|
|
Henry Garfield, MFA
| | Henry Garfield is the author of five published novels, hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, a few dozen short stories, numerous poems of varying length, and a handful of songs. |
|
Conceived on New Year's Eve and named after Hank Williams (his parents unaware that the legendary singer's given name was Hiram), Henry Garfield was born in Philadelphia on September 4, 1957, one month before the launching of Sputnik. He moved with his parents and sisters to the Maine Coast just in time to get caught up in the 1967 American League pennant race and become a Red Sox fan for life. His third novel, Tartabull's Throw, published in 2001 by Simon & Schushter, is partially set in the Maine of his childhood.
Hank spent most of the 1980s and 1990s in Southern California before returning to Maine in 1999. He now lives in Bangor, Maine with his wife, Elaine Garfield, RN, who works in the surgical department at a local hospital. He teaches writing at the University of Maine and is a contributing editor and feature writer for Bangor Metro Magazine.
He attended St. Paul's School in Concord, NH, from which he graduated in 1976. After undergraduate studies in English, History, and Astronomy at Beloit College in Wisconsin, the University of Maine, and San Diego State University, he turned to fiction. His first novel, Moondog was published by St. Martin's Press in 1995, and was follwed by a sequel, Room 13, in 1997. Both are set in Southern California.
He received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine in 2004, the same year his historical novel The Lost of John Cabot was published by Simon and Schuster.
He is the proud father of two grown children: a daughter, Polaris, and a son, Rigel. Polaris recently graduated cum laude in English from the University of Maine; Rigel is studying filmmaking at San Diego City College.
The author's great-great-grandfather was James A. Garfield, the twentieth U.S. President. A campaign biography of the candidate published prior to the 1880 election asserts:
"It is tolerably certain that the male ancestor of the American Garfields was one of that picked company of men, women and children, who came over in the ship which bore Governor Winthrop to the Massachusetts shores, and it is absolutely certain that this ancestor, Edward Garfield, was one of the one hundred and six proprietors of Watertown, now a lovely suburb of Boston, for he is so recorded in 1635."*
* from J.M. Bundy, The Life and Public Services of James A. Garfield, 1880, A.S. Barnes & Co., New York
|
|
|
