Eli C. Goldblatt was born in 1952 in Cleveland, Ohio, and grew up on Army posts in the U.S. and Germany. After earning his B.A. at Cornell University and working in farming, manufacture, and carpentry jobs, he attended Case-Western Reserve Medical School in 1975-76. He taught science, math, and English for six years in an urban alternative high school in Philadelphia, traveled in Mexico and Central America in 1980, and received an M. Ed. and certification in biology from Temple in 1982. He finished both an M.A. in literature (1984) and a Ph.D. in composition studies (1990) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently the Director of First-Year Writing and an associate professor of English at Temple University.  He also directs New City Writing, the neighborhood outreach arm of the writing program. NCW supports students working with Open Borders Project, a technology and language learning center in Latino North Philadelphia, as well as Tree House Books, a literacy/literature center near the Temple campus, and the four K-8 Temple Partnership Schools.

Goldblatt works both as a composition/literacy researcher and as a creative writer. In composition, his focus in Round My Way: Authority and Double Consciousness in Three Urban High School Writers (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995) was on authority in writing, but in recent years he has published on literacy autobiography and community-based learning. His essay “Alinsky’s Reveille: A Community-Organizing Model for Neighborhood-Based Literacy Projects” won the 2005 Ohmann Award in College English. He expands the theme in Because We Live Here: Sponsoring Literacy Beyond the College Curriculum (Hampton P 2007).  His poems have appeared over the last thirty years in many small literary journals, most recently in magazines such as Cincinnati Review, Hambone, Paper Air, Another Chicago Magazine, Madison Review, Louisiana Literature, and Hubbub. His books of poems include Journeyman’s Song (Coffee House, 1990), Sessions 1-62 (Chax Press, 1991), Speech Acts (Chax Press, 1999), and Without a Trace (Singing Horse Press, 2001). In addition, Goldblatt published two children’s books, Leo Loves Round and Lissa and the Moon’s Sheep, both from Harbinger House in 1990.