Volume 55, Issue 2

Contributors

RAFAEL ALBERTI (1902-1999) was a prominent member of the “Generation of ’27,” a group of avant-garde Spanish writers. The author of numerous poetry collections, Alberti was a prize-winning and highly regarded poet when the Spanish Civil War began in 1936. He became one of the central literary voices of the Republic and was forced to leave Spain when it was defeated. He returned to the country in 1977 and lived there until his death in 1999.

ELLIOT BATTZEDEK lives and writes in Philadelphia. Her work has appeared in Poetica, Sinister Wisdom, Poemelon, and Trivia. She completed her MFA in poetry at Drew University, and is now pursuing a second degree in poetry in translation.

TONY BARNSTONE is the Albert Upton Professor of English at Whittier College. His books of poetry include Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki and The Golem of Los Angeles. He is a distinguished translator of Chinese poetry and literary prose. His anthology Monstrous Verse, edited with Michelle Mitchell-Foust, will be published in 2014. His selected poems Bestia en el Apartamento: Antología poética will appear in 2015, with translations by Mariano Zaro.

EMILY BARTON is a writer, essayist, and critic whose work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, Story, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times Book Review, the New York Observer, Poetry, Nextbook, and the Threepenny Review. Her first novel, The Testament of Yves Gundron, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; her second novel, Brookland, was named the same. She currently serves as the Elizabeth Drew Professor at Smith College, where she teaches fiction writing.

ERIC M. B. BECKER is a writer, translator, and award-winning journalist from St. Paul, Minnesota. His translations of Brazilian writer Edival Lourenço have appeared in Machado de Assis Magazine. A candidate for the MFA at Queens College-CUNY, he is the recipient of a 2014 Louis Armstrong House Museum Residency and assistant managing editor at the world literature journal Asymptote. He lives in New York

MIA COUTO is the author of more than twenty-five books of fiction, essays, and poems. His novels and short story collections have been published in twenty languages. In 2002, a committee of African literary critics named his novel, Sleepwalking Land, as one of the twelve best African books of the twentieth century. He lives with his family in Maputo, Mozambique, where he works as an environmental consultant and a theatre director.

NATHAN DEUEL is the author of Friday Was the Bomb: Five Years in the Middle East. He has written essays, fiction, and criticism for The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Harper’s, and The New Republic, among others. He graduated from Deep Springs College and lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.

NICOLE DICELLO is an MFA candidate for Creative Writing-Poety at Emerson College. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The New Guard, Blue Mesa Review, Poetry East, Nimrod, Concho River Review, and Ballard Street Poetry Journal. She is a volunteer screener for Ploughshares, and is pursuing publication of her first completed poetry manuscript.

ROBIN DIZARD, Emerita Professor of English at Keene State College in Keene, NH, lives in Amherst, MA. Her previous articles have appeared in MELUS, Southerly, the Massachusetts Review, and Pedagogy.

ANNE DONLON is a Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the editor of Langston Hughes, Nancy Cunard, and Louise Thompson: Poetry, Politics, and Friendship in the Spanish Civil War, a collection of correspondence and poetry.

J. MALCOLM GARCIA is the author of Khaarijee: A Chronicle of Friendship and War in Kabul. His work has been anthologized in Best American Travel Writing, Best American Essays, and Best Nonrequired Reading.

CHARLES YALE HARRISON (1898-1954) was a writer and political activist. Harrison fought with the Canadian Army in World War I before moving to New York City, where he became active in the leftist politics, media, and literary culture, including the Communist Party of America-led magazine New Masses and the John Reed Club. Harrison’s oeuvre is varied, including five novels and a biography of Clarence Darrow.

LAURA HARTENBERGER lives in Toronto. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Dragnet, Cutbank Magazine, The Found Poetry Review, and NANO Fiction. Hartenberger has won prizes from Gulf Coast Magazine and the Hart House Review.

RICHIE HOFMANN, a 2012 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellow, has poems appearing in the New Yorker, Poetry, and Ploughshares. In the fall, he will be a Creative Writing Fellow at Emory University.

LANGSTON HUGHES(1902-1967) was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance and an important poet in both African American and political communities. The author of over a dozen poetry collections as well as plays, libretti, stories and essays, Hughes traveled to Spain as a reporter during the Civil War and met, through the Alianza de Intelectuales Antifascista, a number of important Spanish Republican writers.

VICTORIA LANCELOTTA is the author of Here in the World: 13 Stories, and the novels Far and Coeurs Blesses. Her work has been anthologized in The Best of Literal Latte and Blue Cathedral: Short Fiction for the New Millennium.  She has been a fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Djerassi Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony. 

BRUCE LAWDER has published three books of poems and a book of essays on poetry, Vers le vers. He lives in Switzerland.

JEFF MCRAE lives in Vermont with his wife, three children, and a cat. Recent work has been published in The Chariton Review, The Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. In addition to writing poems, he is a jazz drummer, songwriter, and English professor.

PHILIP METRES is the author of a number of books and chapbooks, most recently, A Concordance of Leaves, abu ghraib arias, and To See the Earth. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry and has garnered a number of fellowships and awards, including the Beatrice Hawley Award and the Anne Halley Poetry Prize.  He teaches literature and creative writing at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio.   

CLAUDIA MONPERE’s poems and short stories have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Kenyon Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Puerto del Sol, Nimrod, and other journals. She is a recipient of the Georgetown Review Fiction Award and teaches writing at Santa Clara University.

DONALD MORRILL is the author of two volumes of poetry, At the Bottom of the Sky and With Your Back to Half the Day, as well as four books of nonfiction. He has taught at Jilin University, People’s Republic of China, and has been a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Lodz, Poland. Currently he teaches in the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Tampa.

CHRISTOPHER MUNDE completed his MFA at the University of Houston in 2008. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, The Hollins Critic, Hunger Mountain, Third Coast, and elsewhere. He received an Academy of American Poets Prize in 2008 and was named a finalist for the 2012 New Issues Poetry Prize. He currently lives in western New York, where he teaches at Jamestown Community College.

CARY NELSON is Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Among his 28 authored or edited books are several about the Spanish Civil War.

SARA NOVIĆ studied fiction and literary translation in the MFA program at Columbia University, where she is currently a teaching fellow instructing a human rights-themed essay-writing course. Her work has appeared in The Minnesota Review, LA Review of Books, Blunderbuss and Circumference. She is also the founding editor of the Deaf rights and education blog Redefined. Sara is at work on her first novel, which will be published by Random House.

TILLIE OLSEN (1912-2007) was very influential to the publication of women authors. Her works include the much celebrated Tell Me A Riddle, now a staple of college and university literature curricula in the US. As Visiting Writer at Amherst College in 1968-1970, she taught creative writing and literary surveys, which led her to compile extensive reading lists of “silenced” writers. These reading lists still enrich the knowledge students and professors have of working class writers, especially women.

ANTONINA PALISANO is the 2013 recipient of the Sandol Milliken Stoddard Award and was recently named a finalist for the Amherst Writers & Artists Pat Schneider Poetry Contest. Her research interests include death culture, hagiography, and Victorian medicine. She is currently at work on a poetry manuscript about George Mallory’s 1924 ascent of Mount Everest, and will begin an MFA in Poetry at Boston University in the fall of 2014.

EMILY ROBINS SHARPE is Assistant Professor of global Anglophone and postcolonial literatures at Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire. She is currently working on a book manuscript examining global Anglophone responses to the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). With Bart Vautour, she also co-directs “Canada and the Spanish Civil War”. They are at work on a scholarly edition of Charles Yale Harrison’s Meet Me On the Barricades.

Born in 1947, LEV RUBINSTEIN is a central figure in the Russian avant-garde, and has been translated into German, French, Swedish, Polish, and English.  His works in English include Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein and the forthcoming Compleat Catalogue of Comedic Novelties, translated by Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky.

SHEZ is an Israeli poet and playwright. She has published two books, Dance of the Lunatic and the false autobiographical novel The Fairies Return to Israel. She is a recipient of the Ron Adler Prize for poetry.

TATIANA TULCHINSKY has translated many works of fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction, among them Leo Tolstoy’s plays in three volumes and Anna Politkovskaya’s A Small Corner of Hell. She has been awarded a number of literary fellowships and prizes, including a Best Translation of the Year Award from the American Association of Slavists. Currently she works on a project translating and promoting English-language drama for the Russian theater stage.

KARA VAN DE GRAAF is a doctoral student in creative writing at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the anthology Best New Poets, Ninth Letter, Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, Third Coast, Alaska Quarterly Review and other journals.  She is a poetry editor for Cream City Review.

BART VAUTOUR is an Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. He has published articles in the journals Canadian Literature and Canadian Poetry: Studies, Documents, Reviews. He also has edited a scholarly edition of Ted Allan’s Spanish Civil War novel, This Time a Better Earth and co-edited the forthcoming collection Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Canadian Poetry and Poetics.

JOSE MORENO VILLA(1887-1955) was a Spanish poet and a member of the “Generation of ’27,” the avant-garde Spanish poets. An artist, essayist, poet, and teacher, The author of over thirty books of poetry and prose, Villa moved to Valencia at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. He was soon exiled to the United States, and eventually settled in Mexico, where he lived until his death in 1955.

ARNE WEINGART lives in Chicago, where he is the principal of a graphic design consultancy specializing in identity and way-finding.

ERIKA WILDER is a poet and writer currently living in New York, originally from Seattle. She earned her MFA at the University of Washington, where she was Coordinating Editor of The Seattle Review. Her work has appeared in MARY: A Journal of New Writing of St. Mary’s College, PageBoy, Filter Literary Journal, City Arts Magazine, The Destroyer, and Rookie.