Howard Camner

Turbulence at 67 Inches book launch. Photo by Charles Bernstein

Howard Camner is the author of sixteen books of poetry and an autobiography. His works are in the most prominent literary collections in the world, including ten historical archives and six royal libraries. He was nominated for Poet Laureate of Florida in 1980, and has the distinction of having been the youngest poet nominated for a state laureateship. During his years in New York, Camner was the featured performer with the West End Poetry Troupe,an offshoot of Kerouac's beat poets, headquartered at the famed West End Jazz Club. Camner often performed in clown makeup backed by members of Duke Ellington's orchestra known as "Ellintonia". Camner's stage persona became as well known as his poetry, described in Broadway Magazine as "a bittersweet Chaplinesque street character with a lot on his mind". With over 1,550 published poems, Camner is recognized as Florida's most widely published poet. He represents the United States in the Poet 2000 Sculpted Library, an international exhibition of the works of contemporary poets. He received the Library of Congress Award for his contribution to U.S. cultural arts in 1993 and the first annual MiPo Literary Award in 2004. Camner was named "Best Poet of 2007" in New Times Newspaper's "Best of Miami" readers poll edition.
In other ventures, Camner's original feature film screenplay "Duck, Duck, Goose" has been placed in the archives of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles, and the comedy television talk show he created and hosted in the 1980s, "Life is a Four Letter Word" was placed in the UCLA Film and Television Archives in 1999. Camner resides in Miami with his wife, daughter, and son.

Marta Braunstein, editor of Cambio Literary Journal writes: "Camner defies the traditional aesthetic concepts of poetry. He targets a world of ideas in a rather active way as opposed to the more passive, meditative aspects found in most poetry. There is a linguistic simplicity to his poems, an almost transparent quality, over a rather complex web of experience and thought. His poetry is life...All you have to do is look...The obvious and not so obvious."