing and Research after Literacy in American Lives. Edited with John Duffy, Julie Nelson Christoph, Nelson Graff, Rebecca Nowacek, Bryan Trabold. S. Illinois UP, 2014
• Writing Home: A Literacy Autobiography. S. Illinois UP, 2012.
• Because We Live Here: Sponsoring Literacy beyond the College Curriculum. Hampton Press, 2007.
• Round My Way: Authority and Double-Consciousness in Three Urban High School Writers. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995.