Fine Flu Journal Fine Flu Journal- june 2014 | Page 19

INTERVIEW with STEVE CLEPETAR

1) Tell us some things about yourself
It might interest you to know that I was born in Shanghai, China. My
parents were holocaust survivors in two different ways. My father was
expelled from Czechoslovakia by the Nazis in 1939 and joined the
Jewish community in Shanghai. My mother was sent to concentration
camp. She survived and joined my father there after the war. I was
born in 1949 and my family emigrated to the U.S. when I was two
months old, so my experience has been very similar to that of a first
generation American, with the added inconvenience of being a
naturalized citizen with a strange and complicated birth story. I grew
up in New York City and was educated at Stuyvesant High School,
Binghamton University and The University of Chicago. I have spent
the past 39 years teaching literature and creative writing, mostly at
Saint Cloud State University in Minnesota.

2) Why did you start writing poetry and when was it?
While I recall being the poet laureate of my sixth grade class (this may
be a reconstructed memory), I started writing poetry seriously in
college in the late 1960’s. Since I always lived a good bit of the time in
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