Charles Muñoz

Muñoz served as a WWII navy aerial gunner in Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo bombers. After the war he worked as a United States Merchant Marine radio officer, sailing on freighters, tankers, and passenger ships, and later for several years on munitions ships bound for duty in the wars in Korea and Vietnam. He came ashore for good and married the former Bernardine Martin. For a while, he entertained himself as an explorer of caves, a walker in the desert, and a writer on arctic survival for the Air Force. He then chose a more formal profession, becoming vice president of Springhouse Corporation, a publisher of books and magazines.

Muñoz was a specialist in eighteenth-century literature, a member of the Gunroom, a novelist, a science fiction writer, and especially a poet. He attended Columbia University and wrote his masters thesis on English poet Edward Young in 1953. Stowaway, his mainstream sea novel, was published in 1957. His science fiction short stories appeared in the 1950s and 1960s under the pseudonym T. P. Caravan. One ("Random Sample," 1953) was recently reprinted in the anthology Worst Contact (Baen Books, 2016). Muñoz's varied experiences form the background that enriches his poems, which are often conventionally suburban in their location but wildly mythic in their subtext.

Muñoz was poet laureate of (Bucks County), spent five years as poetry editor of Jewish Spectator magazine, and became the official list bard to the Gunroom of HMS Surprise. His poems earned four nominations for the Pushcart Prize.

• Publisher's site with one of Muñoz's poems
• Interview with Charles by his grandson, Ian Munoz
• Charles' Burial at Sea