Volume 54, Issue 3

Contributors

GARY AMDAHL is the author of Visigoth (stories) and I Am Death (novellas) and The Intimidator Still Lives In Our Hearts (stories). A novel, Across My Big Brass Bed will be published in January of 2014, by Artistically Declined Press.  Other novels and collections will follow each January thereafter, making seven volumes in The Amdahl Library Project. His poetry, translated and original, is being published by Spolia in Berlin.

RADCLIFFE BAILEY, the Atlanta based artist, explores American memory and history to encourage healing and transcendence through art. His collage-like images of photographs, colors, numbers, and objects as well as his installations evoke and reference the past in an authentic, contemporary articulation. Bailey’s works has been shown internationally.

TARA BRAY is the author of Mistaken for Song (Persea Books, 2009). Her most recent poems have appeared in journals including Poetry, Colorado Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Southern Review, and Cincinatti Review.

MARTHA COLLINS is the author, most recently, of White Papers (Pittsburgh, 2012) and the book-length poem Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006); she has also published four earlier collections of poems and two collections of co-translated Vietnamese poetry. She is currently editor-at-large for FIELD magazine and an editor for Oberlin College Press.

GEFFREY DAVIS holds an MFA (2012) from Penn State University, where he is completing a doctoral dissertation on American poetics. His debut collection, Revising the Storm, won the 2013 A. Poulin Poetry Prize and will be published by BOA Editions in April 2014. A Cave Canem Fellow, he has also received the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, and the Leonard Steinberg Memorial/Academy of American Poets Prize. He has poems forthcoming or featured in a variety of journals, among them Crazyhorse, Greensboro Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Mid-American Review, Mississippi Review, Nimrod International Journal, and Sycamore Review. He considers the Puget Sound area “home”—though he’s been raised by much more of the Pacific Northwest, and now by Pennsylvania as well.

LYNN DOMINA is the author of two collections of poems, Corporal Works and Framed in Silence, and the editor of a collection of essays, Poets on the Psalms. Her recent work appears or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, Arts & Letters, The Gettysburg Review, The Paterson Literary Review, and many other periodicals. She currently lives in the western Catskill region of New York.

Best remembered for his classic The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DU BOIS was the most important public intellectual in the United States during the last century.

EUGENE DUBNOV was born in Tallinn and educated at Moscow and London Universities. He taught English Literature and was Writer-in-Residence at Carmel College, Oxfordshire, and a Wingate Scholar in London. Two collections of his poems in Russian came out in London; his verse and prose in English translation and written in English has appeared in periodicals world over, as well as in a number of European and North American anthologies; nine of his short stories have been broadcast on the BBC. A collection of his poems in English, translated by Anne Stevenson with the author, will be published by Shoestring Press, UK, in autumn 2013.

MARY EVANS is a Nigerian born artist, living in London. Her work focuses on ideas of identity, alienation, and assimilation of immigrants from Africa in European countries. She is fascinated by “what they are forced to learn, and relearn, what they choose to remember and forget, how they are irrevocably changed.” She tries to express her own identity, which is a union of African and European elements, in her work.

BRENDAN FERNANDES was born in Kenya. Of Indian heritage, Fernandes is based in Toronto and New York. Brendan investigates the concept of authenticity as an ideological construct. One of his video installations was recently featured in the New York Guggenheim exhibition “Found in Translation.”

JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN was a historian of the United States and a chaired professor of history at Duke University. Best known for his work From Slavery to Freedom; among his many other publications are Race and History: Selected Essays, 1938-1988, and The Color Line: Legacy for the Twenty-first Century. In 1995, In 1995, he received the first W.E.B. Du Bois Award from the Fisk University Alumni Association and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

LATOYA RUBY FRAZIER was born and raised in Braddock, Pennsylvania. Her work is informed by late 19th- and early 20th-century modes of representation in documentary practice. With an emphasis on postmodern conditions, class, and capitalism, Frazier investigates issues of propaganda, politics, and the importance of subjectivity.

NORA HICKEY is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of New Mexico. Originally from Milwaukee, WI, she is now enjoying the burger joints and mountains of Albuquerque. She currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of Blue Mesa Review and her poetry and non-fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Booth, Mid-American Review, Court Green, Puerto del Sol and DIAGRAM.

PAUL R. HUNDT is a retired corporate lawyer who splits his time between Southampton and Larchmont, New York. His work has appeared in Ducts.org, Notre Dame Magazine, Oxford Magazine and the Palo Alto Review. In his spare time he enjoys hiking, bird watching and saltwater fishing.

PETER KAHN is a professional translator living in Vermont. He has translated works of fiction and nonfiction by numerous Latin American and Spanish writers. His fiction and poetry translations have appeared in various publications, including Grand Street, Gastronomia, Santa Barbara Review, Modern Poetry in Translation and several anthologies.

JULIE MEHRETU was born in Ethiopia, raised in Michigan, educated in Senegal and Rhode Island, and lives in New York and Berlin. Her art covers issues such as family history, migration, geography, home, war, cultural history, and personal narrative. Her works have been widely shown in Europe and the United States.

ANN MESSNER is a New York based artist whose work, since the late 1970s, has focused on the relationship between the individual body and the larger social body as encountered within public space or discourse.

Helming Squircle Line Press as its founding editor, DESMOND KON ZHICHENG-MINGDE is the author of I Didn’t Know Mani Was A Conceptualist, and The Arbitrary Sign, forthcoming in 2013. He has edited more than ten books and co-produced three audio books, several pro bono for non-profit organizations. He is the recipient of the PEN American Center Shorts Prize, Swale Life Poetry Prize, Cyclamens & Swords Poetry Prize, Stepping Stones Nigeria Poetry Prize, and Little Red Tree International Poetry Prize. An interdisciplinary artist, Desmond also works in clay. His ceramic works are housed in private collections and museums in India, the Netherlands, the UK, and the US.

KAREN AN-HWEI LEE is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo Press, 2012), Ardor (Tupelo Press, 2008) and In Medias Res (Sarabande Books, 2004), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award.  The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, she lives and teaches in southern California, where she is a novice harpist. She earned an M.F.A. from Brown University and  Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley.

Labor rights activist, cyclist, and music enthusiast KATHRYNE V. LINDBERG was a professor of English at Wayne State University. The author of Reading Pound Reading: Modernism After Nietzsche, she was also co-editor of America's Modernisms: Revaluing the Canon: Essays in Honor of Joseph N. Riddel and Bobweaving Detroit: The Selected Poems of Murray Jackson.

JUSTIN LUMLEY was born in 1955 in Bishop’s Stortford, England, and studied Russian at the University of London. He first met Eugene Dubnov when they both took part in a production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Through a varied career that included teaching English in four countries, founding a linguists’ club and many years of proofreading and editing, Justin has kept an interest in Russian literature. He has been working with Eugene Dubnov since 2004.

ANDREW NURKIN's poetry has appeared in North American Review, Drunken Boat, Rattle, Solstice, Peregrine, and elsewhere. Recipient of the Solstice Poetry Prize, a SLS Fellowship, and two Pushcart nominations, he holds his MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and degrees in English and religion from Duke and Yale. Originally from Atlanta, he lives in New Jersey.

DALE PETERSON is the author of Up From Bondage: The Literatures of Russian and African American Soul (2000) and The Clement Vision: Poetic Realism in Turgenev and James (1975). He teaches and writes frequently about Nabokov and has enjoyed a career at Amherst College as the Eliza J. Clark Folger Professor of English and Russian.

JEFFERSON PINDER, a Washington D.C. based artist, currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Pinder seeks to find black identity through his experimental videos and feature films that reference music, videos, and musical theater.

TIM ROLLINS AND K.O.S have worked with students in the South Bronx for over 30 years. Rollins developed a collaborative strategy that combines lessons in reading and writing with the production of works of art. His works has been internationally exhibited.

REBECCA RUKEYSER is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her work has appeared in ZYZZYVA.

Born in Italy, Venezuelan poet and translator, MARARA RUSSOTTO graduated from the Central University of Venezuela, where she was a professor for several years. She has translated poetry and essays by Brazilian and Italian writers, such as Cecília Meireles, Oswald de Andrade, Antonio Candido, Claudio Magris, Giuseppe Ungaretti, and Alfonso Gatto, among others, and has published eight books of critical essays. As a poet, her eight collections include Erosiones extremas (Editorial Universidad de Costa Rica, 2010), Del esplendor (Editorial Tiempo Nuevo, 2009), and Obra poética (Ediciones El otro el mismo, 2006). She received a Fulbright scholarship (1998), the LASA (Latin American Studies Association) Montserrat Ordóñez Award (2007) for her collection La ansiedad autorial, and was recently a writer in residence at the Chateau de Lavigny International Writer's Residence (Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation) in Switzerland. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, working on poetry and women writers with interdisciplinary and multicultural perspectives.

ADAM TAVEL received the 2010 Robert Frost Award, and his forthcoming collections are The Fawn Abyss (Salmon, 2014) and Red Flag Up (Kattywompus, 2013), a chapbook. His work has appeared in West Branch, Indiana Review, Zone 3, South Dakota Review, The Minnesota Review, and The Cincinnati Review, among others. He is an associate professor of English at Wor-Wic Community College on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

MR Contributing Editor EKWUEME MICHAEL THELWELL was the founding chairman of the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amhers. His vision and gifts have shaped many of the most essential pages published in this magazine over the past half century. Thelwell was active in the civil rights movement, participating in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). His novel The Harder They Come (1980) has become a Jamaican classic, and his political and literary essays are collected in Duties, Pleasures and Conflicts (1987).

MICKALENE THOMAS, a New York based artist, is best known for her elaborate paintings composed of rhinestones, acrylic and enamel. Thomas introduces a complex vision of what it means to be a woman and expands common definitions of beauty. Her work stems from her long study of art history and the classical genres of portraiture, landscape, and still like.

JEAN FAGAN YELLIN, Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at Pace University, New York, is a scholar of nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture. Born in the Middlewest and raised in a radical newspaper family, where she learned something about gender, race, and class in America, she received her PhD at the University of Illinois. A pioneer in African-American and gender studies, she is best known for her work Harriet Jacobs, Author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

ELIZABETH YOUNG is the author of Disarming the Nation: Women’s Writing and the American Civil War and Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor, and co-author of On Alexander Gardner's "Photographic Sketch Book" of the Civil War. She is Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College.

CARRIE MAE WEEMS has focused on family relationships, gender roles, the histories of racism, sexism, class, and various political systems. Her work is found in major museum collections across the country. Her retrospective exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum will tour the country through 2014.