Jan Schreiber was born in 1941 and grew up in Fish Creek, Wisconsin, a hamlet of some two hundred people situated beneath a limestone bluff on a harbor of Lake Michigan. After receiving a BA at Stanford he enrolled as a graduate student at the University of Toronto and, to support himself, joined the editorial staff of the University of Toronto Press. A few years later, with an MA in hand, he went on to Brandeis University where he studied with poet J.V. Cunningham, receiving a PhD in English literature in 1972.

For a time he worked as an editor at the Godine Press, where he started the Godine Poetry Chapbook Series, then began doing government-funded research in the social sciences. He founded the non-profit Social Science Research Institute, which studied issues in criminal justice and mental health. During this time he wrote The Ultimate Weapon: Terrorists and World Order. Later, after an affiliation with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, he started a company that provided software to local governments. Only after selling it some twenty years later did he become, for the first time in his life, a fulltime writer.

His earlier books include Digressions (Aliquando Press, Toronto), Wily Apparitions (Cummington Press, Omaha), Bell Buoys (Aliquando), and two books of translations: Sketch of a Serpent and A Stroke upon the Sea. Schreiber was one of the founding editors of Canto: Review of the Arts, a Boston-based literary magazine that flourished in the late 1970s. His poems and translations have appeared in many magazines – including the Southern Review, Hudson Review, Christian Science Monitor, Literary Imagination, The Formalist, and Think – and in online journals such as Expansive Poetry, Not Just Air, and Literary Matters. His work appears in the on-line anthologies The Hypertexts and Poem Tree and in an anthology of ekphrastic poetry, Lay Bare the Canvas (2014). More recent books include Sparring with the Sun (criticism), Peccadilloes, Bay Leaves, and Poems of Paul Valéry (translations). Seven of his poems were set to music by Paul Alan Levi in a song cycle for tenor and piano called Zeno's Arrow.

In 2010 Schreiber, along with poet David Rothman, started an annual symposium in poetry criticism, The Critical Path. The symposium brings distinguished poet-critics together each year to present papers and exchange views on significant issues in the understanding and criticism of poetry in our time. In recent years it has been presented virtually and now reaches an international audience.

Over his career Schreiber has written many reviews and critical articles on poetry for Contemporary Poetry Review, Southern Review, Literary Imagination, Literary Matters, Think, and other publications. Many of these are collected in his latest critical work Breath Lines: How Poems Work and Why They Matter (LSU Press, 2025).

                                                                                     J A N   S C H R E I B E R
                                                                                               jansch@verizon.net