Until I read Clint Smith’s book How the Word Is Passed I had never heard of Seneca Village. How in what is now the middle of Manhattan a place where I’ve been many times could a whole community have been built and lives lived and then erased so totally? I couldn’t stop thinking about it. But if I wrote about it, was I appropriating a story I had no right to?
Ellen Steinbaum is the author of four poetry collections. Her work has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and is included in Garrison Keillor’s anthology, Good Poems, American Places; The Widows’ Handbook; and A Mighty Room: a collection of poems written in Emily Dickinson’s bedroom. An award-winning journalist and former Boston Globe columnist, she writes a blog, “Reading and Writing and the Occasional Recipe” which can be found at her web site, ellensteinbaum.com.
