Joel Lipman is a professor of Art & English at the University of Toledo, the official Poet Laureate of Lucas County, Ohio, and the founder of the Toledo Poets Center. For over 30 years, he has contributed immensely to the arts and culture of Toledo and Northwest Ohio. In 1985, he received the Governor’s Award, both for his own poetry and for his efforts on behalf of the arts in Northwest Ohio. He has served numerous times on Ohio Arts Council panels, and received highly competitive OAC individual artist’s fellowships five times.

As a University of Toledo professor, he has served as associate dean for the visual and performing arts in the College of Arts & Sciences, as a member of the UT liaison committee to the Toledo Museum of Arts, and as the Art Department’s leader in the process of acquiring national accreditation. In 1992, he was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Belize where he taught poetry and helped establish a writing program.

As a poet, Lipman studied with such lyric masters as James Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks and has published eight collections of poetry. As a visual artist, he has combined an interest in words to create a method of conveying meaning with words (and letters, and punctuation, and whole book pages) as visual objects. Prof. Cynthia Hoque, the Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetics at Arizona State University has called him “a distinguished literary artist who is also at home and making a difference in the visual arts.”

Lipman received his BS in English and his JD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and his MA in creative writing from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has been teaching at the University of Toledo for more than thirty-five years. He is currently working on a scholarly project on the work of the 20th Century American poet and visual artist Bern Porter.

Video of Joel Lipman reading a poem at the 2010 Ohioana Awards Reception

Home page of the Toledo Poets Center