Procession of Goats, Cotonou, La République du Bénin, West Africa. Photo: Bronwyn Mills
CONTRIBUTORS
Issue 16
Volume II
Poetry
Selim Temo is a poet, translator, and scholar born in the village of Mêrîna in Batman. He received his Masters and PhD. from the Department of Turkish Literature, Bilkent University in 2003 and 2009, respectively. In 2009, Mardin Artuklu University hired him as an Assistant Professor in Mardin-Turkey. In 2011, he served as a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Kurdish Studies at the University of Exeter, England. He worked as a columnist for Radikal from 2013-2014, Duvar from 2017-2019 and Xwebûn from 2019-2020. He has authored over thirty books, including poetry, translations, anthologies, children’s books and novels, which have been translated into over ten languages including Arabic, Armenian, Azeri, English, Flemish, French, German, Japanese, Kurdish (Kurmanjî, Sorani, and Kirmanjkî), Persian, Spanish and Turkish. Temo was a Visiting Professor at Université Paul Valéry of Montpellier in 2020-2021. He currently lives in Paris.
Zêdan Xelef is a writer, translator, researcher at Kashkul (AUIS) and a graduate student at San Francisco State University. His poetry has been translated into English, Arabic, Spanish, Isth-mus-Zapotec, Turkish, and Persian. “A Barcode Scanner,” the title poem from his first collection of poems, was read on the floor of the UK Parliament and made into an award-winning poetry film. His writing and translations have appeared in World Literature Today, Poetry London, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Epiphany, Plume, Asymptote, and Words Without Borders.
Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse is a writer, translator, and assistant professor. She earned her PhD in Kurdish Studies at the University of Exeter, specializing in nineteenth century poetry. Her book-length works include Kajal Ahmed's Handful of Salt (2016), Abdulla Pashew's Dictionary of Midnight (2019), and Farhad Pirbal’s The Potato Eaters (2023). Her writing has appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today, In Other Words, Plume, Epiphany, Sewanee Review, The Iowa Review, and Words Without Borders. She serves as the Director of Kashkul and was the Founding Director of the Slemani UNESCO City of Literature. She is a 2022 NEA Fellow, the first ever NEA fellow working from the Kurdish, translating Hero Kurda’s I Write Yousif.
Ruth Christie, was born and educated in Scotland and, degreed in English Language and Literature at the University of St Andrews. She taught English for two years in Turkey and later studied Turkish language and literature at London University. Now regarded as an important translator from Turkish, with Saliha Paker she has translated, Latife Tekin (Marion Boyars 1993) and in collaboration with Richard McKane a selection of the poems of Oktay Rifat (Rockingham Press 1993), and a major collection of Nâzim Hikmet’s poetry, again with Richard McKane, was published by Anvil Press in 2002. In the Temple of a Patient God, her translations from the Turkish of Bejan Matur, was published by Arc Visible Poets in 2004. Recent publications include In the Temple of a Patient God by Bejan Matur, and, in collaboration with Richard McKane, Beyond the Walls, poems by Nazim Hikmet, and Voices of Memory, poems of Oktay Rifat (Anvil Press 2007). In 2007 she translated The Shelter Stories by Feyyaz Kayacan Fergar (Rockingham Press), and in 2012 her translation of Bejan Matur’s How Abraham Betrayed Me (Arc Visible Poets) was awarded the Poetry Book Society’s Recommendation for 2012.
Necmi Zekâ is an avant garde poet working in Turkey. Attending Istanbul’s German High School and the Department of Political Science at Boğaziçi University, he completed his M. Phil degree at Leicester University and conducted doctoral work at Northwestern. He has published nine books of poetry over the last twenty years. Zekâ has also translated various German and English-language poets into Turkish, among others Nelly Sachs, Paul Celan, Thom Gunn, and Mark Strand. In addition to teaching postgraduate courses on aesthetics at several Turkish universities, Zekâ is also a multi-media artist whose work has been showcased in six solo exhibitions. In 2003, he received the city of Antalya’s Golden Orange Poetry Award, which led to a symposium on his work. Zekâ’s poetry has appeared in English translation in Turkish Poetry Today, Two Lines: World Writing in Translation, Bosphorous Review of Books, The Berlin Quarterly, Ezra: An Online Journal of Translation, The Antigonish Review, and Visions International: The World Journal of Illustrated Poetry. Zekâ currently lives and works in Istanbul.
Erik Mortenson is a writer, teacher, and literary scholar living in Benton Harbor, Michigan. His translations have appeared in journals such as Asymptote, Talisman, Two Lines, Turkish Poetry Today, The Berlin Quarterly, Ezra: An Online Journal of Translation, The Antigonish Review, and Visions International: The World Journal of Illustrated Poetry. In addition to his translation work, Mortenson has authored Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence, selected as a Choice outstanding academic title in 2011; Ambiguous Borderlands: Shadow Imagery in Cold War American Culture (2016); and most recently, Translating the Counterculture: The Reception of the Beats in Turkey (2018). All published by Southern Illinois University Press: After earning a PhD from Wayne State University in Detroit, Mortenson spent a year as a Fulbright Lecturer in Germany and a decade at Koç University in Istanbul where he helped found the English and Comparative Literature Department.Now an English Faculty member at Lake Michigan College, Mortenson’s co-written memoir of his time in Detroit, Kick Out the Bottom, will appear from Cornerstone Press.
Baba Badji is a Senegalese American poet, translator, and research. He is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He earned an MFA in poetry and Translation (French and Wolof) at Columbia University and PhD in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. He works on the links between the various forms of postcolonial studies, theory, and practice, with a particular focus on the debates about postcolonial translation theory and Négritude in Anglophone and Francophone cultures. Besides English and French, he is fluent in Wolof, Mending, Pulaar, and Diola. The first volume of Badji’s Ghost Letters is available from Parlor Press.
Alberto Mario Perrone, Argentine writer, poet, journalist and art critic, has published more than a dozen books. He is known as much for his poetic work as for his interviews and biographies. Perrone has worked for television in the production of documentaries and has also made his debut as a playwright. These poems are from his newest collection of poetry Yacanto (Buenos Aires, Mecenazgo, 2019). For more information and for his publications (see https://albertomarioperrone.wixsite.com/misitio/publicaciones) found or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Tinfish, Bamboo Ridge, and TAYO Literary Mag.
Portfolio
Charlie Steiner is a photographer and filmmaker, now the Video Director at community radio station WWOZ in New Orleans. More info at https://www.charliesteiner.com/One Act Play
Harriet Kriegel has been published in The Nation, Commonweal, and The Provincetown Advocate. She edited Women in Drama (New American Library, 1975). Kriegel wrote and directed Domestic Tranquillity, a short film in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, selected for inclusion in its New Directors Series, 1974. Her short story “Getting Even” was published in Telling Stories Out of Court, an anthology of narratives about workplace discrimination against women (Cornell University Press, 2008).
Fiction
Agneta Pleijel is a Swedish novelist, poet, playwright, journalist and literary critic. She has written about a half dozen plays, several collections of poetry, a dozen or more novels and many articles in the Swedish press on authors and literary works and on contemporary social problems in Sweden. Pleijel was a professor at Dramatiska Institutet for many years starting in 1992. She has won numerous awards including the Swedish Academy's Nordic Prize in 2018.
Harald Hille is a retired translator (formerly at the United Nations). He has translated a couple of Agneta Pleijel’s novels and a play into English. He has also published a medium-sized Swedish-English/English-Swedish dictionary for travelers and students of Swedish.
Dana Durasoff is a Stockholm-born Swedish-American citizen who did Swedish translations for Microsoft. She now paints in oil and egg tempera on images of nature and Scandinavian folk themes.
B.J. Atwood-Fukuda has an MFA from The New School and is a founding member of the New York workshop Writing at the Crossroads. The first half of "Nice Piano" can be found in Witty Partition #15. Her work has appeared in Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present and Free Radicals: American Poets Before Their First Books, as well as in American Letters & Commentary, The Mad Hatter's Review, Frigate and Tupelo Quarterly, among others. Her piece "Fellow Breathers of the Only Air" appeared in Witty Partition (then The Wall) #2. B.J. lives and writes in Spuyten Duyvil (Bronx), NY and Woods Hole, Mass., where she is at work on an autobiographical novel, Beautiful, and a series of riffs, Trainwreck.
Remarkable Reads
Book Arts:
Ed Rayher is a poet and printer living in Northfield, MA. He runs Swamp Press which publishes limited edition letterpress books of poetry. The press was founded in 1976 and its books have won various awards, including two NEA grants, a CCLM grant, and Grand Prize in a juried Gallery Show at Cooperstown, NY. Swamp Press books are in the Rare Book collections of the Boston Public Library, New York Public Library, Brown, Harvard, Smith College, SUNY, & McGill. Over the years the press has published over seventy titles, many in both paper editions and deluxe limited editions. Ed’s formal education includes a Ph.D. in Philosophy from UMass Amherst, with a focus on nineteenth century evolutionary theory & the work of Alfred Russell Wallace. Ed also earned a MFA in Poetry at UMass Amherst, working with James Tate and Madeleine DeFrees, and has published in many reviews.
Vincent Tripi, after prolonged studies in philosophy and later in psychology, created a career in children's services, crisis-intervention & especially residential treatment. During the 70's he came under the guidance of a spiritual master. For a period of time afterwards, he taught yoga & meditation, eventually residing in three different spiritual settings. In the early 80's he took up the solitary life with a cabin in New Hampshire. This resulted in a first book Haiku Pond. After moving to San Francisco, he helped form The Haiku Poets of Northern California and was instrumental in creating their first magazine Woodnotes (Transcendentalist roots) which he co-edited with the late Haiku-Master Paul O. Williams. He edited a substantial number of haiku books including the collected poem of Charles B. Dickson, Jerry Kilbride, & the final volume of poetry by H.F. Noyes. He was the author of approximately 12 books of haiku, two interview books, and two collections of short meditative-reflections on writing poetry. In 2006 he founded The Haiku Circle. He died in 2020.
Women of the Family:
Nandana Dev Sen is an actor, writer, and child-rights advocate. She has appeared in over 20 films, and is the Ambassador for Child Protection for Save the Children India. Dev Sen is the author of six children's books. She lives lives in New York, London, and Kolkata
Nabaneeta Dev Sen was a writer and scholar educated in India and the United States. Dev Sen taught at several universities and institutes in India, while serving in executive roles for literary institutes in India. She published more than 80 books in Bengali, including poetry, novels, short stories, plays, literary criticism, personal essays, and children's literature. Her work was recognized with awards from many international and Indian organizations, including the Padma Shiri, one of the Indian government’s highest civilian honors.
Trish Crapo is a writer, photographer, and collage artist living in Western Massachusetts, on an organic farm in Leyden, MA. Her photography, collage, and altered books have been exhibited in Western Mass, Boston, Vermont, at The New School in New York City, in Moscow and Tula, Russia and in Havana, Cuba. Her poetry has been published in a variety of journals and featured in former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s syndicated newspaper column, American Life in Poetry, and in Crossing Paths: An Anthology of Poems by Women (2002). She is a member of the Slate Roof poets’ collective and a founding member of the collaborative word/performance/art group Exploded View. She was a columnist on the arts for many years with the Greenfield Recorder, Women’s Review of Books and The Montague Reporter. Her books include Walk through Paradise Backwards, recently reissued by Slate Roof Press, and adrift, a rowboat. She is a founding member of the collaborative word/performance/art group Exploded View.
It's a Mystery:
Carmen Firan is a Romanian born poet, a fiction writer and playwrite. In her native country, she has published twenty books of poetry, novels, essays and short stories. Since 2000 she has been living in New York. Her writings appear in translation in many literary magazines and in various anthologies in France, Israel, Sweden, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Canada, U K, and the USA. Her recent books and publications in the USA include: Rock and Dew, Sheep Meadow Press, The Second Life, (short stories) Columbia University Press, 2005, The Farce (a novel) Spuyten Duyvil, 2003, Firan is a member of the editorial board of the international magazine Lettre Internationale, member of the PEN American Center and The Poetry Society of America. She is the co-editor of Born in Utopia; An Anthology of Romanian Contemporary Poetry, Talisman Publishers, 2006; Naming the Nameless; An anthology of American Contemporary Poetry and Stranger at Home;Poetry with an Accent – An anthology of American Contemporary Poetry, Numina Press. http://www.carmenfiran.com
Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio's news program, All Things Considered, from 1983 until 2016. He won the 1995 Peabody Award for his film Road Scholar, and is a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize.His book So Recently a World: Selected Poems, 1968-2016 was a National Book Award nominee. He is the winner of the Peabody Award for his film Road Scholar and the Ovid Prize for poetry. He was Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2009.
Editors
Bronwyn Mills' books include Beastly’s Tale (a novel) and Night of the Luna Moths (poetry); her education, an MFA from UMass, Amherst, a Ph.D. from NYU. She was mentored by James Tate, Samuel Delany, Kamau Brathwaite, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. An Anais Nin Fellow and Fulbright Fellow (La République du Bénin, West Africa) she has lived in Paris, France, New York City, Istanbul, Turkey; Cotonou, Bénin, and Latin America and taught Caribbean literature, African literature and writing in Istanbul, Bénin, and just outside New York City. Formerly a dance and theatre writer in New England, Bronwyn is a founding co-editor for Witty Partition and a Senior Prose Editor for Tupelo Quarterly. Guest-editor for the Turkish issue of Absinthe; New European Writing (#19), her current projects include By the Spoonmaker's Tomb, a collection of vignettes from her time in Istanbul and the newly finished Canary Club, a novel set in medieval Spain. Most recently, Agni Online has published an excerpt from Spoonmaker. She has also published work on African vodou. More of her work can be found at https://bronwynmills.org/. Bronwyn now lives and writes in a tiny mountain village far, far away.
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 The Gotham Guide to 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, Arkansan Review, Bluestem, The Confluence, Linden Avenue, Noon, Witty Partition, and Zingara Poetry Review. She has published translations in Apple Valley Review, Ezra Translations, and Witty Partition. She is a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee in nonfiction. To learn more, visit danadelibovi.weebly.com/
Jan Schmidt, our Consulting Prose Editor, has had fiction published in Anti-Heroin Chic, The Wall, Tupelo Quarterly, The Long Story. IKON, 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. Her unpublished novel Sunlight Underground was a finalist for the Novel Slices Award, 2021. Till 2015, she held the position of Curator of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Some of her published writing can be seen on her website janschmidt-writer.com
Contributing Editor-at-Large
Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, whose memoir we continue to serialize, is the author of more than a dozen books including biographies of Paul Bowles, e.e. cummings, and a group portrait of American writers in Paris 1944-1960, The Continual Pilgrimage. He has translated the Salvador Dalí's "San Sebastien" essay, work by Eduard Roditti, and books by Paul Eluard, Rafael Alberti, Panaït Istrati, García Lorca as well as the Mayan Books of Chilam Balam. The inaugural issue of Wet Cement has new work by the author: https://www.wetcementpress.com/wcpmag.
Night Suite, his newest book of poems, will be out later this year from Talisman House. Other work includes, 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 retiring 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.
Selim Temo is a poet, translator, and scholar born in the village of Mêrîna in Batman. He received his Masters and PhD. from the Department of Turkish Literature, Bilkent University in 2003 and 2009, respectively. In 2009, Mardin Artuklu University hired him as an Assistant Professor in Mardin-Turkey. In 2011, he served as a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Kurdish Studies at the University of Exeter, England. He worked as a columnist for Radikal from 2013-2014, Duvar from 2017-2019 and Xwebûn from 2019-2020. He has authored over thirty books, including poetry, translations, anthologies, children’s books and novels, which have been translated into over ten languages including Arabic, Armenian, Azeri, English, Flemish, French, German, Japanese, Kurdish (Kurmanjî, Sorani, and Kirmanjkî), Persian, Spanish and Turkish. Temo was a Visiting Professor at Université Paul Valéry of Montpellier in 2020-2021. He currently lives in Paris.
Zêdan Xelef is a writer, translator, researcher at Kashkul (AUIS) and a graduate student at San Francisco State University. His poetry has been translated into English, Arabic, Spanish, Isth-mus-Zapotec, Turkish, and Persian. “A Barcode Scanner,” the title poem from his first collection of poems, was read on the floor of the UK Parliament and made into an award-winning poetry film. His writing and translations have appeared in World Literature Today, Poetry London, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Epiphany, Plume, Asymptote, and Words Without Borders.
Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse is a writer, translator, and assistant professor. She earned her PhD in Kurdish Studies at the University of Exeter, specializing in nineteenth century poetry. Her book-length works include Kajal Ahmed's Handful of Salt (2016), Abdulla Pashew's Dictionary of Midnight (2019), and Farhad Pirbal’s The Potato Eaters (2023). Her writing has appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, World Literature Today, In Other Words, Plume, Epiphany, Sewanee Review, The Iowa Review, and Words Without Borders. She serves as the Director of Kashkul and was the Founding Director of the Slemani UNESCO City of Literature. She is a 2022 NEA Fellow, the first ever NEA fellow working from the Kurdish, translating Hero Kurda’s I Write Yousif.
Ruth Christie, was born and educated in Scotland and, degreed in English Language and Literature at the University of St Andrews. She taught English for two years in Turkey and later studied Turkish language and literature at London University. Now regarded as an important translator from Turkish, with Saliha Paker she has translated, Latife Tekin (Marion Boyars 1993) and in collaboration with Richard McKane a selection of the poems of Oktay Rifat (Rockingham Press 1993), and a major collection of Nâzim Hikmet’s poetry, again with Richard McKane, was published by Anvil Press in 2002. In the Temple of a Patient God, her translations from the Turkish of Bejan Matur, was published by Arc Visible Poets in 2004. Recent publications include In the Temple of a Patient God by Bejan Matur, and, in collaboration with Richard McKane, Beyond the Walls, poems by Nazim Hikmet, and Voices of Memory, poems of Oktay Rifat (Anvil Press 2007). In 2007 she translated The Shelter Stories by Feyyaz Kayacan Fergar (Rockingham Press), and in 2012 her translation of Bejan Matur’s How Abraham Betrayed Me (Arc Visible Poets) was awarded the Poetry Book Society’s Recommendation for 2012.
Necmi Zekâ is an avant garde poet working in Turkey. Attending Istanbul’s German High School and the Department of Political Science at Boğaziçi University, he completed his M. Phil degree at Leicester University and conducted doctoral work at Northwestern. He has published nine books of poetry over the last twenty years. Zekâ has also translated various German and English-language poets into Turkish, among others Nelly Sachs, Paul Celan, Thom Gunn, and Mark Strand. In addition to teaching postgraduate courses on aesthetics at several Turkish universities, Zekâ is also a multi-media artist whose work has been showcased in six solo exhibitions. In 2003, he received the city of Antalya’s Golden Orange Poetry Award, which led to a symposium on his work. Zekâ’s poetry has appeared in English translation in Turkish Poetry Today, Two Lines: World Writing in Translation, Bosphorous Review of Books, The Berlin Quarterly, Ezra: An Online Journal of Translation, The Antigonish Review, and Visions International: The World Journal of Illustrated Poetry. Zekâ currently lives and works in Istanbul.
Erik Mortenson is a writer, teacher, and literary scholar living in Benton Harbor, Michigan. His translations have appeared in journals such as Asymptote, Talisman, Two Lines, Turkish Poetry Today, The Berlin Quarterly, Ezra: An Online Journal of Translation, The Antigonish Review, and Visions International: The World Journal of Illustrated Poetry. In addition to his translation work, Mortenson has authored Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence, selected as a Choice outstanding academic title in 2011; Ambiguous Borderlands: Shadow Imagery in Cold War American Culture (2016); and most recently, Translating the Counterculture: The Reception of the Beats in Turkey (2018). All published by Southern Illinois University Press: After earning a PhD from Wayne State University in Detroit, Mortenson spent a year as a Fulbright Lecturer in Germany and a decade at Koç University in Istanbul where he helped found the English and Comparative Literature Department.Now an English Faculty member at Lake Michigan College, Mortenson’s co-written memoir of his time in Detroit, Kick Out the Bottom, will appear from Cornerstone Press.
Baba Badji is a Senegalese American poet, translator, and research. He is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He earned an MFA in poetry and Translation (French and Wolof) at Columbia University and PhD in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. He works on the links between the various forms of postcolonial studies, theory, and practice, with a particular focus on the debates about postcolonial translation theory and Négritude in Anglophone and Francophone cultures. Besides English and French, he is fluent in Wolof, Mending, Pulaar, and Diola. The first volume of Badji’s Ghost Letters is available from Parlor Press.
Alberto Mario Perrone, Argentine writer, poet, journalist and art critic, has published more than a dozen books. He is known as much for his poetic work as for his interviews and biographies. Perrone has worked for television in the production of documentaries and has also made his debut as a playwright. These poems are from his newest collection of poetry Yacanto (Buenos Aires, Mecenazgo, 2019). For more information and for his publications (see https://albertomarioperrone.wixsite.com/misitio/publicaciones) found or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Tinfish, Bamboo Ridge, and TAYO Literary Mag.
Portfolio
Charlie Steiner is a photographer and filmmaker, now the Video Director at community radio station WWOZ in New Orleans. More info at https://www.charliesteiner.com/One Act Play
Harriet Kriegel has been published in The Nation, Commonweal, and The Provincetown Advocate. She edited Women in Drama (New American Library, 1975). Kriegel wrote and directed Domestic Tranquillity, a short film in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, selected for inclusion in its New Directors Series, 1974. Her short story “Getting Even” was published in Telling Stories Out of Court, an anthology of narratives about workplace discrimination against women (Cornell University Press, 2008).
Fiction
Agneta Pleijel is a Swedish novelist, poet, playwright, journalist and literary critic. She has written about a half dozen plays, several collections of poetry, a dozen or more novels and many articles in the Swedish press on authors and literary works and on contemporary social problems in Sweden. Pleijel was a professor at Dramatiska Institutet for many years starting in 1992. She has won numerous awards including the Swedish Academy's Nordic Prize in 2018.
Harald Hille is a retired translator (formerly at the United Nations). He has translated a couple of Agneta Pleijel’s novels and a play into English. He has also published a medium-sized Swedish-English/English-Swedish dictionary for travelers and students of Swedish.
Dana Durasoff is a Stockholm-born Swedish-American citizen who did Swedish translations for Microsoft. She now paints in oil and egg tempera on images of nature and Scandinavian folk themes.
B.J. Atwood-Fukuda has an MFA from The New School and is a founding member of the New York workshop Writing at the Crossroads. The first half of "Nice Piano" can be found in Witty Partition #15. Her work has appeared in Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present and Free Radicals: American Poets Before Their First Books, as well as in American Letters & Commentary, The Mad Hatter's Review, Frigate and Tupelo Quarterly, among others. Her piece "Fellow Breathers of the Only Air" appeared in Witty Partition (then The Wall) #2. B.J. lives and writes in Spuyten Duyvil (Bronx), NY and Woods Hole, Mass., where she is at work on an autobiographical novel, Beautiful, and a series of riffs, Trainwreck.
Remarkable Reads
Book Arts:
Ed Rayher is a poet and printer living in Northfield, MA. He runs Swamp Press which publishes limited edition letterpress books of poetry. The press was founded in 1976 and its books have won various awards, including two NEA grants, a CCLM grant, and Grand Prize in a juried Gallery Show at Cooperstown, NY. Swamp Press books are in the Rare Book collections of the Boston Public Library, New York Public Library, Brown, Harvard, Smith College, SUNY, & McGill. Over the years the press has published over seventy titles, many in both paper editions and deluxe limited editions. Ed’s formal education includes a Ph.D. in Philosophy from UMass Amherst, with a focus on nineteenth century evolutionary theory & the work of Alfred Russell Wallace. Ed also earned a MFA in Poetry at UMass Amherst, working with James Tate and Madeleine DeFrees, and has published in many reviews.
Vincent Tripi, after prolonged studies in philosophy and later in psychology, created a career in children's services, crisis-intervention & especially residential treatment. During the 70's he came under the guidance of a spiritual master. For a period of time afterwards, he taught yoga & meditation, eventually residing in three different spiritual settings. In the early 80's he took up the solitary life with a cabin in New Hampshire. This resulted in a first book Haiku Pond. After moving to San Francisco, he helped form The Haiku Poets of Northern California and was instrumental in creating their first magazine Woodnotes (Transcendentalist roots) which he co-edited with the late Haiku-Master Paul O. Williams. He edited a substantial number of haiku books including the collected poem of Charles B. Dickson, Jerry Kilbride, & the final volume of poetry by H.F. Noyes. He was the author of approximately 12 books of haiku, two interview books, and two collections of short meditative-reflections on writing poetry. In 2006 he founded The Haiku Circle. He died in 2020.
Women of the Family:
Nandana Dev Sen is an actor, writer, and child-rights advocate. She has appeared in over 20 films, and is the Ambassador for Child Protection for Save the Children India. Dev Sen is the author of six children's books. She lives lives in New York, London, and Kolkata
Nabaneeta Dev Sen was a writer and scholar educated in India and the United States. Dev Sen taught at several universities and institutes in India, while serving in executive roles for literary institutes in India. She published more than 80 books in Bengali, including poetry, novels, short stories, plays, literary criticism, personal essays, and children's literature. Her work was recognized with awards from many international and Indian organizations, including the Padma Shiri, one of the Indian government’s highest civilian honors.
Trish Crapo is a writer, photographer, and collage artist living in Western Massachusetts, on an organic farm in Leyden, MA. Her photography, collage, and altered books have been exhibited in Western Mass, Boston, Vermont, at The New School in New York City, in Moscow and Tula, Russia and in Havana, Cuba. Her poetry has been published in a variety of journals and featured in former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s syndicated newspaper column, American Life in Poetry, and in Crossing Paths: An Anthology of Poems by Women (2002). She is a member of the Slate Roof poets’ collective and a founding member of the collaborative word/performance/art group Exploded View. She was a columnist on the arts for many years with the Greenfield Recorder, Women’s Review of Books and The Montague Reporter. Her books include Walk through Paradise Backwards, recently reissued by Slate Roof Press, and adrift, a rowboat. She is a founding member of the collaborative word/performance/art group Exploded View.
It's a Mystery:
Carmen Firan is a Romanian born poet, a fiction writer and playwrite. In her native country, she has published twenty books of poetry, novels, essays and short stories. Since 2000 she has been living in New York. Her writings appear in translation in many literary magazines and in various anthologies in France, Israel, Sweden, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Canada, U K, and the USA. Her recent books and publications in the USA include: Rock and Dew, Sheep Meadow Press, The Second Life, (short stories) Columbia University Press, 2005, The Farce (a novel) Spuyten Duyvil, 2003, Firan is a member of the editorial board of the international magazine Lettre Internationale, member of the PEN American Center and The Poetry Society of America. She is the co-editor of Born in Utopia; An Anthology of Romanian Contemporary Poetry, Talisman Publishers, 2006; Naming the Nameless; An anthology of American Contemporary Poetry and Stranger at Home;Poetry with an Accent – An anthology of American Contemporary Poetry, Numina Press. http://www.carmenfiran.com
Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio's news program, All Things Considered, from 1983 until 2016. He won the 1995 Peabody Award for his film Road Scholar, and is a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize.His book So Recently a World: Selected Poems, 1968-2016 was a National Book Award nominee. He is the winner of the Peabody Award for his film Road Scholar and the Ovid Prize for poetry. He was Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2009.
Editors
Bronwyn Mills' books include Beastly’s Tale (a novel) and Night of the Luna Moths (poetry); her education, an MFA from UMass, Amherst, a Ph.D. from NYU. She was mentored by James Tate, Samuel Delany, Kamau Brathwaite, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. An Anais Nin Fellow and Fulbright Fellow (La République du Bénin, West Africa) she has lived in Paris, France, New York City, Istanbul, Turkey; Cotonou, Bénin, and Latin America and taught Caribbean literature, African literature and writing in Istanbul, Bénin, and just outside New York City. Formerly a dance and theatre writer in New England, Bronwyn is a founding co-editor for Witty Partition and a Senior Prose Editor for Tupelo Quarterly. Guest-editor for the Turkish issue of Absinthe; New European Writing (#19), her current projects include By the Spoonmaker's Tomb, a collection of vignettes from her time in Istanbul and the newly finished Canary Club, a novel set in medieval Spain. Most recently, Agni Online has published an excerpt from Spoonmaker. She has also published work on African vodou. More of her work can be found at https://bronwynmills.org/. Bronwyn now lives and writes in a tiny mountain village far, far away.
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 The Gotham Guide to 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, Arkansan Review, Bluestem, The Confluence, Linden Avenue, Noon, Witty Partition, and Zingara Poetry Review. She has published translations in Apple Valley Review, Ezra Translations, and Witty Partition. She is a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee in nonfiction. To learn more, visit danadelibovi.weebly.com/
Jan Schmidt, our Consulting Prose Editor, has had fiction published in Anti-Heroin Chic, The Wall, Tupelo Quarterly, The Long Story. IKON, 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. Her unpublished novel Sunlight Underground was a finalist for the Novel Slices Award, 2021. Till 2015, she held the position of Curator of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Some of her published writing can be seen on her website janschmidt-writer.com
Contributing Editor-at-Large
Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, whose memoir we continue to serialize, is the author of more than a dozen books including biographies of Paul Bowles, e.e. cummings, and a group portrait of American writers in Paris 1944-1960, The Continual Pilgrimage. He has translated the Salvador Dalí's "San Sebastien" essay, work by Eduard Roditti, and books by Paul Eluard, Rafael Alberti, Panaït Istrati, García Lorca as well as the Mayan Books of Chilam Balam. The inaugural issue of Wet Cement has new work by the author: https://www.wetcementpress.com/wcpmag.
Night Suite, his newest book of poems, will be out later this year from Talisman House. Other work includes, 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 retiring 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.
