Milton Kessler

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Milton Kessler (1930-2000) was a poet and an English professor at SUNY Binghamton. He was one of the founders of the university's Creative Writing Program.

His first book, Sailing Too Far, was published by Harper & Row, and widely noted. Kessler had grown up in Queens, New York, in a Jewish family. He was a volunteer spear carrier and prop boy at the New York Metropolitan Opera as a teenager, and had classical training as a singer. He worked selling cloth at the Sample Shop as a young adult, and married Sonia while working a range of modest jobs.

He attended graduate school at Harvard, but found enough success as a poet that he left doctoral studies, and landed at SUNY, where his students included Camille Paglia and Gerry Crinnin.

Kessler had a brief bout with thyroid cancer, an affliction he shared with poet Paul Blackburn. Boarding a bus after a visit to Binghamton, Blackburn told Kessler, "How warm to share a common disease." Blackburn died not long after.

After his passing SUNY Binghamton established a poetry award in his honor, the Milton Kessler Memorial Prize [1] for Poetry.