Peter Payack

Peter Payack is a father, a coach, a writer, a science fiction poet, a marathon runner, a professor, an inventor, a sky artist, a Cambridge community activist, a CBS weather watcher and a recipient of the 2018 Marquis Who’s Who Lifetime Achievement Award.

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Peter Payack was the first Poet Populist of Cambridge Massachusetts (2007-2009). 
His innovation, Phone-a-Poem, the Cambridge/Boston Poetry Hotline (1976-2001) along with his work and realia, were recently archived at Harvard’s Lamont Library in the Woodberry Poetry Room. 


He was a contributing editor of the groundbreaking magazine,

Creative Computing from 1975-1985 which published a page of his poetry every issue.

Payack is an acclaimed poet and writer including multiple appearances in The Paris Review, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Cornell Review, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazines, Creative Computing and the Boston Globe. He has published over 1,500 poems, stories, prose poems, photos and articles.




His Poem, The Migration of Darkness, won the 1980 Rhysling Award, signifying The Best Poem in Science Fiction Poetry, and was recently named the number one poem that unites science and art (Quirk Books.) 


He has 20 books to his credit, including “No Free Will in Tomatoes” and Blanket Knowledge” both from Zoland Books.

Payack is currently working on three collections.




Payack is the inventor of the world-renowned Stonehenge Watch™, an infinitesimal replica of the megaliths at Stonehenge inside of an old-fashioned pocket watch, which can be used as a shadow clock to tell time, mark the seasons and predict eclipses. The Stonehenge Watch™ has been featured at The International Sky Art Conference at MIT, on BBC-TV, in Astronomy and has been for sale at the Stonehenge site itself. 


As a Sky Artist Payack has been commissioned to do environmental poetry projects for The New York Avant Garde Festival, The International Sky Art Conference (MIT), The Harvard 350 Celebration and Boston’s First Night.

Payack’s Poem, “No Free Will in Tomatoes” has been sandblasted into the brick floor of the Davis Square Subway Station (Boston’s Red Line) since 1984.

Peter was featured on the PBS Children’s show ARTHUR, episode1308,“Fernlets for Fern”, and is pictured in US Magazine with his “Poetry Mobile”.


Peter was an Assistant Professor Communications at The Berklee College of Music, and taught Technical & Scientific Communications at The University of Massachusetts Lowell for over 30 years where he was awarded the 2010 Haskell Award for Distinguished teaching. Payack has also been a visiting artist at The Center For Advanced Visual Studies at M.I.T.

Peter is a weather watcher for WBZ-TV (CBS) Boston.




When not writing poetry, teaching or inventing new things, he can be found coaching The Cambridge Rindge & Latin School Varsity wrestling team or coaching The Bob Cats in The Cambridge Girls Softball League. Payack was a co-founder of the CGSL in 1992.

He has run 100,000 miles, hundreds of road races and 24 marathons, including 12 Boston Marathons.

Peter and his wife Monica have 2 sons, Mike and Peter Paul. Mike is a writer and Peter Paul is an editorial cartoonist. Monica has worked at Brigham & Women’s Hospital for 42 years, and she was the Nurse Manager of The Kidney Transplant Unit for over a decade.