About Frederick Glaysher

A poet and writer, Frederick Glaysher is the editor of Robert Hayden’s Collected Prose (The University of Michigan Press) and his Collected Poems (Liveright).

With deep family roots in Michigan, Frederick Glaysher’s relatives on one side owned and operated for many years the neighborhood Essex Bakery on Essex Avenue, south of Jefferson Avenue in Detroit, near Belle Isle. One of his earliest memories as a child was visiting the Detroit bakery in the early 1960s and all the excitement it entailed for a child’s imagination. As Detroit declined, his relatives were eventually forced by events to move north, out of the city.

Glaysher was a camp counselor for the Society of St. Vincent de Paul’s Camp Ozanam, for inner city kids, for a summer when he was about nineteen. A child care worker for a year at the Detroit Baptist Children’s Home for emotionally impaired boys, including minority children, formerly in Royal Oak, while living in Detroit near 7 Mile Road and John R, enabling him to use the Detroit Public Library on Woodward, one of his earliest acquaintances with the poetry of Robert Hayden.

Glaysher was a student at Oakland Community College, transferred to Eastern Michigan University, and then to the University of Michigan, where he studied with the poet Robert Hayden and completed two degrees, one a master’s degree in English. Glaysher owes Robert Hayden not only for encouraging his fledgling literary ability, but, as an impoverished student from a working class background, for the modest stipend Hayden paid him for work as an assistant preparing his papers for disposition, which provided the very food and shelter that allowed Glaysher to complete his formal education.

As a student at Eastern Michigan University in a class on the interpretive reading of literature, Glaysher read Robert Hayden’s visionary, triumphal poem of human endurance and freedom, “Frederick Douglass,” to the derision and scorn of minority students who felt a white boy had no business reciting a black poet’s work. Robert Hayden, years later, was visibly appalled to hear the story, angrily blurting out why shouldn’t a white person respect and read his poetry and when are we ever going to get beyond all this obscene race business?

For more than ten years, Glaysher lived and taught English outside Michigan in Japan, on the Colorado River Indian Tribes Reservation in Arizona, and on the Mississippi, ultimately returning to his suburban hometown of Rochester Hills. He was a Fulbright-Hays scholar to China in 1994, a National Endowment for the Humanities scholar in 1995 on India, and was an accredited participant at the United Nations Millennium Forum in 2000. He is the author of two books of poems, Into the Ruins and The Bower of Nil.

As editor of Robert Hayden’s work, Glaysher was often invited to interview for teaching positions for African-American and non-Western literature, until it was discovered he is a white man, a complexity too profound for American university departments under the rule of affirmative action and radical race politics. A victim of reverse discrimination on a number of occasions, Frederick Glaysher is the human being who didn’t get the job because of his arbitrary skin color and the abstract ideologies of ruling elites.

Also See Brief Bio

Contact

Frederick Glaysher