Ira Silverberg

Ira Silverberg is an American editor, writer, and director of Broadview Arts Management, a consultancy working with writers, artists, publishers, arts funders, and non-profit arts organizations. He is a member of the adjunct faculty of the MFA Writing Program at Columbia University. He's worked in publishing as a literary agent; editor in chief of Grove Press; co-founder of High Risk Books/Serpent's Tail; and as Literature Director of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Early life and education Silverberg was born and raised in the Bronx, New York. After graduating from Bronx High School of Science in 1980, While attending CUNY, he met James Grauerholz (a friend and assistant of William Burroughs) at a bar in the East Village. They began a romantic relationship and Grauerholz convinced Silverberg to move to Kansas, where they lived and wrote with Burroughs and other aging beat poets. Silverberg attended the University of Kansas from 1982 to 1984. In 1984, he returned to New York and attended Hunter College. In 1984, he began his career as a part-time editorial and publicity assistant at The Overlook Press after meeting founder Peter Mayer at a 25th-anniversary party of Jack Kerouac's On the Road in Boulder, Colorado two years earlier. He joined Donadio & Olson in 1997, becoming a partner, and was foreign-rights director at Sterling Lord Literistic from 2008 to 2011.

Silverberg was appointed literature director of the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C. in 2011, a post he held until 2013.