Glenn Kurtz

Glenn Kurtz
File:Glenn Kurtz - IFFR 2015-1.jpg
Born	Roslyn, New York, USA
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	United States
Genre	Memoir, creative nonfiction
Subject	Classical Music, the Guitar
Website
www.glennkurtz.com

Glenn Kurtz (born 1962, Roslyn, New York) is a writer and the author of Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music (Knopf, 2007; Vintage paperback, 2008). He lives in New York City, where he is currently working on a novel.

Biography

Glenn Kurtz is a graduate of the New England Conservatory-Tufts University double degree program. He also holds a PhD from Stanford University in German Studies and Comparative Literature. His writing has been published in ZYZZYVA, Artweek, Tema Celeste, and elsewhere, and he has taught at Stanford University, San Francisco State University, and California College of the Arts.

Practicing

Glenn Kurtz writes:

Practicing: A Musician’s Return to Music is a book about the dream of becoming an artist. Drawn from my experiences as a child performer and concert classical guitarist, Practicing tells the story of my youthful ambition to achieve musical artistry, the collapse of that ambition in my twenties, and my surprising return to music later in life. As a child and young adult, I practiced full of passion and expectation, certain I could change peoples’ lives with music. In my late twenties, despairing of a viable career as a classical guitarist, I quit in bitterness. For ten years, I couldn’t bear to touch the instrument. Now, in my forties, a lover of music chastened in my goals, I’ve returned to practicing to understand what went wrong, to learn to do it better.

Practicing has been featured in the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, and in other publications, and on radio broadcasts nationally (NPR).

Three Minutes in Poland

In 2009, Glenn Kurtz stumbled upon a home video shot by his family that included three minutes of footage in Nasielsk, Poland shot in 1938. Kurtz set out to restore the film and find the people in it. The book based on this journey is titled Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).

Further reading

• Glenn Kurtz's blog at The Huffington Post