Ben Milder

Born in 1915, in St. Louis, Missouri, Ben Milder is the author of more than one thousand poems of light verse, written over the past forty-five years. In 1979, his book The Fine Art of Prescribing Glasses Without Making a Spectacle of Yourself won the American Medical Writers Association's Best New Book of the Year Award (sometimes called the "Pulitzer Prize for medical texts"). He has published six books of poetry, The Good Book Says...: Light Verse to Illuminate the Old Testament (1995), The Good Book Also Says...: Numerous Humerous Poems Inspired by the New Testament (1999), Love Is Funny, Love Is Sad (2002), The Zoo You Never Gnu: A Mad Menagerie of Bizarre Bests and Birds (2004), What's So Funny About the Golden Years (2008; out of print), and From Adolescence to Senescence: A Life in Light Verse (2010), and his light verse has been published in many magazines and journals, including the Palm Beach Post, Milwaukee Sentinel, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Washington University Outlook, Pharos, The Critic, Long Island Night Life, LIGHT Quarterly, numerous medical journals, and the Journal of Irreproducible Results, as well as in the The Best of Medical Humor (Hanley-Belfus, 1989). Milder has taught poetry workshops at Washington University (St. Louis) and at the Palm Beach Community College Institute of New Dimensions, as well as a light-verse discussion course entitled "Ogden Nash is Alive and Well and Living in the Twentieth Century," at the Washington University Lifelong Learning Institute. Professor Emeritus of Clinical Ophthalmology at Washington University School of Medicine, Dr. Milder resides in St. Louis, with his wife, Jeanne.