Joel Savishinsky

Joel Savishinsky is an anthropologist, gerontologist, poet and writer, whose career has included work in western Turkey, the Canadian North, a working-class London borough, villages in South India and the Bahamas, and American nursing homes and retirement communities. His books include The Trail of the Hare: Life and Stress in An Arctic Community (Gordon and Breach, 1974; revised edition 1994), Dementia Sufferers and Their Caregivers in The London Borough of Islington (Polytechnic of North London Press, 1990), The Ends of Time: Life and Work in A Nursing Home (Bergin and Garvey, 1991), Breaking the Watch: The Meanings of Retirement in America (Cornell University Press, 2001). The latter two volumes each won the Richard Kalish Award for Innovative Publishing, the book-of-the-year prize given by the Gerontological Society of America.  His poetry, short fiction and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including American Writers Review, The Avocet, Beyond Words, Blood and Thunder: Musings on the Art of Medicine, Caesura, Cirque, The Examined Life Journal, Poetry Quarterly, Pontoon Poetry, Soul-Lit, and Windfall. In 2023, his collection Our Aching Bones, Our Breaking Hearts: Poems on Aging, was published by The Poetry Box. A Pushcart Prize nominee, he is the recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Museums of Canada, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Since 2008, he has been the Charles A. Dana Professor Emeritus in the Social Sciences at Ithaca College. savishin@gmail.com;  https://www.ithaca.edu/faculty/savishin