Victoria Amelina was a Ukrainian novelist, essayist, and human rights activist based in Kyiv. She won the Joseph Conrad Literature Prize for her prose works, including the novels Dom’s Dream Kingdom and Fall Syndrome, and was a finalist of the European Union Prize for Literature. Since 2022 Amelina had been collaborating with Ukrainian teams to document russian war crimes and advocate for accountability for the international crimes committed by the russian Federation and its troops. She was tragically killed in a senseless airstrike while eating with colleagues at a restaurant in Kramatorsk, Ukraine.
Peter Balakian is the author of 8 books of poems, 4 books of prose, 3 collaborative translations, and several edited books. “No Sign,” is the title poem of Balakian’s forthcoming book of poems. Ozone Journal won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Black Dog of Fate, a memoir won the 1998 PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for the Art of the Memoir; The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response won the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize. His collaborative translations include two books by Grigoris Balakian: Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide and The Ruins of Ani. Among his other books of prose is Vice and Shadow: Essays on the Lyric Imagination, Poetry, Art, and Culture. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages.
Balakian is the recipient of many awards, prizes, and civic citations including the Presidential Medal from the Republic of Armenia, Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, The Spendlove Prize for Social Justice, Tolerance, and Diplomacy, and The Emily Clark Balch Prize for poetry from the Virginia Quarterly Review. He is Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of the Humanities in the department of English and Director of Creative Writing at Colgate University.
Judith Baumel’s previous books are The Weight of Numbers, for which she won The Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, Now, The Kangaroo Girl and Passeggiate. She is Professor Emerita of English and Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at Adelphi University. She has served as President of The Association of Writers and Writing Programs, director of The Poetry Society of America and a Fulbright Scholar in Italy.
Gerry Bergstein's work contrasts the awesome and the trivial, the high and the low, the manic and the melancholic using sources from Brueghel to "The Simpsons." He is the recipient of an Artadia grant (2007), a career achievement award from the St. Botolph Club (2007), and a four-week residency at the Liguria Study Center in Genoa, Italy (2006). His solo shows include Gallery NAGA and the Danforth Museum (scheduled for 11/09); Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston ('04, '02, '99, '97); Stephan Stux Gallery, NY ('99); Galerie Bonnier, Geneva, Switzerland; Zolla Lieberman Gallery, Chicago, IL; and the DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA. He is represented in the collections of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; MIT; DeCordova Museum; Davis Museum at Wellesley College; IBM; and many others. He has been reviewed widely in the local press as well as Tema Celeste, ARTnews, Art in America, and Artforum. He has been on the faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for over two decades.
Daniel Berrigan was an American Jesuit priest, university educator, and poet. Berrigan was also a lifelong anti-war activist committed to social and political justice. He led faith-driven coalitions against the Vietnam War including the Catonsville Nine - a group of nine Catholics that burned draft files in protest, in Maryland, 1968. Berrigan then went on to form the Plowshares Movement, an anti-nuclear protest group that practiced the destruction of military weapons a decade later. This activism continued in his later life, with continued pacifism toward conflict with the Middle East. In his literary life, Berrigan authored over 50 books, won many awards, and taught at Fordham University from 2000, until his death in 2016.
Rafael Cadenas (Barquisimeto, 1930) is a Venezuelan poet, translator, and educator. He formed part of the “Tabla Redonda” group in the early sixties, when he was active in the Communist Party of Venezuela. He was imprisoned and exiled during the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, and he took refuge on the island of Trinidad until 1957. He has published the books Los cuadernos del destierro (1960), Falsas maniobras (1966), Memorial (1977), Intemperie (1977), Anotaciones (1983), Amante (1983), Dichos (1992), Gestiones (1992), Apuntes sobre San Juan de la Cruz y la mística (1995), and En torno a Basho y otros asuntos (2016). He received a Guggenheim grant in 1986 and an Honoris Causa doctorate from the Central University of Venezuela. His work has been awarded several important prizes, including the Premio Nacional de Ensayo in 1984, the Premio Nacional de Literatura in 1985, the Premio San Juan de la Cruz in 1991, the Premio Internacional de Poesía Ciudad de Granada Federico García Lorca in 2016, and the Reina Sofia Iberoamerican poetry prize in 2018.
Sumita Chakraborty is poetry editor of AGNI, art editor of At Length, and a fellow at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University, where she is a PhD candidate in English with a certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her articles, essays, and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Cultural Critique, the Los Angeles Review of Books, POETRY, and other publications. In 2017, she received the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship.
Departures from Rilke is Steven Cramer’s seventh poetry collection. His previous books are The Eye that Desires to Look Upward (Galileo Press, 1987), The World Book (Copper Beech Press, 1992), Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand (Lumen Editions/Brookline Books, 1997), Goodbye to the Orchard (Sarabande Books, 2004)— winner of the 2005 Sheila Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club and named a 2005 Honor Book in Poetry by the Massachusetts Center for the Book—Clangings (Sarabande Books, 2012), and Listen (MadHat Press, 2020), long-listed as a “must read” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. His poems and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Field, Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and other journals. His work is represented in anthologies such as The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (Autumn House Press, 2005 and 2011), The Book of Villanelles (Knopf Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series, 2012), and The POETRY Anthology, 1912-2002 (Ivan R. Dee, 2002). He has also written essays for Simply Lasting: Writers on Jane Kenyon (Graywolf Press, 2005); Touchstones: American Poets on a Favorite Poem (Middlebury College Press, 1996); and Until Everything Is Continuous Again: American Poets on the Recent Work of W.S. Merwin (WordFarm, 2012). Recipient of two grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, he has taught literature and writing at Bennington College, Boston University, M.I.T., and Tufts University; and he founded and now teaches in the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Houston's second Poet Laureate (2015-2017), Robin Davidson is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Kneeling in the Dojo and City that Ripens on the Tree of the World, and the full collection, Luminous Other, recipient of the Ashland Poetry Press 2012 Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize. The recipient of Fulbright and NEA awards, she is co-translator with Ewa Elzbieta Nowakowska of two volumes of Ewa Lipska's poems from the Polish, The New Century and Dear Ms. Schubert (Princeton University Press, 2021). She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2019, and teaches literature and creative writing as professor emeritus of English for the University of Houston-Downtown.
Martin Edmunds' book, The High Road to Taos, was chosen by Donald Hall for the National Poetry Series. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Paris Review, Little Star, Grand Street, The Nation, The Partisan Review, Southwest Review, and Agni among other journals and anthologies; three poems are featured on the Yeats Society of NY website. Awards and honors include an Artist Fellowship in Poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the “Discovery”/ The Nation Prize, the Lloyd McKim Garrison Medal for Poetry, and the Harvard Monthly Prize. Edmunds was an Artist-in-Residence at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine for many years, where he wrote plays, verse plays, libretti, and entertainments. He has also co-written screenplays, including Passion in the Desert, a feature adaptation of the Balzac story for Roland Films released by Fine Line. Edmunds works as a freelance editor, teaches creative writing and versification, and digs life on the Outer Cape as a landscaper, clam raker, and oysterer.
Poet, photographer, professor and bandleader Thomas Sayers Ellis is the author of The Maverick Room and Skin, Inc., He co-founded The Dark Room Collective and The Dark Room Reading Series in 1989 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has taught in various Universities and published, both poems and photographs, in numerous journals, including The Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, and Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2010, 2015). In 2015, he co-founded Heroes Are Gang Leaders, a literary free Jazz band of artists, and was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in Poetry.
Amira El-Zein is a poet, translator, and scholar writing in English, Arabic, and French. She published two collections of poetry, The Book of Palm Trees, Bedouins of Hell, and a chapbook The Jinn and Other Poems.
Her translations of the poet Mahmoud Darwish appeared in Unfortunately it Was Paradise edited by Carolyn Forche and Munir Akash. She is the author of the acclaimed book Islam, Arabs, and the Intelligent World of the Jinn (Syracuse University Press, 2009) which went into several prints and is now available in paperback. She is also the co-editor of the book Creativity and Exile (Washington DC: Jusoor Books, Kitab Publications, 1996.) She teaches at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919-2021) was an American poet, painter, and social activist. After serving as a Navy officer in World War II, Ferlinghetti co-founded City Lights Booksellers & Publishers in San Francisco, CA, a bookstore-publisher dedicated to world literature and progressive politics. Ferlinghetti often collaborated with Beat poets - publishing Allen Ginsberg’s Howl - and got arrested, as a result, for its “obscene” content. Ferlinghetti’s politically-charged paintings, essays, and poetry won him many awards, and speak to his belief that art needs to be witnessed by those in the public sphere.
The Invisible Borders of Time: Five Female Latin American Poets is a new anthology edited by Venezuelan-born editor and poet Nidia Hernández. In this collection, Hernández, winner of the Sundara Ramaswamy prize for The Land of Mild Light: Selected Poems of Rafael Cadenas, gathers the voices of Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay), Piedad Bonnett (Colombia), Yolanda Pantin (Venezuela), Carmen Boullosa (Mexico), and Rossella Di Paolo (Peru)—five award-winning Latin American poets— into a definitive bilingual anthology. This collection, representative of the region’s rich poetic history, samples the poetry of trailblazing female voices from the last sixty years. Many celebrated poets and translators have brought this edition into English, including Sophie Cabot Black, Forrest Gander, Sally Keith, Rowena Hill, and many others.
Melissa Green is a poet and author of Magpiety: New & Selected Poems (2015) and Fifty-Two (2007), both from Arrowsmith; The Squanicook Ecologues (1987), which won multiple awards and was hailed by Derek Walcott as “reverential elations [that] uplift and soothe the reader as naturally and cleanly as the morning wind.”
Her work has appeared in publications such as Yale Review, Agni, Paris Review, and The New York Review of Books. She has also written Color Is the Suffering of Light (1995) and The Linen Way (2013), two memoirs. She lives in Winthrop, Massachusetts.
Donald Hall Jr. was an American poet, writer, editor and literary critic. He was the author of over 50 books across several genres from children's literature, biography, memoir, and essays, including 22 volumes of verse. Early in his career, Hall became the first poetry editor of The Paris Review (1953–1961), and was noted for interviewing poets and other authors on their craft. In June 2006, Hall was appointed as the Library of Congress’s 14th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. He is regarded as a "plainspoken, rural poet," and it has been said that, in his work, he "explores the longing for a more bucolic past and reflects [an] abiding reverence for nature." Hall was respected for his work as an academic, having taught at Stanford University, Bennington College, and the University of Michigan, and having made significant contributions to the study and craft of writing. Hall passed away in 2018.
Scott Harney (1955-2019) was a practicing poet who, aside from a few early publications in the Somerville Community News, did not publish during his lifetime, leaving a significant body of work to be discovered by readers after his death. He grew up in and around Boston, graduating from Charlestown High School and Harvard College. His literary influences include Robert Lowell and Jane Shore, with whom he studied at Harvard in the 1970s, as well as Richard Hugo and Philip Levine.
Houman Harouni was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1982, and migrated, as a refugee, to the United States in 1997. His father was, for a time, a professional revolutionary, and his mother, for a time, a sociologist of revolution. He is a theorist of cultural transformation. His work moves across philosophy, political economy, history of science, psychology, theater, and literature, culminating in his pedagogy of Active Theory, which he has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Education since 2015. His academic and journalistic writings have appeared in a wide array of publications, including The Guardian, PBS Frontline, The White Review, and the Harvard Educational Review. He has been awarded Fellowships at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education. Unrevolutionary Times is Harouni’s first collection of poems.
Charles O. Hartman has published seven previous collections, including New & Selected Poems (Ahsahta); a textbook (Verse: An Introduction to Prosody, Wiley-Blackwell); and three books of critical prose (Free Verse, Jazz Text, and Virtual Muse). He co-edited the volume on Wendy Battin for the Unsung Masters series. He is Professor and Poet in Residence Emeritus at Connecticut College. He plays jazz guitar.
Kythe Heller is a poet, essayist, interdisciplinary artist, and scholar completing a doctorate at Harvard University in Comparative Religion and Arts and Media Practice. She is also a practitioner of Sufism and a student of M.R. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. Her published work includes two poetry chapbooks, Immolation (Monk Honey) and Thunder (WICK: Harvard Divinity School), the philosophical monograph “An Ethnography of Spirituality” (Cambridge UP), the essay "Living Backwards" in the anthology Quo Anima: spirituality and innovation in contemporary women’s poetry (Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics), and poems and essays published in The American Poetry Review, Tricycle, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from Harvard University, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, The Mellon Foundation, The MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, and Squaw Valley Community of Writers. While completing an MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, she created a literacy and creative arts program at the Coachman Family Homeless Shelter in White Plains, New York; she has also taught through the Bard Prison Initiative, Bradley-Angle Women’s Shelter, Yellow Brick Road Street Outreach, and lived and worked full-time at Janus Youth Shelters; currently she is a teaching fellow at Harvard University and on the faculty of the Language and Thinking Program at Bard College. In 2017, she founded VISION LAB, a collective of creatives working across spirituality, the arts, social and environmental justice, and technology.
Nidia Hernández was born in Venezuela and has been living in the US since 2018. She is a poet, translator of Portuguese poetry, editor, broadcaster, and radio producer. Her editorial project lamajadesnuda.com won the 2011 world Summit Awards, and her radio program (also called La Maja Desnuda) has presented works from the last 35 years with more than 1,820 broadcasts. Currently, she is broadcasting the program through UPV Radio 102.5 FM Spain. She curates Poesiaudio (Arrowsmith Press), is a co-editor for Mercurius Magazine, a UK publication based in Barcelona, Spain, and belongs to the Board of Directors of New England Poetry Club. Hernández is the winner of the 2021 Sundara Ramaswamy Prize for her editorial work on The Land of Mild Light by Rafael Cadenas. In 2022, she published a new anthology, The Invisible Borders of Time: Five Female Latin American Poets, for which she which won the 2023 Mass Poetry Community Award.
Fanny Howe is the author of more than thirty works of poetry and prose, including Love and I, The Needle's Eye, Come and See, and The Winter Sun. Howe was the recipient of the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. She also won the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for her Selected Poems, and has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Council for the Arts, and the Village Voice.
Richard Kearney is an Irish philosopher and writer who holds the Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College. He has written many books on European philosophy, narrative imagination, and Irish culture, as well as a book of poetry and two previous novels, Sam’s Fall and Walking at Sea Level. Kearney is also director of the international Guestbook Project of Narrative Hospitality.
Lyudmyla Khersonska is a poet and translator from Odesa, Ukraine. She is the author of four poetry collections in Russian. In 2022 her joint volume with the poet Boris Khersonsky, her husband, came out in English translation from Lost Horse Press, titled The Country where Everyone’s Name is Fear. Khersonska was recently included in the list, “33 International Women Writers Who are Bold for Change” by Words without Borders.
George Kovach was the founding editor and publisher of CONSEQUENCE magazine, the international literary journal addressing the culture and consequences of war through literature and the arts. A poet and combat veteran, he directed a series of writing workshops for war veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Halyna Kruk was born in 1974 in Lviv, Ukraine. She is the author of five books of poetry, a collection of short stories, and four children’s books. She has garnered multiple awards, including the Ptyvitannia Zhyttia and Granoslov Prizes in 1997, the Step by Step prize for children’s books in 2003, the BookForum Best Book Award in 2021, the Smoloskyp Poetry Award, the Bohdan Ihor Antonych Prize award, the “Hranoslav” Award, the Polish Gaude Polonia Fellowship, and the Kovaliv Foundation Prize for Prose in 2022. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages, and she has translated from several languages into Ukrainian. She’s served as vice president of the Ukrainian PEN, holds a Ph.D in Ukrainian literature, and is professor of European and Ukrainian baroque literature at the Ivan Franko National University in Lviv.
Oksana Lutsyshyna is a Ukrainian writer and poet. She is the author of four books of fiction and four books of poetry, all published in Ukraine. She is currently working as Lecturer in Ukrainian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches Ukrainian language and literature, as well as other Eastern European literatures. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Georgia. She also translates Ukrainian poetry into English in collaboration with the New York-based poet and writer Olena Jennings.
Maureen N. McLane grew up in upstate New York and was educated at Harvard University, Oxford University, and the University of Chicago. She is the author of five books of poetry: Some Say (FSG, 2017), Mz N: the serial: a poem-in-episodes (FSG, 2016), This Blue (FSG, 2014—Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry), World Enough (FSG, 2010), and Same Life(FSG, 2008), as well as the poetry chapbook, This Carrying Life (Pressed Wafer/Arrowsmith, 2006). Her book My Poets (FSG, 2012)—an experimental hybrid of memoir and criticism—was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography. She has also published two books of literary criticism, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge UP, 2008) and Romanticism and the Human Sciences (CUP, 2000), and coedited The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry (CUP, 2008).
Mitch Manning teaches in the English and Labor Studies programs at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and is Associate Director at the Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences. He is a poetry editor for Consequence Magazine and founding editor of NO INFINITE. His poems and interviews have been published in The Doris, BOOG City, Let The Bucket Down, Consequence Magazine, Sundial, Hollow, GAFF, and elsewhere. He can be found online at mitchmanning.info
Alexandra Marshall’s essays and short fiction have appeared in AGNI, Five Points, Hunger Mountain, Literary Hub, Ploughshares, The American Prospect, The American Scholar, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and in several anthologies. She has published five novels (Gus in Bronze, Tender Offer, The Brass Bed, Something Borrowed, and The Court of Common Pleas) and a nonfiction book, Still Waters. With the publication of this work, earlier versions of The Silence of Your Name: The Afterlife of a Suicide have at last achieved a Beginning, a Middle, and an End.
Diane Mehta was born in Frankfurt, grew up in Bombay and New Jersey, studied in Boston, and now makes her home in New York City. She is the author of the forthcoming novel Leaving Malabar Hill, set in India during Partition (OR Books, 2024), and the essay collection Happier Far (University of Georgia Press 2024-25). She also published a debut poetry collection, Forest with Castanets (Four Way, 2019), and a poetics and style guide, How to Write Poetry (Barnes & Noble Books, 2005). Her work has been recognized by the Peter Heinegg Literary Award, the Café Royal Cultural Foundation, a Kirby-Mewshaw fellowship at Civitella Ranieri, and a fellowship at Yaddo. She was the founding managing editor of A Public Space, launched and edited Glossolalia for PEN America to publish writing from traditionally underrepresented languages, and was executive nonfiction editor for Guernica.
Hanna Melnyczuk received an MFA from Mass College of Art. Her work has appeared at Art Space in Maynard, MA, University of Massachusetts Lowell Mahoney Gallery, The Gallery at the Piano Factory, the Danforth Museum, Tufts Gallery, Brush Gallery, Fountain Street Gallery, New Art Center, and more. She has curated two art exhibits: Agni Magazine of Emerging Artists (published by Agni Press as Agni 37: Standing on the Verge: Emerging Poets & Artists alongside poetry curated by Joseph Lease and Thomas Sayers Ellis); the other, a travelling exhibit of Ukrainian artists’ works, Don’t Close Your Eyes, responding to the current war. Hanna teaches Drawing and 2D Design at University of Massachusetts Lowell, and lives in Groton with her husband Joseph, her daughter Lara, and their cat Tello. This is her first book. You can see more of her work at www.hannamelnyczuk.com
Christopher Merrill has published seven collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and translations; and six books of nonfiction, among them, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, and Self- Portrait with Dogwood. His writings have been translated into nearly forty languages; his journalism appears widely; his honors include a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French government, numerous translation awards, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial and Ingram Merrill Foundations. As director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa since 2000, Merrill has conducted cultural diplomacy missions to more than fifty countries, and he served as a Senior Fulbright Specialist in Poland and Russia. He also served on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO from 2011-2018, and in April 2012 President Barack Obama appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities.
Yuliya Musakovska is an award-winning Ukrainian poet and translator. She was born in 1982 in Lviv, Ukraine, where she lives and works. She has published five poetry collections in Ukrainian, among them Hunting for Silence (2014), Men, Women, and Children (2015), and The God of Freedom (2021) shortlisted for the Lviv UNESCO City of Literature Prize and included in the top eight nominees for the Taras Shevchenko National Prize. She received many literary awards in Ukraine, including the Smoloskyp Prize for Poetry (2010). Her work has been translated into over thirty languages and widely published around the globe. Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, AGNI, Tupelo Quarterly, NELLE, The Common, and other journals
John Okrent is a poet and a family doctor. His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Plume, Poetry Northwest, Field, and The Seattle Times, among other journals. He was chosen by Carl Phillips as the winner of the 2021 Jeff Marks Memorial Prize. Okrent works at a community health center in Tacoma, WA, where he lives with his wife and two young children in a fisherman’s cabin on Puget Sound.
Romeo Oriogun is a Nigerian poet whose poems have appeared in Brittle Paper, Connotation Press, Prairie Schooner, Dissident Blog, and Expound, among other publications. His poems have been translated into Estonian, Slovenian, and Swedish, and rendered into songs in Portuguese. He is the author of the chapbooks Burnt Men (Praxis) and The Origin of Butterflies (APBF and Akashic Books). He is the winner of the 2017 Brunel International African Prize for Poetry, his manuscript My Body Is No Miracle was shortlisted for the 2017 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, and his poem Metamorphosis was shortlisted for the inaugural Brittle Prize for Poetry. He is currently a Resident Scholar at Dunster House, an Institute of International Education Artist Protection Fund Fellow, a W.E.B. DuBois Research Institute Fellow, and the Harvard Scholars at Risk Fellow for Spring 2019.
Catherine Parnell earned an MFA in Literature and Creative Writing from Bennington College. She is the author of the memoir The Kingdom of His Will (2007), along with many short stories in publications like Redivider, TSR: The Southampton Review, and The Baltimore Review. A writing and editing consultant, she currently works as the senior associate editor for Consequence magazine, and teaches creative writing at Grub Street in Boston.
Mark Pawlak is the author of nine poetry collections, most recently Reconnaissance: New and Selected Poems and Poetic Journals, and the editor of six anthologies. His work has been translated into German, Japanese, Polish, and Spanish, and has been performed at Teatr Polski in Warsaw. In English, his poems and prose have appeared widely in anthologies such as The Best American Poetry, Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, For the Time Being: The Bootstrap Anthology of Poetic Journals, and in the literary magazines New American Writing, Mother Jones, Poetry South, The Saint Ann’s Review, and The World, among many others. His latest publication is the book-length memoir My Deniversity: Knowing Denise Levertov (MadHat Press, 2021). Pawlak lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is co-editor of Hanging Loose, one of the country’s longest lived and most influential literary presses.
Douglas J. Penick has written opera libretti (Munich Biennale, Santa Fe Opera), texts for video (NFB/Canada: Leonard Cohen, narrator), as well as novels on the 3rd Ming Emperor (Journey of the North Star) and about spiritual searchers (Dreamers and Their Shadows). He also wrote three book-length episodes from the Gesar of Ling epic on a grant for the Witter Bynner Foundation. Wakefield Press published his and Charles Ré’s translation of Pascal Quignard’s A Terrace In Rome. Shorter works appeared in Agni, Chicago Quarterly, Cahiers de L’Herne, New England Quarterly, Kyoto Journal, Tricycle, Utne Reader, and many others.
William Pierce is the author of Reality Hunger: On Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (Arrowsmith, 2016). His fiction has appeared in Granta, Ecotone, and elsewhere; his essays, in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, and Consequence. He is senior editor of AGNI, where he writes an irregular column called Crucibles. With the Caine Prize-winning Nigerian novelist E. C. Osondu, he coedited The AGNI Portfolio of African Fiction.
David Rivard is the author of six previous books, including Standoff, Sugartown, Wise Poison, and Torque. His work has won the PEN/New England Prize in poetry, the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and he has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Among his other honors are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. In 2006, he was given the O.B. Hardison Poetry Prize by the Folger Shakespeare Library in recognition of both his writing and teaching. He lives on the coast of Maine.
Etnairis Rivera was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1949. She belongs to the Poetic Generation of 1975. She wrote from an early age, publishing her first poems in the literary press at age 15. Her poetry has been translated into English, French and Portuguese, and published in various anthologies and magazines of Puerto Rican and international poetry. Rivera writes stories, essays, and scripts for cultural television programs. She is Professor of Hispanic Literature at the University of Puerto Rico. Rivera has published the books of poems: Wydondequiera, 1974; María Mar Moriviví, 1976; Canto de la Pachamama, 1976; The day of the pollen, 1981; Ariadna del Agua, 1989; Between cities and almost paradises, 1995; The journey of kisses, Of the flower of the sea and death, 2000; Intervenidos (anti-war poems dedicated to the struggle of the people of Vieques, 2003).
Poet, playwright and translator, Sherod Santos is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Square Inch Hours. A National Book Award, New Yorker Book Award and National Book Critics Award Finalist, in 1999 he received an Award for Literary Excellence from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has taught at several universities in the United States and was Poet-in-Residence at the former Poets’ House in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He currently lives in Santa Fe, where he works with a hunger relief program serving nine counties in Northern New Mexico.
One of Ukraine’s leading women of letters, poet, activist, and publisher, Marjana Savka lives in Lviv. She has published twelve books of poetry and children’s literature. As editor-in-chief of Old Lion Publishers, she has brought out the work of Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow, Jorge Luis Borges, Stephen Hawking, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Sofia Andrukhoych. Savka is also a member of the Center for the Study of Young Adult and Children’s Literature. Her own work has been translated into half a dozen languages, including English, Russian, and Latvian. In 2003 she was awarded the Stus Prize for poetry.
George Scialabba is a Boston-area book critic referred to by James Wood as “one of America’s best all-around intellects.” He has authored five collections of essays, including Divided Mind (2006), The Modern Predicament (2011), and Low Dishonest Decades: Essays & Reviews, 1980-2015. Richard Rorty wrote that he is “one of many readers who stay on the lookout for George Scialabba’s bylines. His reviews and essays are models of moral inquiry.” His reviews can be found in many publications.
Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966) made one of the most sensational debuts in the history of American poetry when he published his first collection of poetry (and a story, and a verse play), In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, with New Directions four days after his 25th birthday in 1938. He received his B.A. in Philosophy from N.Y.U. before studying Philosophy as a graduate student at Harvard. He left Harvard without taking a degree, to pursue writing and publishing. Despite continued literary successes, increasing problems with drinking, pill taking, insomnia, and mental illness ravaged Schwartz's life. His self-proclaimed masterpiece Genesis: Book One was a commercial and critical failure. Schwartz taught composition at Harvard from 1940-1947, and was poetry editor of the Partisan Review from 1943-1954. In 1959 he won the Bollingen prize in Poetry for Summer Knowledge: New and Selected Poems 1938-1958, the youngest recipient to receive the prize. Much of his poetry has been out of print for over half a century, but is now being collected by editor Ben Mazer in The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Lloyd Schwartz’s poetry collections include These People (1981), Goodnight, Grace (1992), Cairo Traffic (2000), and, most recently, Little Kisses (2017). His poems have been selected for the Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Best American Poetry, and The Best of the Best American Poetry. Author Roger Rosenblatt calls him “A major poet with a gentle comic soul.” Poet James Merrill has described his work as “the Chapliniana of our later, darker day.” And Times Literary Supplement has praised him for “how powerfully [his] verse can still deliver the idioms and nuances of American speech.” In Salmagundi, poet Peter Campion wrote that “Schwartz does what should make any reader or fellow poet grateful: he enlarges the range of living speech as artwork.” He is also a noted Elizabeth Bishop scholar, co-editor of the Library of American’s Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, & Letters, and editor of the centennial edition of Bishop’s prose. In 1994, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his columns on music in The Boston Phoenix. Since 1987, he has been the classical music critic for NPR’s Fresh Air. He is currently the Frederick S. Troy Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston.
Jason Shinder was an American poet who authored three books and founded the YMCA National Writer's Voice. His last book, Stupid Hope (Graywolf Press, 2009), was released posthumously. He was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1955, and published his first literary work in 1993, with the release of Every Room We Ever Slept In, which became a New York Public Library Notable Book. He went on to author Among Women and Uncertain Hours, and edit numerous anthologies, including The Poem That Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later and The Poem I Turn To: Actors and Directors Present Poetry That Inspires Them. Shinder also served as director of the Sundance Institute Writing Program, as a teacher in the graduate writing program at Bennington College, as a graduate teacher at New School University, and was a Poet Laureate of Provincetown. Shinder also earned a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2007. Shinder died from cancer in 2008.
Tom Sleigh is an award-winning poet and translator. His latest work, Station Zed (2015), won praise from the Los Angeles Times and Ploughshares. Seamus Heaney wrote that Sleigh’s poems are “hard-earned and well founded.” Sleigh’s awards include the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is currently program director and senior poet of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Hunter College.
On February 8, 2018, Graywolf Press will publish two books by Sleigh that both take up the tensions between political convictions and political emotions as he has experienced them in writing about Syrian, Palestinian, and Somali refugees. The book of essays, THE LAND BETWEEN TWO RIVERS: WRITING IN AN AGE OF REFUGEES, and the book of poems, HOUSE OF FACT, HOUSE OF RUIN, are being published jointly because they are meant to be companion pieces.
Lasse Söderberg was born in 1931 in Stockholm, Sweden. He is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, and he is the foremost translator of post-war contemporary poets into Swedish, including Octavio Paz, Yves Bonnefoy, Charles Simic, Jorge Luis Borges, André Breton, and Rafael Alberti. He founded International Poetry Days, a festival in Malmö, Sweden. He has received numerous awards for his poetry in Sweden and was named to an honorary professorship by the Swedish government in 2002. In 2019, he received the Max Jacob Prize in Paris.
Ukraine may be the only country on earth that owes its existence, at least in part, to a poet. Ever since the appearance of Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar in 1840, poetry has played an outsized role in Ukrainian culture. “Our anthology begins: Letters of the alphabet go to war and ends with I am writing/ and all my people are writing,” note the editors of this volume, acclaimed poets Carolyn Forché and Ilya Kaminsky. “It includes poets whose work is known to thousands of people, who are translated into dozens of languages, as well as those who are relatively unknown in the West.”
These poems offer a startling look at the way language both affects and reflects the realities of war and extremity. This anthology is sure to become the classic text marking not only one of the darkest periods in Ukrainian history, but also a significant moment in the universal struggle for democracy and human rights.
Matiop Wal was born in southern Sudan. Displaced by the civil war in 1987, he fled to Ethiopia, remaining there for almost four years before civil war broke out there as well. After staying in a refugee camp on the border of Sudan and Ethiopia for nearly nine months, he was re-displaced, this time to Kenya and another refugee camp, where he stayed from 1993-2001. In March of 2001, he and other Sudanese young men, who had suffered for more than fourteen years in the jungle around north east Africa, were given the opportunity to start a new life in America.
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January, 1930 – 17 March, 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was the University of Alberta's first distinguished scholar in residence, where he taught graduate and undergraduate writing courses. He also served as Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
Novelist, poet, and philosopher, Oksana Zabuzhko is one of Ukraine’s best known and most important public intellectuals. Her controversial novel, Field Work in Ukrainian Sex, is widely regarded as a contemporary classic and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Her most recent novel, Museum of Abandoned Secrets, explores the untold stories of Soviet life in the second half of the twentieth century. Zabuzhko has been a Fulbright scholar, and has taught Ukrainian literature at Penn State, Pittsburgh University, and Harvard. Her book Notre-dame d’Ukraine is a cultural study focused on the work of the fin-de-siecle writer Lesia Ukrainka. Founding editor of Komora Publishers, she works at the Hryhori Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy at the National Academy of Sciences in Ukraine.