Sandra Hochman


Sandra Hochman is an American author, poet, screenwriter, lyricist and documentary film maker. Her first autobiographical novel Walking Papers was very well received and Philip Roth called it a masterpiece. She has published seven books of poetry; her first book won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. She has also written for The New York Times, Life, People, New York and many more. She created the Foundation You're an Artist Too, which was an after school program held weekly at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her film Year of The Woman is the first feminist film ever made. She co-produced it with Porter Bibb, the producer of The Rolling Stones documentary Gimme Shelter. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. described it as "the greatest combination of sex and politics ever seen in a film."`

Life

After she graduated from the Cherry Lawn boarding school, she went on to graduate from Bennington College. She also has a master's degree in comparative literature from Columbia University. When she was living in Paris she studied at the Sorbonne. She was poet-in-residence at Fordham University, and City College of New York.
When she was young she met Israeli violinist Ivry Gitlis. They were married in Israel, and soon after they lived in Paris. She writes about these years in her book Paris 1958 - 1960. After she and Gitlis were divorced she married Harvey Leve, a Harvard University lawyer who was the head of the treasury department in Hong Kong. They had a daughter, the writer Ariel Leve. After they divorced, Harvey was an international lawyer in Thailand and later Indonesia. He is now retired and lives in Bali. Their daughter, who is an award winning journalist for the London Times, travels between New York and Bali. In 2016 Ariel published a critically acclaimed memoir An Abbreviated Life in which she explores the psychological consequences of a physical and emotional abuse she faced in her childhood and the aftermath of survival.
Sandra is also a journalist as well as a poet. She was one of the first women to write a humor column for Harpers Bazaar Magazine. She also wrote her own column alternating with Gloria Steinem.
Her documentary, the first and only documentary about the women's movement, was made in 1972 at the Democratic Convention. It was shown all over the world including Paris, London and New York.
Her poems appeared in a two page spread in The New Yorker. She was one of the youngest poets to have her collected poems published by the Viking Press. Ms. Huffington showed her film in 2017. She had also had musicals produced on and off Broadway. Her one woman play based on her memoir My father, My friend'' was going to be directed by Julie Arnell in June of 2018. She created her own foundation, "You're an Artist Too" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to teach poetry to children ages 7–12. She ran this program for 15 years. She had lived in Paris and Hong Kong and now lives in Manhattan.

Awards

Sandra Created the Foundation You're An Artist Too which was an after school program held weekly at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was for children for ages 8–12 and it successfully ran for 15 years. Her Foundation received a generous donation from the Uris Brothers Fund in the amount of 300 million dollars. Because the program was so popular, it received a two-page review in The New York Times.

Works

Poetry