AT THE CUTBy Peter AnastasA memoir of growing up in Gloucester Massachusetts in the 1940's. Critics say:
Author Profile Peter Anastas Peter Anastas was born in Gloucester, Massachusetts in 1937. He attended local schools, graduating in 1955 from Gloucester High School, where he edited the school newspaper and was president of the National Honor Society. His father Panos Anastas, a restaurateur, was born in Sparta, Greece and his mother, Catherine Polisson, was born in Gloucester of native Greek parents. Anastas attended Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine on scholarship, majoring in English and minoring in Italian, philosophy and Greek. While at Bowdoin, he wrote for the student newspaper, the Bowdoin Orient, and was editor of the college literary magazine, the Quill. In 1958, he was named Bertram Louis, Jr. Prize Scholar in English Literature, and in 1959 he was awarded first and second prizes in the Brown Extemporaneous Essay Contest and selected as a commencement speaker (his address was on "The Artist in the Modern World.") During his summers in college, Anastas edited the Cape Ann Summer Sun and worked on the waterfront in Gloucester. After graduating from Bowdoin in 1959, Anastas lived in Florence, Italy until 1962, where he studied Medieval literature at the University of Florence and taught English at the International Academy. While in Florence, Anastas worked as an interpreter-translator at the university's Institute for Physical Chemistry. His translation of Prof. Giorgio Piccardi's The Chemical Basis of Medical Climatology, was published in the U.S. in 1962. Returning to Gloucester in 1962, Anastas taught English at Rockport High School and Winchester (MA) Senior High School before winning a graduate fellowship to Tufts University, where he studied English Literature and American Social and Intellectual History, receiving a master's degree in 1967. Between 1967 and 1972, Anastas worked as a free-lance writer, publishing his first book, Glooskap's Children: Encounters with the Penobscot Indians of Maine (Beacon Press, 1973). As a result of his experience of poverty in rural Maine, in 1972 Anastas joined the staff at Action, Inc., Gloucester's antipoverty agency, where for thirty years he was a social worker and Director of Advocacy. For twenty years he was also an adjunct faculty member at North Shore Community College, where he taught English and literature. During these years Anastas continued to write and publish, contributing a weekly column, "This Side of the Cut", to the Gloucester Daily Times and publishing When Gloucester Was Gloucester: Toward an Oral History of the City (with Peter Parsons), Siva Dancing, a memoir, Landscape with Boy, a novella in the Boston University Fiction Series, and Maximus to Gloucester, an edition of the letters and poems of Charles Olson to the editor of the Gloucester Times. Currently he is contributing a column called "A Walker in the City" to the Cape Ann newspaper North Shore North. Anastas is the father of three children, Jonathan, an advertising executive in Los Angeles, Rhea, an art historian currently teaching at Bard College, and Benjamin, a writer who has published two novels. AT THE CUTBy Peter Anastas248 pp, paperbound, 1st edition 2002 Published by Dogtown Books Cover art compliments of Gregory GibsonISBN 0-9719387-0-9 $14.95 ...is available from Dogtown Book Shop We accept personal checks, MC/Visa
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