Everyone on Wall Street knows Fred Iseman as Chairman and CEO of CI Capital Partners, the private equity firm he founded in 1993. But few know him as a writer and editor. After graduating from Yale with a BA in English Literature, he became an editor at Hearst and later California Magazine. He wrote articles for The New Yorker (notably a Talk of the Town piece about New York’s Claremont Riding Academy) and for Harper’s (The War in the Sahara, 1980).
Today, an active patron of the arts, it should not come as a surprise that Iseman, a member of The Elizabethan Club of Yale, is giving $3 million to endow the school’s first chair in poetry. The Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry Fund will support a recognized poet or poetry scholar. Iseman must miss his ink-stained days–nothing comes off the money. Will we see a return to Iseman publishing more of his own writing? If that’s the case, seeing that he’s a busy guy, we respectfully suggest 2paragraphs. We’d love to read concise accounts about middle market leveraged buyouts written by a man who can recite Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
