Kal Rosenberg's Obituary
Kal Rosenberg passed away, November 11, 2014, losing a long battle with kidney disease. Kal was born in 1935 and raised in the Bronx. After a troubled and abusive childhood he went on to graduate phi beta kappa from City College of New York in 1963, then accepted a teaching scholarship at University of Miami grad school where he taught History of Western Civilization. In 2001, by then in his sixties, he earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. He has lived in Gainesville since 1991 and once served on the city’s Cultural Advisory Board. He also taught English, Creative Writing, and Critical Thinking at Santa Fe and City College.
Already a successful entrepreneur and investor, he began to write at age fifty and sold the first short story he submitted. His work has been widely published in literary magazines and newspapers andhas garnered many awards, including the Tampa Bay Oral Poetry Contest, the Authors in the Park Short Story Competition, a First Novel Award from the National Writers’ Association, was nine-time winner of the Tampa Writers’ Alliance literary contest, five-time winner of the Hirschberg Award for Florida Fiction, and won the Porter Fleming Prize for non-fiction. He was a three-time winner of the Tallahassee Writers’ Association’s writing contest, received a Douglas Freels poetry award, and one for short fiction from the Loriann Hemingway competition. He won both of the Hippodromes’s Senior Playwright contests, where both plays were subsequently performed. He was also an avid and controversial op-ed writer whose submissions often appeared in the Gainesville Sun.
Kal was co-founder of the Writers’ Alliance of Gainesville—WAG—an organization devoted to improving and assisting writers at all levels. His first novel, Sold As Is, was a PEN-Faulkner Award and a Ben Franklin Award nominee, and his short story collection, Damaged Goods was up for both the Florida Book Award as well as a Pushcart Prize.
Kal is survived by the great love of his life—his wife Sandi, whom he dubbed “my treasure,” by five children, ten grandchildren and a great-grandson, a sister and brother-in-law who live in Virginia, and their two children.
A Memorial Service will be held Friday, November 14, 2014 at 11:00 a.m., at Temple B’nai Israel, 3830 N.W. 16th Blvd, Gainesville, FL 32606, where they were long-time congregants. Donations in Kal’s name to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), PO Box 62596, Baltimore, MD 21264-2596 or NAMI.org are appreciated. Please visit his memorial page at www.williamsthomasfuneralhome.com. Condolences Open House will be held Saturday, Sunday and Monday, 5:30pm to 7:30pm. Contact the family for the address.
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