About

Bio

Edward Donald Nudelman (born June 13, 1953) is an American poet with four published poetry books, and one forthcoming in Feb, 2024. He recently retired from a productive career in cancer research, where he was a head scientist in several biotech companies. Nudelman is a native of Seattle, and owns and operates a rare book company which he founded in 1980.  

Edward Nudelman received all of his pre-college education on Mercer Island, a community just East of Seattle, and graduated from Mercer Island High School, where in his Senior year he studied exclusively in an alternative “block classroom,” consisting of reading most of the classic philosophers, discussion groups, and not a few rousing debate sessions per week. Nudelman graduated from the University of Washington in 1976, receiving honors and separate bachelors of science in Zoology, and Chemistry, respectively. Turning down a medical school acceptance, Nudelman pursued scientific research, an ambition he’d held since youth, by accepting a laboratory appointment in 1976 at the prestigious Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. He remained at FHCRC for the next ten years, authoring 25 papers on novel cancer therapeutic and diagnostic strategies. He then cofounded The Biomembrane Institute, also in Seattle, where he remained for eight years, publishing an additional 30 papers in cancer research. Nudelman closed out his career in scientific research by cofounding a successful cancer biotech company in Boston, where he and his wife lived for seven years. Soon after his return to Seattle in 2012, Nudelman retired from science, and he and his wife moved back to their home in Seattle.

During his scientific career, Nudelman remained active in writing poetry, but it was not until 2005, when he joined a writing group in Boston, that he became active in submitting his work, first to journals, then a manuscript for his book, Night Fires, which was published in 2009. That was quickly followed by What Looks Like an Elephant (2011), and Out of Time Running (2014). Nudelman’s two latest poetry collections include: Nonlinear Equations for Growing Better Olive Trees (Kelsay Books, 2023), and Thin Places, forthcoming from Salmon Poetry, in Feb, 2024.

Edward Nudelman’s poetry has garnered praise from noted poets and reviewers, and he has won significant awards and prizes. His poetry is known for its lyrical aspects, wry humor, as well as special qualities and impressions which he has obliquely imported from his career in scientific research. Often presenting paradoxes and comparisons in nature and experience, as well as contradictory impulses of certainty and doubt, Nudelman shares his quirky and irrepressible thirst for beauty and meaning.

An avid guitarist and chess enthusiast, Nudelman enjoys pouring over arcane and sometimes frustrating lines of biomedical research and development (just being honest!), long walks, expensive red wine that he can’t afford, gardening, sparring with his many-faceted grandkids, and of course, reading and writing poetry. He lives with his wife of some-odd 40 years (in a good wayin their North Seattle home where they brought up three children, and now hosts a passel of demanding farmyard animals, including a wonderful dog and a troop of Indian Runner ducks that think they own the place.