Return Of Your Inner Yeti: Boria Sax And The Zoological Guides To Reality Tomorrow At Curley's

Boria with friends

Poet and zoological folklorist Boria Sax reads once more in the Stamford area, this time featured as part of this Tuesday's PoemAlley program (Boria previously appeared at Frank Chamber's Open Mic in the Stamford Barnes & Noble last April), He has numerous titles to his credit, translated into French, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, and Czech, spanning fiction, poetry, history, reference, folklore and, in particular, human/animal relations, both on the naturalistic and metaphorical levels. Choice academic library journal named two books, Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust
(Continuum, 2000) and The Mythical Zoo: An Encyclopedia of Animals in Myth, Legend, and Literature (Overlook Press, 2013) among their "outstanding titles of the year".

Boria earned his doctorate in Intellectual History and German from the State University of New York, Buffalo, has served as a human rights consultant for Amnesty International and Helsinki Watch and is founder of Nature in Legend and Story, a non-profit organization fostering appreciation of the

traditional bonds between humans and the natural world. Currently he is leading his first course in creative writing at Mercy College.

His deep fascination for the metaphorical roots of our species' complex and contradictory ties to other living creatures, whether wild, domesticated, or mythic, is best articulated in the introduction to Imaginary Animals: The Monstrous, the Wondrous and the Human (Reaktion, 2013): "... all imaginary animals, to some degree all animals, are ultimately both monsters and wonders, which assist us by deflecting and absorbing our uncertainties." Depending on our hopes and fears of the moment or the age, "Men and women are not only part angel and part demon, as the old cliché goes; they are also part centaur, part werewolf, part mandrake, and part sphinx."

Below is a video from Overlook Press, publisher of 2012's City of Ravens, where Boria talks of the historical connection between the city of London and its ubiquitous bird population:

Poet's Press, 2010

Boria has received national awards for e-learning, and is a mentor in the Sloan-C Certificate program in online teaching. Currently, he teaches in the graduate literature program of Mercy College, as well as liberal arts courses at Sing Sing and Taconic prisons, where he enjoys the attention of "perhaps the most engaged, interested college students in the world."

"Our Triumphant March Toward Humility", "Animals and Cultural Diplomacy", "Why the French Army Collapsed at Waterloo" and "History and Experience: Revisiting My Childhood In an FBI File" are some of the provocative entries addressing human culture and prospects on the blog he maintains for the Huffington Post, the last addressing his father's role in nuclear espionage during the Cold War. His Stealing Fire: Memoir of a Boyhood in the Shadow of Atomic Espionage relates these confusing, turbulent years in detail.

His latest project is a cultural history of lizards. For more on his writing, visit boriasax.com.