Ron Charach was born in Winnipeg and was educated in the Arts, Medicine and Psychiatry in Winnipeg, Toronto and New York. For more complete biography, and selected poems, readers are referred to his website www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/charach/
Charach is Canada's best known physician poet, and the only psychiatrist/poet to have published more than a half-dozen books of poetry. His work is featured in the world anthology of physician poetry, Blood & Bone, published by the University of Iowa Press.
In 1990 he edited an anthology of poems by 37 Canadian phsyician/poets, called The Naked Physician. Charach lives in Toronto with his wife and two teenaged children. He is a frequent contributor to the Globe and Mail and since 1987 has hosted a column on poetry in The Medical Post.
Awards
The League of Canadian Poets National Poetry Contest, finalist, 1988-90,
1992, 1993, 1997.
The Henry Fuerstenberg Award for Poetry (2003) for Dungenessque.
Selected Publications
The Big Life Painting (Quarry Press, 1987) ISBN 0-919627-48X.
The Naked Physician, editor of Anthology (Quarry Press,1990) ISBN 0-919627-77-3.
Someone Else's Memoirs.(Quarry Press, 1994) ISBN 1-55082-105-9.
Past Wildflowers. (Quarry Press, 1997) ISBN 1-55082-197-0.
Petrushkin! (Ekstasis Editions,1999/2000) ISBN 896860-48-6.
Dungenessque (Signature Editions, 2001) ISBN 0-921833-76-8.
Elephant Street (Signature Editions, 2003) ISBN 0-921833-89-X.
Selected Anthologies
The Naked Physician. (Quarry Press, 1990).
1995-96 Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry.
(Monitor Books, 1997).
Blood and Bone: Poems of Physicians. (University of Iowa Press, 1998).
Books in Print
Charach, Ron
Elephant Street (Signature Editions, 2003) ISBN 0-921833-89-X.
Dungenessque (Signature Editions, 2001) ISBN 0-921833-76-8.
Petrushkin! (Ekstasis Editions,1999/2000) ISBN 896860-48-6.
Past Wildflowers. Quarry Press, 1997. $14.95 ISBN 1-550821-97-0.
Someone Else's Memoirs. Quarry Press, 1994. $14.95 ISBN: 1-55082-105-9.
The Big Life Painting. Quarry Press, 1987. $10.95 ISBN: 0-919627-48-X.
Ron Charach 57 Heathdale Rd, Toronto ON, M6C 1M9
charach@interlog.com
Poet in the School
(Toronto)
Charach is a poet and practising psychiatrist, who has published a collection of poems The Big Life Painting and edited an anthology of poems about medicine written by some 37 Canadian physicians, The Naked Physician. His most recent book is Someone Else's Memories. He has written and spoken extensively on the relationship between creativity and psychopathology. He has served as a contributing poetry editor for The Medical Post for the past five years. His training in child and adolescent development helps him pitch concepts to kids at an appropriate level. Charach has also recently begun writing, and illustrating, books for very young children (ages junior-K and up), the last two of which are titled Lemily by the Sea and Christopher Shproyngeez and the Deedlekin Doll. He is also currently working on a novel for teenagers, titled Benji at the Group Home.
Grade Levels: all
Fees: standard
Classroom Approach:
Charach
prefers that older children be familiar with his work, but also enjoys acquainting
students with representative works of well-known poets from the literary canon.
A gifted reader, Charach enjoys reading poems to little kids in a multiplicity
of accents. He also enjoys reading his own work to teenagers, as well as discussing
the ins and outs, and ups and downs of the literary life. His emphasis is on
making more poetry accessible to more young people, as well as to encourage
individual students in their own efforts at poetic expression.