Volume 44, Issues 1 & 2

Contributors

Daniel Aaron is Emeritus Professor of English at Harvard University. A former director of the graduate program in the History of American Civilization, he is one of the founders of the Library of America.

Doris Abramson is Professor Emeritus of Theater at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her most recent collection of poems, Now and Then, was published in 2002.

Chinua Achebe is a Nigerian writer who was a visiting professor at UMass in 1972 1975 and a Fullbright fellow in 1987. He currently teaches at Bard College.

Emmon Bach splits his time between Pelham, Massachusetts and London, England. He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Professorial Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. His publications are mostly in the field of linguistics; he has previously published poems in MR.

Leonard Baskin (1922-2000), internationally famous artist and sculptor, was MR‘s first designer and a principal in the magazine from its première issue on.

Sabine Broeck is Professor of American Studies at the University of Bremen, in Germany. She has published two books: White Amnesia–Black Memory? American Women’s Writing and History (Lang, 1999) and Der entkolonisierte Koerper. Die Protagonistin in der afroamerikanischen weiblichen Erzähltradition der 30 bis 80erJahre (Campus Verlag 1988).

Stephen Clingman was born and grew up in South Africa. He is Professor of English and Director of the Interdisciplinary Seminar in the Humanities and Fine Arts at UMass. His first book, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside, was succeeded by The Essential Gesture, an edited collection of Gordimer’s essays, his biography of one of the leading figures in the anti-apartheid struggle, Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary, won the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award, South Africa’s premier prize for non-fiction.

Madeline DeFrees was born in Ontario, OR in 1919 and educated at Marylhurst College, the University of Oregon, and Gonzaga University. She has taught at Holy Names College (later Fort Wright), University of Montana at Missoula, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry and received an NEA Grant. She currently lives in Seattle. Her most recent publication is Blue Dusk: New and Selected Poems from Cooper Canyon Press, 2001.

Martín Espada‘s sixth book of poems is called A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (Norton). His previous collection, Imagine the Angels of Bread (Norton), won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Espada teaches in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

John Fesltiner wrote The Lies of Art: Max Beerbohms Parody and Caricature (1972), Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu (1980), Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (1995), which won the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism, and Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (2001), which won the Modern Language Association, American Translators Association, and PEN West translation prizes. He teaches English and Jewish Studies at Stanford.

Hilene Flanzbaum received her Ph.D. at University of Pennsylvania and is Associate Professor and Director of Creative Writing at Butler University. She is a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, U.S. Holocaust Museum and Memorial. Her publications include Americanization of the Holocaust, and Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, which she co-edited.

Lewis Fried is a professor in the English Department at Kent State University. He is the editor-in-chief of the Handbook of American-Jewish Literature and co-editor of American Literary Naturalism and Jacob A. Riis: A Reference Guide. He is also the author of Makers of the City. He has been a Fulbright Professor in Turkey and Norway.

Yehudit Ben-Zvi Heller is a poet and a translator. Her poetry has appeared in a number of Israeli literary reviews. Yehudit’s first book of poetry, written in Hebrew, The Woman in a Purple Coat, was published by Teked Publishing, Tel Aviv. Her second collection of Hebrew poems is Even in the Summer It Rains Here, Ekid Publishing (Dec. 2002). She is currently a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Kathryn Hellerstein teaches Yiddish and Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the co-editor of Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, and the editor and translator of Paper Bridges: Selected Poems of Kadya Molodoswky and In New York: A Selection by Moyshe- Leyh Halpern. Hellerstein has received fellowships for her translations of Yiddish from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation.

John Hicks was co-editor of MR from 1962 to 1986. He is President Emeritus of the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation in Carmel, California.

Florence Howe helped found The Feminist Press in 1970. She has been the president of The Modern Language Association, editor of Women’s Studies Quarterly and has taught at the University of Wisconsin, Hofstra College, Queens College/ CUNY, Goucher College, and the College at Old Westbury/SUNY From 1985 to 2001 she was Professor of English at the City University of New York. She is the author or editor of more than a dozen books and more than ninety published essays.

Paul Jenkins teaches poetry at Hampshire College and is an editor of this review. “Walt Whitman in Chile” appears in his newest book of poems, Six Small Fires, published by Four Way Books in October, 2002.

Ursula Junk was born in Speyer, Germany. She attended the College of St. Teresa in Winona, MN and the University of Minnesota. She worked for SNCC and Poor People’s Corporation during the civil rights movement in Mississippi and has been an editor for a Cologne daily paper. She has also been an assistant to a Social Democratic member of parliament. Junk has been a freelance journalist for German public radio and television for the past twenty years.

Paul H.D. Kaplan is Professor of Art History in the School of Humanities at Purchase College/SUNY. He has written extensively on the subject of black Africans in European art from the Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century, including a 1985 book, The Rise of the Black Magus in Western Art. His published essays also included analyses of political and sacred imagery in Venetian Renaissance art, and he is currently completing a study of the political dimension of the work of Giorgione.

Rosette Clémentine Lamont was bom in Paris and came to the United States in 1941. She is Professor Emeritus of Theater at CUNY as well as being a Romance languages scholar, theater journalist, and translator. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellow. She is a regular contributor to MR.

Joseph Langland is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a former editor of MR. His books include Selected Poems (UMass Press 1991) and Any Body’s Song (National Poetry Series, Doubleday 1980). He has also been published in upwards of one hundred magazines, including Poetry, the Nation, the Atlantic Monthly, and the New Yorker. He has received an Amy Lowell Fellowship, a Ford Institute Faculty Fellowship, and a National Council of the Arts Fellowship, as well as the Melville Cane Award in Poetry.

Andrew Lass, born in New York, grew up in Prague and lives in South Hadley, Massachusetts. A photographer, essayist and poet, he has been an active member of the Czech surrealist group since 1968 and currently teaches social anthropology at Mount Holyoke College. His conversation with Allen Ginsberg appeared in MR Vol. XXXIX, No. 2.

Bruce Laurie was educated at Rutgers and the University of Pittsburgh. He has been at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst since 1971. His major work includes Working People of Philadelphia 1800-1850 (1980) and Artisans Into Workers (1989). He was President of the Massachusetts Society of Professors, the faculty union at the University of Massachusetts, from 1980-82.

Günter Lenz has been Professor of American Studies at Humboldt-Universit?t since 1993. His numerous publications include the history and theory of American Studies, multicultural theory, twentiteth- century American literatures, African American Studies, American film and printing, and Euro-American relations. He is recipient of the Carl Bode-Norman Holmes Pearson Prize of the American Studies Association for Lifetime Achievement in American Studies in 1999.

Julius Lester is the author of more than thirty books and has been a member of the University of Massachusetts faculty since 1971. He was a photographer for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the civil rights movement.

Jerome Liebling‘s photographs have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, The Getty Museum, The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and many other museums and galleries in the United States as well as England, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Japan. His work is in the permanent collections of major museums throughout the world. He is a recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and has had many monographs of his work published. His most recent book of photographs, The Dickinsons of Amherst with essays by Polly Longsworth, Christopher Benfy and Barton St. Armand, was published in fall 2001.

Kadya Molodowsky (1894-1975) came to the U.S. from Poland in 1935. She was a leading Yiddish poet.

Shaun O’Connell is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. He is the author of Imagining Boston: A Literary Landscape and Remarkable, Unspeak able New York.

Dale Peterson is the Eliza Clark Folger Professor of English and Russian at Amherst College and Associate Editor of the Massachusetts Review. His latest publication is Up From Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul (Duke University Press 2000).

Carol Potter is the author of three books, most recently Short History of Pets, which was the winner of the CSU Poetry Center Prize and the Balcones Poetry Prize. She has most recently published in Field, Poetry, the Journal, and the XXVI Pushcart Prize.

Rose-Myriam Réjouis is on leave from Sarah Lawrence College, where she teaches Caribbean and African literature. She currently teaches at Eugene Lang College. With Val Vinokurov, she has translated two novels by Patrick Chamoiseau: Texaco and Solibo Magnificent (Pantheon Books, 1997). Her poetry has recently appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Kestrel, and Poetry Daily. Her first book, Mots, Mort, Liberté: L’Ecriture de l’identité dans les oeuvres de Césaire, Chamoiseau et Condé, is forthcoming (Editions Karthala).

Adrienne Rich‘s most recent books of poetry are Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995- 1998 and Fox: Poems 1998-2000 (Norton). A new selection of her essays, Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations, was published in 2001. She is a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. She lives in California.

Werner Sollors earned the Doctor of Philosophy degree at the Freie Universitat Verlin, for which Jules Chametzky was the Doctorvater. He is now the Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English and Professor of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University. His publications include Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Literature and Culture (1986), Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (1999), and a book-length contribution on ethnic modernism to Volume 6 of Sacvan Bercovitch’s Cambridge History of American Literature (2003).

James Tate‘s latest books are Memoir of the Hawk (Ecco Press) and Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee (Verse Press). Sarabande Press recently published Lost River as part of their Quarternote Chapbook series.

Esther Terry came to UMass in 1965 to study with Sidney Kaplan and Jules Chametzky. She was one of the founding members of the WE.B. Du Bois Depart ment of Afro-American Studies and is currently the Professor and Chair of the department. She serves the campus as Associate Chancellor for Equal Opportunity and Diversity and has received numerous awards, including the Distinguished Alumni Award and the English Department’s Distinguished Graduate Award.

Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, is the author of the classic novel The Harder They Come and numerous influential articles on politics and literature.

Alan Trachtenberg was born in 1932. His most recent publication is Reading American Photographs (1989). He is the Neil Gray Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies at Yale University.

Robert Tucker (1921-1982) was Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and an editor of the Massachusetts Review from its founding until his death in 1982. He published several collections of poems and a variety of critical works.

Kwame Ture, formerly known as Stokely Carmichael, died in Guinea in 1998. Head of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, he was also honorary Prime Minister of the Black Panther Party, and a bestselling author.

Pauline Uchmanowicz is currently Associate Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz. Her poetry and essays have appeared in many national publications including Crazyhorse, Ohio Review, New American Writing, and Southern Poetry Review. She is a feature writer for Chronogram and Catskill Mountain Guide, both arts and culture journals serving New York’s Mid-Hudson Valley. She also writes “Recipe for Living,” a food column for the Woodstock Times.

Val Vinokurov was born in Moscow and in 1979 emigrated to Miami Beach. He is currently a post-doctoral teaching fellow at Eugene Lang College of New School University. He has published in the Russian Review, New American Writing, 110 Stories, Nothing Makes You Free, and The Miami Herald. His work is forthcoming in Common Knowledge and McSweeney’s. He is the co- translator, with Rose-Myriam Réjouis, of Texaco and Solibo Magnificent, novels by Patrick Chamoiseau.

Ellen Doré Watson directs the Poetry Center at Smith College and serves as an editor of the Massachusetts Review. Her newest collection of poems, Ladder Music, won the New York/New England Award from Alice James Books.

Melvin Wilk was born and raised in Brownsville, Brooklyn, NY. He is Professor of English at Simpson College, Indianola, Indiana. He, his wife and their three chil dren five in Des Moines, Iowa. His publications include a book of poetry, In Exile, and a book of criticism, Jewish Presence in T.S. Eliot and Franz Kafka. Poems from Marrying America, his latest poetry manuscript have also appeared in Poetry and the New Yorker.