Stephen C. Pollock is a poet, essayist, physician, academician, former business executive, and inventor. His poetry collection Exits has been honored with the 2024 North Street Book Prize along with seventeen other book awards.
Steve began scribbling poems on shirt cardboard at age nine. All of those early poems rhymed. (Yertle the Turtle by Dr. Seuss was a huge influence!). Steve’s interest in writing intensified at Amherst College where he took several courses in modern and contemporary poetry.
Trained as a physician, eye surgeon, and neuro-ophthalmologist, he was recruited to Duke University as Chief of Neuro-Ophthalmology in 1987. He ultimately achieved a rank of Associate Professor with tenure, having published 30 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters in the medical literature.
After seventeen years in academic medicine, Steve left Duke to become chief executive of CEC, a nationwide company that provides vision benefits to individuals and their family members. Following the sale of CEC in 2019, he retired from the company.
Though not an engineer, Steve has always had a penchant for designing novel devices. As a medical student, he collaborated with another student in the development of a unique variable-focus lens. Steve drafted the patent and the associated illustrations. In 1984, the Patent Office granted U.S. Patent 4,477,158, Lens System for Variable Refraction. Steve subsequently designed an instrument used to biopsy inaccessible tumors in the brain and behind the eye.
The gratification Steve derives from writing springs from a variety of sources: fascination with language; the whimsy of wordplay; the thrill associated with creating something utterly new; and awe at the infinite ways in which words, well chosen, can capture and intensify human experience.
