Benjamin Saltman

Benjamin Saltman (September 7, 1927 – January 9, 1999) was an American poet and Professor of verse writing and contemporary American literature at California State University, Northridge. The Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award is given annually by Red Hen Press in his honor.

Biography Saltman was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the youngest son of Russian-Jewish (Ukrainian) immigrants. He earned a B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh in 1952 and an M.A. in creative writing from San Francisco State University in 1959. After graduation he took a job at Sierra College near Auburn, California where he, along with around seven students, started a literary magazine named Viewpoint. He taught for one year at Sierra College before joining his friend Alvin Duskin as a teacher at the experimental college, Emerson, in Pacific Grove, Ca. In 1967 he received a Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate School where he wrote his doctoral thesis "The Descent to God: Religious Language in Several Contemporary American Poets". At Claremont Ben Saltman became good friends with poet Bert Meyers, whose friendship and encouragement inspired him to start writing poetry seriously.

Career Saltman was the recipient of two literature fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1969 and 1987. In 1992, after retiring, he volunteered to teach at California State University Northridge for free after state budget cuts caused the school to cancel 1,000 courses previously scheduled for the fall semester.

Association with Vedanta After reading the Swami Prabhavananda's translation and commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, Saltman started frequenting lectures at the Vedanta Society of Southern California he wrote an article for "Vedanta and the West" called What Vedanta Means to Me.