Ron Silliman - Life

Life

In the 1960s, Silliman attended Merritt College, San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley, but left without attaining a degree. He has subsequently taught in the Graduate Writing Program at San Francisco State University, at the University of California at San Diego, at New College of California and, in shorter stints, at Naropa University and Brown University.

Silliman has worked as a political organizer, a lobbyist, an ethnographer, a newspaper editor, a director of development, and as the executive editor of the Socialist Review (US). While in San Francisco, he served on numerous community boards including the 1980 Census Oversight Committee, the Arson Task Force of the San Francisco Fire Department, and the State Department of Health's Task Force on Health Conditions in Locale Detention Facilities. After living in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 40 years, Silliman moved to Chester County, Pennsylvania in 1995 where he resides with his wife Krishna and two sons, Colin and Jesse. Silliman worked as a market analyst in the computer industry before retiring at the end of 2011.

In 2012, Silliman was one of three Kelly Writers House Fellows at the University of Pennsylvania, the others being Karen Finley and John Barth. Silliman was a 2003 Literary fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts & a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council as well as a Pew Fellow in the Arts in 1998. Silliman is one of the poets memorialized in Berkeley's Addison Anthology, a walk containing plaques recognizing poets and authors in his home town. Silliman was voted the Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere He received the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation in 2010.