Robin Hirsch
Filed under: Authors
Robin Hirsch was born in London during the Blitz, the son of German Jews who had fled Hitler. This complex history informs much of his work both as a writer and as a performer.
He is the author of Last Dance at the Hotel Kempinski: Creating a Life in the Shadow of History (New England Press, 1995), for which he received two NYFA Fellowships and the Robert and Adele S. Blank Jewish Arts Award. Jewish Book News called it "one of the best books ever written on the long arm of the Holocaust." He is also the author of FEG: Stupid Poems for Intelligent Children, written with the collaboration and interference of his own children (Little, Brown, 2002), which the New York Times called "searingly smart and intelligent."
He was the founder and artistic director of the New Works Project in New York City, where he developed more than two hundred works for the American theatre, including his own acclaimed solo performance cycle, Mosaic: Fragments of a Jewish Life ("completely glorious" according to the Village Voice), with which he has toured both the US and Europe.
He is a former Oxford, Fulbright, and English-Speaking Union Scholar, who has acted, directed, taught, published, and produced on both sides of the Atlantic. But the titles of which he is proudest were self-bestowed: Minister of Culture/Wine Czar/Dean of Faculty at the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village, which he founded with two other artists in 1977, and where, over the next 41 years, he presented some 700 shows a year in every conceivable genre (and quite a few inconceivable ones) from science to stiltwalking, from Afro-Latin jazz to Caribbean-American poetry, from Shakespeare at Midnight to the entire Iliad as an experiment in Breakfast Theatre. He co-produced (with Bernard Brightman) the award-winning album of original songs on Stash Records, Cornelia Street: The Songwriters Exchange (1980, re-issued 1990, 2007).
Cornelia was named "Best NY Poetry Series" by the Poetry Calendar, "Jazz Venue of the Year" by the NYC Jazz Record, one of "The Top 100 Jazz Venues of the World" by Downbeat Magazine, "Best Wine-by-the-Glass Program" by the Wine Spectator, and "Best of New York Food" by the Village Voice. In 1987, Mayor Ed Koch proclaimed it "a culinary as well as a cultural landmark."
He has toured the US for the National Humanities Series, served as a Literature panelist for NYSCA, and was a board member of the Writers Room, an urban writers' colony in New York City. He has performed various one-man versions of Café Stories at half a dozen New York theatres, is the subject of Michael Jacobsohn's documentary, Cornelia Street Café in Exile, and his book, The Whole World Passes Through: Stories from the Cornelia Street Café, is forthcoming from Wordville Press in the UK.
Photo by Kevin Hagen
Winning Entry: Shakespeare
Contest Won: Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest 2025, Honorable Mention
