CONTRIBUTORS
Issue 12, Volume II
Pocket Anthology:
John High is is a poet and translator. The author of eleven books, he is the chief editor of Crossing Centuries: The New Russian Poetry (Talisman) and a former member of the Moscow Poetry Club; he has translated several contemporary Russian poets, including Nina Iskrenko, Ivan Zhdanov, and Alexei Parschikov. He has received four Fulbright and two NEA fellowships as well as grants from IREX and The Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. He has an NEH Fellowship to complete a new translation of Osip Mandelstam’s Voronezh Notebooks in collaboration with Matvei Yankelevich. His most recent book, Without Dragons Even the Emperor Would Be Lonely, can be accessed via https://ww.wetcementpress.com/without-dragons. Matvei Yankelevich's translations include Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Ardis/Overlook), and (with Eugene Ostashevsky) Alexander Vvedensky's An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB Poets), which received a National Translation Award. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Conversations: Tobias Meinecke is a German-born, American-educated creator of television and motion picture projects, who recently launched Love Child Storytellers, a creative production company. He develops US, German and international TV series and movies in partnership with other writers and producers in New York, London, Vienna, Brussels, Berlin and Jakarta. He is a Graduate of the HFF/Munich and the SoA Columbia University (MFA), where he studied directing and screenwriting with Milos Forman. Meinecke’s feature debut The Contenders won Gold for Best Comedy at Houston Film Festival (1993) and was an official selection at Rotterdam, Berlin and Montreal Film Festivals. His debut short film, The Super, an adaptation of the graphic novel by Will Eisner, was critically praised, and won awards in Tel Aviv and Warsaw. He also produced Dreams of Love, the debut short film of actress Claire Danes. www.love-child.tv; www.tobiasmeinecke.tv W. D. Myers is Associate Professor of History at Fordham University, author of Poor, Sinning Folk and Death and a Maiden. He is an authority on crime in Central Europe of the early modern age (17th-19th Century). Myers spent two years researching German archives to unearth the fascinating true case of Grethe Schmidt and Justus Oldekop, to be adapted for the screen by Love Child. Essays: Quitman Marshall’s most recent book of poems, You Were Born One Time, won the SC Poetry Archives Book Prize. He was the founding host of the Literary Series at Spoleto Festival USA, and won the Writers Exchange Award (Poets & Writers) in 1996. His roving manuscripts include Swampitude: Escapes with the Congaree (nonfiction), of which “Escaping the Fake” is a part, The Bloody Point (novel), and American Folklore (poems). After growing up in SC, he lived in Barcelona, DC, Amherst, MA, and in New York City from 1978 until 1990. For most of a year after their marriage, he and his wife lived in her hometown outside Paris. Since 2001 they have lived in Beaufort, SC, with their three children, and he teaches school—sometimes English, sometimes writing, sometimes French. Talia Abrahams is a recent graduate of New York University, where she received a B.A. in Art History with High Honors and a minor in German language, literature, and philosophy. She works for the Barbara Goldsmith Division of Conservation and Preservation at the New York Public Library, as well as for the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. There, she conducts research on material religion, the historicity of faith and ethics in Africa, and museum programming and engagement strategies that reflect contemporary social issues. Talia lives and works in New York City, where the streets offer a plethora of scrap wood, picture frames, and mysterious glass shards for her to paint on. Ventanas: Carmen Carrero Castro has dedicated herself to visual poetry, action art, performance poetry, mail-art, and the publication and dissemination of literature. She also organized the Creative Photography Days and founded the Guadalquivir Photo Gallery, and had an exhibition organized by IVAM from her series of photomontages “Album”, for the Institute of Women in Valencia. She continues giving readings and lectures, more recently under the aegis of the Ministry of Culture and the Plan for the Promotion of Reading in Teaching Centers and such venues as the Seville Festival of Perfopoetry; in EDITA, Punta Umbría; in Voces del Extremo, Moguer; in the Guadiana Poets Encounters "Poesía Transfronteriça", Ayamonte and Vila Real de Santo Antonio; in Armapalavra "Palavra Ibérica"). Recent work includes Piratas y quesitos; Lámina animal, a book of poetry; a collective endeavor, Enredando, experimental poetry in Metamorfosis; the Arachne Seamstress; Paradise folders; Baroque Factory; Three in Sum , Escáner Cultural, Artecenter, Stylusart, and Literaturas.com. She has published in anthologies of experimental poetry including Poets in Platea; Recital Chilango Andaluz; Crabs in the Sun; Poetry and Magic; Poetry in the desert; Poets of Guadiana “Poesía Transfronteriça” and most recently in Microparticular, Oniria, Las Cosas Quebradas, and Río Río Río. Her accomplishments are many and varied; see her website for much more information (in Spanish). Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, co-translator of Frontera with Bronwyn Mills and whose memoir we continue to serialize, is the author of more than a dozen books including biographies of Paul Bowles and E.E.Cummings, and a group portrait of American writers in Paris 1944-1960, The Continual Pilgrimage. He also translated the Salvador Dalí "San Sebastien" essay in Witty Issue 10. His translations include books by Paul Eluard, Rafael Alberti, Panaït Istrati, García Lorca and the Mayan Books of Chilam Balam. His most recent publications are Dix méditations sur quelques mots d’Antonin Artaud, translated by Patricia Pruitt (Paris: Alyscamps, 2018) Remission (Talisman House, 2016) and Mussoorie-Montague Miscellany (Talisman House, 2014) Until his retirement he taught writing at MIT for over a quarter-century. He lives in Turners Falls, Massachusetts. Many of his books are on Amazon and Bookshop.org. Fiction: Trinidadian-American Kelvin Christopher James earned a B.Sc. from the University of the West Indies (St. Augustine campus), and a doctorate in Science Education from Columbia University Teachers College. His books include Jumping Ship and Other Stories, the novels Secrets, A Fling with a Demon Lover and People & Peppers, a romance. James has been awarded literary fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He lives in Harlem, New York City. http://www.kelvinchristopherjames.co ¡VIVA! Marithelma Costa was born in Puerto Rico, and has been living in New York since 1978. She is the author of three books of poetry: De Al’vión, De tierra y de agua, and Diario oiraiD, three books of interviews: Enrique Laguerre. Una conversación, Kaligrafiando. Conversaciones con Clemente Soto Vélez, and Las dos caras de la escritura. Conversaciones con M. Benedetti, M. Corti, U. Eco, et al., as well as various books on Spanish literature, and the novel Era el in del mundo. Currently she teaches at Hunter College. She is working on a collection of short stories and finishing her second novel. Poetry: Francesca Gargallo is a writer, translator, feminist editor, teacher, and advocate for women’s rights from Mexico City. Gargallo is the author of nine novels, three collections of stories, and three books of poetry. She has also published numerous critical essays, and is the recipient of many literary awards, including the Premio Bellas Artes Luis Cardoza y Aragón for criticism in the plastic and visual arts. To learn more, visit francescagargallo.wordpress.com/ Stephanie Johnson has spent most of her adult life overseas teaching English literature, ESL and Spanish at universities and adult education settings that span the globe. As a poet, she has most recently been published in Vagabonds, Anthology of the Mad Ones and she has several pieces appearing in upcoming issues of Sink Hollow and Forum Literary Magazine. Her writing often focuses on the slightly uncomfortable space of the expatriation/ repatriation experience. She is currently based in San Francisco. Portfolio: Leslie Wagner creates art on and in multiple mediums, and has been exhibiting since 1991. She graduated from Parsons School of Design in New York City, and studied at Parsons in Paris. Her creative process has been informed by her long-time meditation practice and as such, she has made pilgrimages to many natural and urban sanctuaries for research. Her work brought her to a residency at Great Vow Zen Monastery in Oregon, which distilled interests in making art concerned with impermanence, and moment-to-moment awareness. She investigates this intention through the direct experience of drawing around the hand and the dispersion of material; and in imagery, she explores the threshold between waking and dreams. Leslie Wagner was awarded a Scholarship to the Footpaths Artist Residency in the Azore Islands, received a Fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center, and most recently received two Hemera Contemplative Practice Tending Space Fellowships for Artists in 2017 and 2018. www.lesliewagnerart.com Editors: Bronwyn Mills holds an MFA from UMass, Amherst, and a Ph.D. from NYU where she was an Anais Nin Fellow. Later a Fulbright Fellow (La République du Bénin, West Africa) she travels widely, and has lived in New York City, Istanbul, Turkey; Latin America; and Paris, France. For many years a dance and theatre writer for regional arts publications in New England, she is also a Senior Prose Editor for Tupelo Quarterly. Books include Night of the Luna Moths (poetry,) Beastly's Tale (a fabulist novel). She has just completed By the Spoonmaker's Tomb, vignettes from her time living in Istanbul and is currently working on Canary Club, a novel set in medieval Spain. Her work has appeared in IKON, Frigate,Talisman: a Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Tupelo Quarterly, and most recently in Agni Online. She guest-edited the Turkish issue of Absinthe; New European Writing (#19.) Bronwyn has taught at Stevens Institute of Technology; Kadir Has University in Istanbul; and Abomey-Calavi in Bénin. From time to time she publishes work on African vodou. Bronwyn lives and writes in a tiny mountain village far, far away. Read more at https://bronwynmills.org/ Eric Darton’s books include Free City, a novel, first published in 1996 by WW. Norton and recently re-released by Dalkey Archive Press, and the New York Times bestseller Divided We Stand: A Biography of The World Trade Center (Basic Books, 1999, 2011). Other of his writings may be found at bookoftheworldcourant.net, ericdarton.net and tupeloquarterly.com. He co-wrote, co-produced, and appears in the award-winning feature Asphalt, Muscle & Bone, directed by Bill Hayward. Darton teaches literature, writing, urban design and Ba Gua Zhang, a Chinese internal martial art. He leads Writing at the Crossroads, an interdisciplinary prose workshop. Hardy Griffin has a Ph.D. from Boğaziçi University, and has published writing in Fresh.ink, New Flash Fiction, Alimentum, Assisi, The Washington Post, American Letters & Commentary, and a chapter in Writing Fiction (Bloomsbury). His translations can be found in Words Without Borders, The Istanbul Biennial, and for the award-winning EU-sponsored study Armenians, which documents the lives of Armenians living in contemporary Turkey. A selection of his work can be found here. He is the founding editor of the literary magazine Novel Slices, dedicated solely to the publication of novel excerpts of all genres. Consulting Editors: Dana Delibovi, our Consulting Poetry Editor, is a poet, essayist, and translator from Missouri (USA). Her poetry and essays have recently appeared in After the Art, The Confluence, Linden Avenue, Noon, Witty Partition, and Zingara Poetry Review. She has published translations in Apple Valley Review and Ezra Translations. To learn more, visit danadelibovi.weebly.com/ Jan Schmidt, our Consulting Prose Editor, has had fiction published in The Wall, Tupelo Quarterly, The Long Story and New York Stories. In Downtown she published a series of oral history interviews with hard-core, risky individuals and their brushes with salvation. With J.D. Rage, she co-edited Venom Press and its quarterly poetry and fiction magazine, Curare, for eight years. Her short story collection Collateral Regeneration was a finalist for the Eludia Award from Hidden River Arts, 2019. Some of her published writing can be seen on her website janschmidt-writer.com |