Peter Nickowitz

Peter grew up in Fairfield, Connecticut and graduated from Brandeis University and New York University, where he received a Ph.D. in English and American literature. His poems have appeared in literary magazines including The Paris Review, Barrow Street, Shampoo, Slope, Marsh Hawk Review, and Third Coast, and he was a National Poetry Series finalist.

 

His debut collection of poems, Cinema Vernacular, was released in 2014 by Publication Studio.  He is also the author of Rhetoric and Sexuality: The Poetry of Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill (Palgrave, 2006). His plays include The Alice Complex, Backgammon at the Louvre, Songs & Statues, and Love, Alters, Everything and have been produced at the Cherry Lane Theatre, Dixon Place, The Blank Theatre, and Stella Adler Studio, where he was the 2008-09 Harold Clurman Playwright-in-Residence. His screenplays (co-written with Bill Oliver) include The Obit Writer, a contemporary noir drama, and Lulu, a drama based on the life of silent film star Louise Brooks that was optioned by Neve Campbell and Peer Oppenheim.  His most recent screenplay, Jonathan, about a young man who has a condition in which he shares his body with another consciousness, is currently in development. He has taught at the City University of New York, the University of Southern California, and the New School, and currently teaches in the Liberal Studies Program and the Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing at New York University.