Skunk Cabbage

Harry Waitzman is a retired judge living in Congers, New York. He was raised on a farm in Rockland County where he played in streams overgrown with skunk cabbage. As a teenager he enlisted in the U.S. Navy, serving as a crew chief. He attended the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia Law School and worked as a country lawyer and town judge. He decided poetry was the most important thing in his life, went to Sarah Lawrence College and graduated with an MFA in 1993. His chapbook, Seven Views of Hudson's River, was published in 1987. He is published widely in literary journals. He and his wife Marcia have two children and five grandchildren. He is at work on a second collection of poems.