Literature / Law
Lawrence Joseph
born 1948 · poet, essayist, lawyer, law professor
Detroit-born Lebanese-Syrian American poet and law professor whose poems about work, violence, law and money often return to the Detroit of his youth.
- Born
Detroit, Michigan- Detroit years
- 1948–1981
- Field
- Literature, Law
01 / The Detroit story
The Detroit story
Joseph was born in Detroit in 1948 to parents who were themselves Detroit-born; his grandparents, Lebanese Maronite and Syrian Melkite Catholics, were among the first Arab immigrants to settle in the city around 1910. He attended the University of Detroit Jesuit High School and the University of Michigan, where he won a major Hopwood Award for poetry, then studied at Cambridge and returned to Michigan Law School. He clerked for Justice G. Mennen Williams of the Michigan Supreme Court and taught at the University of Detroit School of Law before moving to New York, where he became a law professor at St. John's University. His first book, Shouting at No One (1983), and later collections such as Curriculum Vitae and So Where Are We? weave the Detroit of his family's grocery store, the auto plants and the 1967 uprising into a larger poetry of law, labor and power.
Highlights
- Shouting at No One (1983), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize
- A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems (2020)
- Law clerk to Michigan Supreme Court Justice G. Mennen Williams
- Taught at the University of Detroit School of Law
- Grandson of some of Detroit's earliest Arab American immigrants
02 / Their Detroit places
Their Detroit places 1
Where they lived, worked, performed and liked to hang out. Closed and demolished places stay here too, because they are part of the city's history.
Studied here · 1960s
University of Detroit Jesuit High School
The Jesuit boys' school on Detroit's northwest side that he attended before the University of Michigan.