Alan Albert has been writing and publishing poems for more than thirty years. As an undergraduate, he was a member of the University of Iowa’s undergraduate Writer’s Workshop. He received his M.A. in English and Creative Writing from the University of California, Davis, studying with Karl Shapiro and Sandra Gilbert. In 1975 he published his first poem in Mississippi Review. Later, he was First Prize Winner of the Third Annual Boston University Alumni Poetry Competition and First Prize Winner of the Worcester County Poetry Association Annual Competition. He has been a finalist and semi-finalist in poetry in the Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Fellowship Program. Recently, he has been awarded Artist Residencies from The Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada, and from The Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont. He was also awarded a Scholarship Grant in Poetry from the 41st Annual Squaw Valley Community of Writers Conference.
Albert has published in the following print and online journals and anthology: Alumni Poetry Center Journal of Boston University, The American Poetry Review, The Black Warrior Review, California Quarterly, The Cortland Review (with online audio recording available, Issue 47), Grub Street, Kansas Quarterly, Madrona, The Massachusetts Psychological Association Quarterly, MassPoetry.org, Mercy of Tides: Poems for a Beach House (Dartmouth, MA: Salt Marsh Press), Mississippi Review, New Infinity Review, Obras, Poetry East, Poetry Now, Santa Clara Review, Southwest Review, Talking Writing, Wisconsin Review, The Worcester Review, and Y’Bird Magazine.
Albert’s first book of poetry, Fragments of the Natural, was published in 2015 by WordTech Communications in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Over recent years, Albert has been active in the poetry community in the Greater Boston area. Most recently he has been a featured reader at the Calliope Poetry Series in West Falmouth, Massachusetts, Porter Square Books in Cambridge, the Brookline Poetry Series, the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the Newton Public Library Poetry Series, Newtonville Books, the Chapter and Verse Poetry Series in Jamaica Plain, and at Trident Books in Boston.
Albert has studied with many teachers, including Vijay Seshadri and Tom Sleigh at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA; with Fred Marchant, Bruce Weigl, and Martha Collins at the Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts, Boston; with Alan Shapiro at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival; and with Barbara Helfgott Hyett in The Workshop for Publishing Poets in Brookline, Massachusetts.
In his other writing, Albert has been Opinion-Editorials Editor of the Massachusetts Psychological Association Quarterly, in which the following essays were published: The Five-speed Monastery, A Therapist Visits the Abbey, Sit-down Comedy, Industrialization of Everything, The Illness of the Poem, Childhood—Brief or Intermittent?, I’ll Show You My Theory If You’ll Show Me Yours, and Dissertation As Illness.
Albert has taught poetry writing and literature at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, California, and poetry writing at The Cambridge Center for Adult Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He works as a clinical psychologist in private practice in Newton, Massachusetts. He received his doctorate in clinical psychology from Antioch New England Graduate School. He lives with his partner, Susan Nisenbaum Becker, in Dedham, Massachusetts.
