Samuel James Cornish, an essentially self-educated writer, social activist and teacher was born in Baltimore Maryland in 1935. Although primarily self-educated, he studied at Goddard College in Vermont and Northeastern University in Boston, serving in the United Stated Army Medical Corps from 1958 to 1960.
In 1965 Cornish began working at Baltimore's public library, the Enoch Pratt Free Library, as a writing specialist. He worked with children in that job, co-editing a magazine of children's writing and compiling an anthology that the library issued through its 1960s-era Community Action Program.
In the mid to late sixties Cornish edited a little magazine out of Baltimore and Cambridge appropriately titled Mimeo. In 1969 he took a post as a creative writing instructor at the Highland Park Free School in the Boston ghetto of Roxbury and in the seventies he taught writing at Edmondson High School and Coppin State College in Baltimore. Cornish has published widely in numerous periodicals including the Christian Science Monitor, the Journal of Black Poetry and others.
Cornish later became an instructor in the Afro-American Studies department at Boston's Emerson College, and taught there until his retirement in 2004. He served as the Literature Director of the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities and received a National Endowment for the Arts grant, in 1967 and 1969.
