Ira Silverberg

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Ira Silverberg is an American editor and consultant to writers, artists, publishers, and non-profit arts organizations. He is a member of the adjunct faculty of the Columbia University School of the Arts, MFA Writing Program.

Silverberg was born and raised in The Bronx, New York. After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science in 1980,^[1][2] he attended the CUNY Urban Legal Studies Center, a six-year BA/JD Program designed to teach lawyers to serve underserved urban communities.^[3] While attending CUNY, he met James Grauerholz, a friend and assistant of William Burroughs, at a bar in the East Village. They began a romantic relationship and Grauerholz convinced Silverberg to move to Kansas, where the two lived and wrote with Burroughs and other aging beat poets. Silverberg attended the University of Kansas from 1982 to 1984. In 1984, he returned to New York and attended Hunter College.^[3] He dropped out of college at 22 years old, one semester short of a degree.^[1]

Ira Silverberg is a consultant in publishing and the literary arts. In 2011, he was appointed as the literature director^[2] of the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, DC. Before joining the NEA, Silverberg lived and worked as a literary agent and foreign rights director in New York. During this time, he worked at Sterling Lord Literistic,^[4] as editor-in-chief at Grove Press, and as editorial and publishing director at Serpent's Tail's U.S. projects, including High Risk Books co-edited with Amy Scholder. He founded a marketing and public relations firm, Ira Silverberg Communications.

In 1984, Silverberg began his career as a part-time editorial and publicity assistant at The Overlook Press, after first meeting founder Peter Mayer at the 25th anniversary party for Jack Kerouac's On the Road in Boulder, Colorado in 1982.^[3] He was there as the guest of James Grauerholz and William S. Burroughs, who was on faculty at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder.

To supplement his income at Overlook Press, Silverberg worked as a doorman at the nightclubThe Limelight.^[1] Silverberg promoted events at Limelight and Danceteria beginning in 1984. Among them were book launches for Burroughs, artist David Hockney, and writers Brad Gooch and Dennis Cooper, who became his client and with whom he has had a life-long affiliation.

Silverberg began going to "downtown" New York nightclubs as a high school student.^[5] He first went to Hurrah in 1979 to hear the band The Speedies. He arrived at Hurrah, for the Speedies show, carrying a Charivari shopping bag, and was asked by doormen Haoui Montaug and Aleph Ashline what was in the bag. He worked part-time at Charivari Sport, one of the Upper West Side clothing stores founded by the Weiser family. It was a pair of pleated oxblood pants finished in a coating of what looked like plastic or urethane, prompting a long conversation with Montaug with whom Silverberg went home with that night. They had a brief relationship and a long friendship which allowed Silverberg entry, at a young age, to the downtown scene. Montaug was one of many friends and lovers Silverberg lost to AIDS.

A conversation with Amy Scholder led to them partnering on preparing an anthology which attempted to keep the voices of their friends alive and respond to increasing attacks on artists by the far right. High Risk: An anthology of Forbidden Writings was published by Dutton and Plume at the height of the Culture Wars of that time. Another volume followed, High Risk: Writing on Sex, Death and Subversion, in 1994. Among the writers included in both volumes were Karen Finley, Essex Hemphill, Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz, Mary Gaitskill, William S. Burroughs, Dorothy Allison, Dennis Cooper, Ana María Simo, Darryl Pinckney, Akilah Nayo Oliver, Darius James, Lynne Tillman, Craig G. Harris, Rikki Ducornet, John Giorno, Cookie Mueller, John Preston, Diamanda Galas, Gil Cuadros, Kate Bornstein, and Manuel Ramos Otero. The anthologies are considered influential in defining the Downtown aesthetic.

High Risk Books was born of the success of those anthologies. They were both published in the UK by the independent house Serpent's Tail, a public relations client of Silverberg's in the US.

Silverberg worked to establish Serpent's Tail in the United States by publishing locally-originated books, the first of which was the fiction collection, Disorderly Conduct: The VLS Fiction Reader, edited by The Village Voice Literary Supplement (VLS) editor M. Mark. Scholder and Silverberg co-edited the High Risk series beginning in 1994.^[6] The press published Sapphire, Gary Indiana, June Jordan, Herve Guibert, Jayne Cortez, Renaud Camus, Pagan Kennedy, John Giorno, Diamanda Galas, Cookie Mueller, and Lynne Tillman. Many of their writers were in the High Risk and VLS anthologies and considered in the vanguard of "transgressive" literature.

High Risk Books was shut down by Serpent's Tail's owner Pete Aytron in 1997. Silverberg returned to Grove Press as editor-in-chief in 1997. He contributed the Serpent's Tail/High Risk archives and his own to the Fales Library at New York University.

In his time at Grove, Silverberg reissued the out of print work of Jacqueline Susann. In 1997, Grove reissued Susann's Valley of the Dolls along with Once Is Not Enough and The Love Machine. Silverberg also reissued other overlooked pop classics, including Iceberg Slim's Doom Fox and Andy Warhol's A, A Novel. He published Fernando Pessoa & Co., Selected Poems by Fernando Pessoa, edited and translated by Richard Zenith; Whiting Award winner Samantha Gillison's debut novel An Undiscovered Country; and brought William S. Burroughs back to Grove before his death in 1997 publishing Word Virus: The William S Burroughs Reader which he coedited with James Grauerholz; and Burroughs; Last Words.

Silverberg joined Donadio & Olson in 1997, where he eventually became a partner. He left to join Sterling Lord Literistic in 2008 before leaving in 2011.^[7] He was the foreign rights director at both agencies.

From 2012 to 2013, Silverberg was the literature director of the National Endowment of the Arts.^[5][2] In 2013, he returned to New York to work as strategic advisor at Open Road Media and as a Senior Editor at Simon and Schuster where he published, among other books, debuts such as Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry, Tope Folarin's A Particular Kind of Black Man, Ryan Chapman's Riots I Have Known, and Rodrigo Hasbun's Affections.

In 2013, Silverberg received the Michele Karlsberg Leadership Award from the Publishing Triangle.^[8][9]

Silverberg has become affiliated with many cultural institutions in New York City, including BOMB magazine and the Member's Council of PEN American Center. He has also acted as judge for the Gregory Kolovakos Award for AIDS writing and been a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Program and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund. He has acted as editorial advisor to the Portable Lower East Side, has been a visiting faculty member at The New School for Social Research, and currently teaches at Columbia University.