Carla Schwartz to read from new book

At Natick Center for the Arts

By Susie Davidson

Advocate Correspondent

NATICK - Carla Schwartz wrote her first book of poetry when she was eight years old. She continued to sporadically put her thoughts into verse through high school, college, and graduate school, occasionally taking a writing class. With a new illustrated book, First State, Ruminations on Conversations of a First Date, she will be featured Jan. 15 at the Natick Center for the Arts, 31 Main St. (Route 27, just north of Route 135).

Schwartz, who holds a masters and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University and a Bachelors from Tufts University in the same field, also wrote a chapbook of 32 poems, To the Other End of the Cord, which has nearly sold out its first edition. “I wrote the title poem at Mark Doty's workshop in Truro, in 2001,” she said. First State, which she claims was written on pure inspiration, is illustrated and contains 24 poems. “I wrote the final poem of this collection, ‘Touch and Ghosts’, at Doty's workshop, and the rest of these I wrote as a challenge to myself to write 28 poems in 28 days, all about topics that came up in conversation during a date.” She ended up writing 28 poems in 24 days, condensed them to 23, adding a long poem at the end. Many of the poems in this work were inspired by Dr. Seuss, she says; the illustrations are original. She works as a senior software technical writer; for the last year, she has been working as a senior staff scientist in the field of bioinformatics, performing data analysis in genetics and molecular dynamics.

In a prior career as a college professor and researcher, Schwartz held positions at McGill University, University of Vermont, and University of Florida. She also held visiting scholar appointments at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the University Catholique de Louvain in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, and the University of Newcastle, in Newcastle, NSW, Australia, where she hosted poetry at a regular pub reading, and helped organize the first Newcastle Writer's Festival. She left academics five years ago and moved back to New England to become a technical writer for an engineering design software company. “This move was very good for me because it got me out of academics and into a new career,” she said. “I was hired as a senior writer, with no prior formal technical writing experience.”

While in Vermont, she deposited her book Hormones into Burlington’s Brautigan Library. “Hormones really refers to the poems I wrote overseas, but I also collected poems I had written prior to putting the book together,” she explained. She put one book a year into the library until it was retired to Burlington’s Fletcher Free Library. “Through this work, I was interviewed by the BBC, Good Morning America, and on National Public Radio,” she said. Some of her poems appeared in 05401, a Burlington literary urban architectural journal.

A Framingham resident (“though Cambridge is my cultural home”), Schwartz attended the Hebrew Academy of Nassau County (HANC) for kindergarten. “One of my first paying jobs was cleaning toilets at Temple Beth-El in Great Neck,” she recalled. Her German-born mother is a Holocaust escapee; with her family, they were on the last boat that made it from Europe to Cuba, and entered the US via Cuba. Her father was born in Brooklyn, New York to Russian Jewish parents. “My strong Jewish cultural heritage certainly helped me semi-survive being a lone female for years in a traditionally male field, and suffer the consequences,” she said. “I believe that being strong-minded, quick-witted and assertive are qualities Jewish women often take from the culture which men may find threatening, especially in domains they are used to dominating,” she added.

When Schwartz moved to the Boston area, she became involved with poetry readings at the Cantab and the Lizard Lounge. In the last few years, she has been featured locally at the Lizard Lounge, the Brookline Booksmith, and the Natick Center for the Arts, where she will again appear this Wednesday evening at 8:30, following a 7:30 p.m. open mic.