MICHAEL SALCMAN was born in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia in 1946 and came to the United States in 1949. He attended the Combined Program in Liberal Arts and Medical Education at Boston University, receiving both the B.A. and M.D. in 1969. He trained in neurophysiology at the National Institutes of Health and in neurological surgery at Columbia University. He served as chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland from 1984 through 1991. His early medical career was profiled by Jon Franklin and Alan Doelp in their book, Not Quite A Miracle (Doubleday, 1983).
He was named a Distinguished Alumnus of Columbia's Neurological Institute in 1985 and of Boston University's School of Medicine in 2001 and served as President of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. He is the author of almost 200 medical and scientific papers and the author or editor of six textbooks, most recently the two-volume 2 nd edition of Kempe's Operative Neurosurgery (Springer-Verlag, 2004).
He is past President of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore. His art reviews and essays on the arts and sciences & the visual arts and the brain have appeared in Urbanite, Neurosurgery, Creative Non-Fiction and on-line at sites such as www.PEEKreview.net and www.artbrain.org. Since 2001 he has taught an annual course on the History of Contemporary Art at such venues as Roland Park Country School, The Contemporary Museum and Towson University, and given seminars on the brain's visual system and art at Cooper Union in New York and at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore.
He has been writing poetry for almost forty years. His earliest published poems date from 1963 through 1977. After a ten-year hiatus, he began to write again. The new poems have been widely published in such journals as Harvard Review, Raritan, Southern Poetry Review, Notre Dame Review, Atlanta Review, Barrow Street, Nimrod, River Styx & New York Quarterly. His poems have been heard on NPR's All Things Considered and in Euphoria (2005), an award-winning documentary on the brain and creativity. The author of three previous chapbooks (Plow Into Winter , Pudding House, Ohio, 2003; The Color That Advances, Camber Press, New York, 2003; and A Season Like This, Finishing Line, Kentucky, 2004), his fourth chapbook, Stones In Our Pockets (Parallel Press, University of Wisconsin), and first collection, The Clock Made of Confetti (Orchises, Washington, DC), are forthcoming in 2007. He and his wife Ilene live in Baltimore.