Volume 57, Issue 1

Contributors

Denja Abdullahi is a Nigerian-born poet, playwright, theater director, and culture technocrat. He has published five volumes of poetry and a collection of plays. Abdul­lahi is with the National Council for Arts and Culture, Abuja-Nigeria, where he pres­ently works as a Director, Performing Arts. He co-edited Themes Fall Apart But the Centre Holds, published in 2009 in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, in 2008. He is a UNESCO certified expert and facilitator on the Intan­gible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, and is the National President of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), founded by Achebe in 1981.

Albert Chinualumogu Achebe (1930–2013), often called the father of the African novel, gave his Chancellor’s Lecture “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1975. The lecture was published by the Massachusetts Review in 1977.

Dr. Chidi Achebe is a physician-executive. He has degrees from Dartmouth, Harvard, and Yale, and is the CEO of the Boston-based AIDE (African Integrated Development En­terprise). Dr. Achebe has dedicated his energy toward improving the health concerns of the global community situation, targeting issues such as diabetes, HIV/AIDS, and prostate cancer. He is the third son of Chinua and Christie Achebe.

Caroline Beimford is from Boston. Her work has appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, and she is currently pursuing her MFA at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.

Paula Bohince’s most recent poetry col­lection is Swallows and Waves, forthcoming from Sarabande in 2016.

Marianne Boruch’s ninth poetry collec­tion, Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing, will be out late summer 2016 from Copper Canyon Press, which also published her Ca­daver, Speak and The Book of Hours, winner of the 2013 Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award. The author of two essay collections, In the Blue Pharmacy and Poetry’s Old Air, she’s also writ­ten a memoir, The Glimpse Traveler. Boruch teaches in the MFA Program at Purdue Uni­versity, which she founded in 1987, and for many years in the low-residency Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

The last of the original founders of the Massachusetts Review in 1958–1959, Jules Chametzky served on the board in vari­ous capacities for twenty-seven years. He also lectured and taught in the U.S. and abroad.

Stephen Clingman is Distinguished Pro­fessor of English and Director of the Interdis­ciplinary Studies Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His fellowships include the Southern African Research Pro­gram, the African Studies Institute, the Soci­ety for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study. His books include The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside and an edited collection of essays by Nadine Gordimer, The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics And Places. His most recent book, a memoir titled Birth­mark, was published in 2015.

Dr. Johnnetta Betsch Cole was ap­pointed the Director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in March 2009. Since the mid-1980s, Dr. Cole has worked with a number of Smithsonian pro­grams. She currently serves on the Scholarly Advisory Board for the Smithsonian’s Na­tional Museum of African American History and Culture, the construction of which will be completed on the National Mall by 2016.

Nathan Go was born and raised in south­ern Philippines. He was a 2012 PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellow. A graduate of the Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, he is currently studying fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He writes es­says for the Michigan Quarterly Review Online.

Amy Gordon has published numerous books for middle school and young adult readers. Her most recent book, Painting the Rainbow, won the 2015 Paterson Prize for Young Peo­ple. She runs an after-school theater program for kids in her hometown of Gill, MA. She is currently enrolled in the MFA Program for Poetry and Translation at Drew University.

Corrado Govoni (1884–1965) was a lead­ing figure in the Crepuscular movement in Italian poetry, and a contributor to Futurism.

Paul Harding is the author of two nov­els about multiple generations of a New England family: the Pulitzer Prize–winning Tinkers and Enon. A graduate of the Uni­versity of Massachusetts, he was a drummer for the band Cold Water Flat before earning his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Harding has received a Guggenheim Fellow­ship and was a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown, MA.

Kathleen Hellen is the author of Umberto’s Night, winner of the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Her awards include poetry prizes from H.O.W. Journal and Wash­ington Square Review, and the James Still Award, the Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred, and two Pushcart nominations.

Akil Kumarasamy’s fiction has appeared in the Boston Review and is forthcoming in Guernica and Glimmer Train. She was a 2013/2014 Charles Pick South Asian Fellow in fiction at the University of East Anglia and recently has received scholarships to attend the Wesleyan Writers’ Conference and Squaw Valley Community of Writers. She earned her MFA at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.

Brandon Lewis lives and teaches in New York City. He received an MFA in poetry from George Mason University, and his writ­ing has appeared in journals such as Missouri Review, Salamander, Water-Stone Review, and Spork. This year he won Sundog Lit’s first po­etry contest.

An MR editor and contributor for over forty years, Jerome Liebling (1924–2011) had his photographs exhibited throughout the United States, England, Spain, Germany, and Japan. His work has been the subject of many monographs, and can be found in the perma­nent collections of museums throughout the world.

Achille Mbembe is a Research Professor in History and Politics at Wits University. He is based at the Witwatersrand Institute for Social and Economic Research. He is the author of many books, including On the Postcolony and Critique de la raison negre. His work has been translated into various languages. He is the editor of the online magazine The Johannesburg Salon and the convenor of the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism.

Maaza Mengiste is a Fulbright Scholar, photographer, and the award-winning author of Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, selected by the Guardian as one of the ten best contemporary African books. The novel was named one of the best books of 2010 by Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe, Publishers Weekly, and other publications. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Guardian, the New York Times, BBC Radio Four, Granta, and Lettre Internationale, among others. She has won nu­merous prizes and fellowships, including an NAACP Image Award and an Indies Choice Book of the Year. She was a writer for the documentary Girl Rising, and her second novel is forthcoming.

Okey Ndibe is the author of the novels Foreign Gods, Inc. and Arrows of Rain, and co-editor (with Zimbabwean writer Chen­jerai Hove) of Writers Writing on Conflicts and Wars in Africa. His memoir, Robbing a Bank and Other Misadventures, is forthcoming from Soho Press. He is a Shearing Fellow at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and has written for numerous publications, includ­ing the New York Times, the Guardian, BBC online, and the Financial Times.

Chuma Nwokolo, Jr., is a Nigerian law­yer and writer, and the publisher of African Writing magazine. He is author of the poetry collection Memories of Stone, the serial Tales by Conversation, and many novels, including Dia­ries of a Dead African. He was writer-in-resi­dence at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and his collection The Ghost of Sani Abacha is forthcoming. He lives in England.

Shaun O’Connell has been a member of the English Department at University of Mas­sachusetts Boston since 1965. He is the au­thor of two books: Imagining Boston: A Literary Landscape and Remarkable, Unspeakable New York: A Literary Landscape. He edited an in­terpretive anthology, Boston: Voices and Visions, and his essays have been collected in the New England Journal of Public Policy in Special Issue: Assembled Pieces. His teaching and writings focus on the sense of place upon writers who shaped our imaginations of significant places, particularly Boston and New England, New York, and Ireland.

Born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, Chinelo Okparanta is the author of the award-winning story collection Happiness, Like Water and the novel Under the Udala Trees. Her honors include an O. Henry Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, and finalist selection for the Young Lions, the Caine Prize, and the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. Her stories have appeared in Granta, The New Yorker, and Tin House, among other publications. She lives in New York.

Born in Brooklyn, raised in Miami, and edu­cated at the University of Michigan, Mar­lene Olin is a contributing editor at Arcadia magazine. Her short stories have been fea­tured or are forthcoming in over forty pub­lications, including Upstreet magazine, Steam Ticket, Vine Leaves, Crack the Spine, Poetica, Water Stone Review, Santa Clara Review, Broken Plate, and the Saturday Evening Post online. She recently completed a novel.

Caryl Phillips is the author of numerous books. Dancing in the Dark won the 2006 PEN/Beyond Margins Award, and A Distant Shore won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize. His other awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Lannan Liter­ary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Crossing the River, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize. He has written extensively for the stage, television, and film, and is a regular contributor to newspapers and maga­zines on both sides of the Atlantic. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His latest novel is The Lost Child.

Matt Salyer is a Pushcart-nominated writer and assistant professor at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Haven Review, Florida Review, New Madrid, Beloit Po­etry Journal, and others.

Maxine Scates is the author of three books of poetry, Undone, Black Loam, and Toluca Street. She is also co-editor, with David Trini­dad, of Holding Our Own: The Selected Poems of Ann Stanford. She lives in Eugene, OR.

Lynda Sexson’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Epoch, Able Muse, Copper Nickel, Carrier Pigeon, Black Warrior Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Fourteen Hills, Image, the Gettysburg Review, Ninth Letter, Kenyon Review, and others. Her books are Ordinarily Sacred, Margaret of the Imperfections, and Hamlet’s Planets.

MR Contributing Editor Ekwueme Mi­chael Thelwell was the founding chair­man of the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Thelwell was active in the civil rights movement, participating in the Stu­dent Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Mississippi Freedom Dem­ocratic Party (MFDP). His novel The Harder They Come has become a Jamaican classic, and his political and literary essays are col­lected in Duties, Pleasures and Conflicts.

Chika Unigwe is a writer of both fiction and creative nonfiction. She was born in Enugu, Nigeria. She has degrees from the University of Nigeria and the KU Leuven. She holds a PhD from the University of Leiden in Holland. She is the author of three novels, including On Black Sisters Street and Night Dancer. Her short stories have appeared in literary journals across the world. Her works have been translated into German, Japanese, Hebrew, Italian, Hungarian, Spanish, and Dutch. She won the 2012 Nigeria Literature Award, and is the recipient of many other awards and fellowships, including a Rocke­feller Foundation Fellowship, a UNESCO Fellowship, and a BBC short story award.

Nicholas Wong is the author of Crevasse. His new poems can be found in Quarterly West, Southern Humanities Review, Ostrich Review, Los Angeles Review, The Margins, and Verse Daily. Based in Hong Kong, he is an as­sistant poetry editor for Drunken Boat.