Cornish was an educator, a bookseller, and a prolific poet who made sense of African American history and urban life through his poetry.

He lived his early life with his mother, grandmother, and older brother Herman in a small apartment on McCulloh Street in the Druid Hill section of West Baltimore, a primarily African-American neighborhood.

After boot camp, he spent two years at Ft. Benning, Georgia, which he later regarded as a mainly positive experience because, he said, for the first time, he was able to have enough to eat and access to health care.

Owing to fallen arches and extreme presbyopia, he was not a good candidate for military maneuvers so spent the remainder of his induction on K.P., peeling potatoes and as an army medic.

In 1966, his efforts resulted in his first major publication, Chicory, an anthology of writings by children and adults that was published by the Association Press, a subsidiary of the YMCA.

As the November 1969 issue proclaimed, “The purpose of this magazine is to publish work overheard by the editor which reflect the music of language in the inner city; to encourage more spoken and written comment by people in the community action area; and to inform those other people and agencies within the area of our ways of living.”[5]Chicory continued for some years after Cornish had moved to Boston.

On one visit back to Baltimore, he had a disagreement with personnel at the Lombard Junior High School and believed he was “banned from Baltimore.” An article in the Evening Sun, “Come Home, Sam,”[8] sought to clear up the mistake.

The article describes him as a “teacher at the Highland Park Free School” in Roxbury, MA, although he was hired specifically as a curriculum specialist because of his work on Chicory and similar community-based involvements.

[9] Another small announcement in the Boston Globe[10] states that he was reading with poet Ruth Whitman at the Arlington Street Church.

In 1967 a chapbook entitled Winters was published by the Sans Souci Press and a broadside, The River, was printed by the Temple Bar Bookshop in 1969.

[11] In this position, he created writing materials such as booklets and broadsides for primary school students, and advised their teachers about the open education project.

An article In the News of Paterson New Jersey describes a workshop:…the purpose of which was to orient the Paterson staff to the philosophy of the Education Development Center Follow Through Model... Sam Cornish, EDC of Boston Mass, was in charge of the creative writing sessions…[12]At EDC, he photographed the communities to which he traveled, as well as the students and teachers with whom he worked.

Cornish held the position for only three years, although during that time, he advocated vigorously for small and literary presses to receive matching-grants funding.

In Black Books Bulletin, Carrington Bonner wrote that the poems “are clear images to the point of the themes, with perceptive acknowledgement of the dark beautiful/ugly realities of the inner city from which he came.

It is one in which people occupy a major space.” [18] Both reviewers were impressed that Cornish was not “seeking inner exile,” as poets tend to do, but rather writing about real world experience.

In 1984 he moderated a panel discussion at the Cambridge Public Library on Black writing, sponsored by the bookstore, which published a special issue of the magazine focusing on that topic.

In addition to his wife’s store, he worked at Avenue Victor Hugo in Boston, Paperback Booksmith in Cambridge and New England Mobile Book Fair in Newton, where he was still employed until a few months before his death.

It was reviewed on NPR’s "All Things Considered" by Alan Cheuse:1935 is a powerful collage of portraits of Baltimore ghetto street life, figures from Sam Cornish’s own family, of simple poems about growing up black and swatches of history and sociology.

All of it makes for quite a striking and effective narrative rhythm.Cheuse is appreciative of the historic details in this “..odd amalgam of ego and history, prose and poetry, hymns to Harlem and the deep South and the music of Ruth Brown and the courage of Martin Luther King and all kinds of shades of skin from black to brown to sepia to pink and back again.

Maya Angelou contributed a back cover blurb, comparing the book’s contents with the artistry of Ray Charles’ blues.

Adam Tavel, writing for the Café Review had the following reaction:Time and again in these poems, Sam Cornish trespasses the accepted borders between public history and private experience by evoking the voices of slaves, sharecroppers, and historical figures such as Frederick Douglass in one large cultural conversation that is self–sustaining without the added burden of arguing against Whitman’s vision of nationhood.

Michael T. Steffen, writing for the Wilderness House Literary Review, commented on the “magic of joining words”[25] that the title implies, but it is even more typically Sam Cornish’s inclination to remind the reader that these writers, often depicted as vital, larger-than-life personae, are now a part of history.

On the jacket blurb, Martha Collins comments that “Cornish makes us feel the excitement of those times, even as he and his companions absorb the complex and often disturbing history of what he aptly calls “My Young America.”[26] Unlike his previous several books, in which he wrote about and echoed voices from the past or assumed other identities, in Dead Beats, Cornish returns to the first person and his own identity.

With these poems, as well as a few others in this collection, Cornish pays homage to some of the odd and unusual characters he knew who had provided him with poetic material.

In the mission statement accompanying his application, he promised to focus on outreach and after assuming the post, he outlined his goals: “I try to be the person to bring a poem to people who might not read poetry, or those who want to talk to a poet about the craft.”[27]).

An interdepartmental e-mail from the Mayor’s Office states that in the first year of his term as poet laureate, he “made over 40 appearances at schools, libraries, community centers, bookstores and other venues.

He also represented the Mayor’s Office of Arts & Tourism at various public events and seasonal occasions at which once again, his objective was to bring poetry to a wider audience.

He addressed this in his biographical statement he submitted to Contemporary Poets: “I try to use a minimum of words to express the intended thought or feeling, with the effect being starkly frank at times.”[29] In a poem about the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King (“Death of Dr. King,” 1971), Cornish depicted rage not in mounting cascades of language but in a devastating quick brushstroke: “we are mourning//our hands filled with bricks//a brother is dead.”[citation needed]The poetry of Sam Cornish does not follow strict poetic form.

Despite his criticism of some Black Arts Movement writers, however, he maintained cordial relations with Dudley Randall, founder of Broadside Press, and former US Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks.

When responding to an interview question by poet Afaa M. Weaver regarding his heritage, he replied:Before I was born, my mother was visited by the spirits of three men.