Volume 51, Issue 2

Contributors

Rosa Alice Branco is a poet, essayist, and trans lator. She has a PhD. in Philosophy and is a Professor of the Theory of Perception. She has published ten volumes of poetry, including her collected poems, Spelling Out the Day (2004) and the recent collection, Cattle of the Lord, which has just won the prestigious 2009 Espiral Maior de Poesia Award for best book of poetry from Galicia, Portugal, Angola, or Brazil. Her two volumes of essays are What Prevents the World from Becoming a Picture and Visual Perception in Berkeley. She has organized and participated in International Poetry Festivals throughout the world, from Brazil to Poland, from Venezuela to Tunisia. Closer to home, she is an active organizer of literary events and festivals in the northern Portuguese cities of Aveiro and Porto.

Myriam J. A. Chancy is a Haitian-Canadian writer born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti (PhD., Iowa). Her first novel, Spirit of Haiti (Mango Publications, 2003), was a finalist in the Best First Book Category, Canada/Caribbean region, of the Commonwealth Prize 2004. She is also the author of two books of literary criticism, Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (Rutgers, 1997) and Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile (Temple, 1997) as well as a second novel, The Scorpion’s Claw (Peepal Tree Press, 2005). “The Sound of Water” is excerpted from her third novel, The Loneliness of Angels (Peepal Tree Press, 2010).

Jules Chametzky retired from the UMass English Department in 2004, after a stint as Guest Professor (for the second time) at Humboldt University in Germany in 2003, where his wife Anne Halley, also taught a Bilingual Poetry Workshop. The selections in this issue are the first two of more than thirty essays on Jewish Writers that he has encountered over fifty years.

Daria D’Arienzo served as archivist and head of Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College for more than two decades, where she brought order and thus accessibility to the extensive collection of Hitchcock family papers and books, including Orra White Hitchcock’s artwork. Daria and Robert L. Herbert are the curators of Orra White Hitchcock (1786-1863): An Amherst Woman of Art and Science, a forthcoming exhibition at the Mead Art Museum (January to May 2011).

Robin Dizard, Emerita Professor of English at Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire, specializes in African American and Caribbean literature. Her previous articles on fugitive slave narratives appeared in Slavery and Abolition (2002) and MELUS (1997).

Joanne Dominique Dwyer‘s poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Conduit, the Cortland Review, Field, the Massachusetts Review, the New England Review, and TriQuarterly. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson s Program for Writers and lives outside of Santa Fe, new Mexico. Dwyer is also a 2008 Rona Jaffe Award recipient.

Robert Erwin is the last of a remarkable crew that led the way in scholarly publishing half a century ago at the Unversity of Chicago Press. Jobs at Northwestern University, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania followed, and he still keeps his hand in as Associate Editor of the Massachusetts Review. He is the author of two books of essays, with a third one in progress.

Jessica Lang is Assistant Professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY. She is currently work ing on a book about early American women writers.

Alexis Levitin‘s translations have appeared in well over two hundred literary magazines, including American Poetry Review, Evansville Review, Kenyon Review, Grand Street, New England Review, Partisan Review, Prairie Schooner, New Letters, Northwest Review, and Two-Lines. He has published thirty books of translations, including Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm and Eugenio de Andrade’s Forbidden Words (both from New Directions). He is a recipient of two NEA translation fellowships and two Fulbright Lectureships, as well as residencies at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, the European Translators Collegium in Germany, and the Rockefeller Foundation retreat at Bellagio, Italy.

Stephen Lindow earned his MFA in 2004 from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He will teach English in South Korea this spring. He taught middle school English for four years, two years undergrad Business Communication, and two years English Comp. He performed with Poetry Alive, Inc. in K-12 schools all over the country. Currently, he is involved with an avant-garde group that performs Kurt Schwitters’s “Ursonata.” He is also a scuba diver and an urban spelunker.

Teddy Macker teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Among his honors is the Reginald S. Tickner Fellowship of the Gilman School in Baltimore. His work appears (or will appear) in the Antioch Review, the Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Orion, the River Teeth Reader Anthology, Seneca Review, the Sun, and elsewhere. He lives in the Painted Cave community in the Santa Ynez Mountains.

Cleopatra Mathis‘s most recent book is White Sea (Sarabande, 2005). Born and raised in Louisiana, she has taught at Dartmouth College since 1982, when she founded the creative writing program.

James Meyer is Winship Distinguished Professor of Art History at Emory University and a curator of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery of Art. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, where he is developing a book on the meaning of the sixties in contemporary art and culture. “Guests” is his first published work of fiction.

Edith Pearlman is the author of three collections of short stories: Vaquita, Love Among the Greats, and How to Fall. Her fourth collection will be published in 2010 by Lookout Books.

Barbara Perez studied philosophy and English at the University of Texas at San Antonio. In 2009, she was the recipient of the Harold F. Taylor Prize awarded by the Academy of American Poets. She is currently a student at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her work has been published in various journals.

Wilson Roberts is a receptionist in a small law firm, a musician and storyteller, a mediator in the local courts, a retired teacher, union organizer, and city councilor. He has published three novels: The Cold Dark Heart of the World, a super natural thriller; The Serpent and the Hummingbird, in which reason and faith are tested in a North Carolina mountain Pentecostal serpent handling church; and Incident on Tuckerman Court, about a UMass political scientist in recession-plagued Greenfield who is faced with a threat to his very ground of being. All have been released by Wilder Publications of Blacksburg, Virginia. He lives in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and on St. John in the Virgin Islands.

Michael Thurston teaches in the department of English and the program in American Studies at Smith College. He is the author of Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry between the World Wars and of The Underworld Descent in Twentieth-Century Poetry: From Pound and Eliot to Heaney and Walcott. His reviews of contemporary poetry have appeared in Indiana Review, Kenyon Review, and Yale Review, and his stories in Confrontation, Cupboard, Fringe, Knock, Southeast Review, and Quick Fiction.

Jean Valentine is the author of ten books of poetry; her new book, Break the Glass, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in the fall of 2010.

G. C. Waldrep‘s most recent collection, Archicembalo (Tupelo, 2009), won the Dorset Prize. Your Father on the Train of Ghosts, written in collaboration with John Gallaher, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in April 2011. He lives in Lewisburg, Pa., and teaches at Bucknell University.

Gary Young‘s books include Hands, The Dream of a Moral Life, Days, Braver Deeds, and No Other Life, which won the William Carlos Williams Award. His most recent books are Pleasure and Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California. His New and Selected Poems is forth coming from White Pine Press. He teaches at the University of California Santa Cruz, and recently received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.