Portrait by Andrea Wenglowskyj
Sam Magavern is a writer and public interest lawyer in Buffalo, New York. His work includes poetry, fiction, non-fiction, scholarly articles, a movie screenplay, and a comic book. He is a co-founder of the Partnership for the Public Good and the founder of the Calamus Project.
Sam’s publications include a non-fiction book, Primo Levi’s Universe, and two books of poetry, Ovid’s Creek and Noah’s Ark. His poems have appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Paris Review, and Antioch Review, and he is featured in the book Four Buffalo Poets. He wrote the screenplay for an independent feature film, The Last Word, and worked with musicians to create a novel-with-soundtrack, Ooh La La. In 2022 he founded the Calamus Project, a collaboration that brings Walt Whitman’s poems to life through films, a website, and events.
Sam is the senior policy fellow at Partnership for the Public Good, a community-based think tank that he co-founded in 2007 and co-directed until 2019. He teaches at University at Buffalo Law School and Cornell University ILR School, where he was the Visiting Activist Scholar in 2019-2020. He serves as volunteer attorney for the City of Buffalo Living Wage Commission and as a commissioner on the Niagara River Greenway Commission, as well as a board member for Tupelo Press and the Winkelman Farm Conservation Corporation.
Sam grew up in Buffalo, except for two years in the Philippines. He received his BA from Harvard University and his JD from UCLA Law, after which he worked for the Legal Aid Society of Minneapolis for 12 years. He is married to the artist Monica Angle, and they have two daughters.
Featured Published Work
Ovid’s Creek
In Ovid's Creek Sam Magavern, in paying tribute to the Roman poet Ovid, works out his own ars poetica, one that values plainness over ornament, playfulness over solemnity, and liveliness over propriety and elevation. These virtues are paralleled by the landscapes of Monica Angle, which offer provisional, momentary takes on experience rather than stable images of the permanent. The result is a book of peculiar freshness.
– Carl Dennis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Practical Gods
Featured Project
The Calamus Project is a collaboration of many partners dedicated to presenting Whitman’s Calamus poems in an engaging way through films, programs, and this website.
Works in Progress
Planets on the Table: Nine Poems about Poets and Poetry
Each chapter presents and explores a classic modern poem about poets or poetry, starting with “Adam’s Curse” by W.B. Yeats and closing with “North Haven” by Elizabeth Bishop. Biographical details and close readings bring the poems to life, and, by focusing on the poets’ many relationships with each another, the book becomes almost novelistic in its development of characters and themes. A version of the chapter on Ezra Pound appeared in The Montréal Review.
Luminous Words
Linked essays exploring ten core values, including goodness, truth, beauty, freedom, and equality. Drawing on diverse sources – from the Talmud to Parliament Funkadelic, from Ludwig Wittgenstein to Cary Grant – the book weaves together a picture of life and how to live that is pluralistic, open-ended, and, although non-religious, imbued with a sense of awe. Versions of the chapters on truth, joy and wonder have appeared in the Montréal Review.
Singing School
A bittersweet, comedic novel about the loves and losses of an eclectic group of law students in 1980s Los Angeles. You can read the first chapter here.
