EVERYTHING IS NOW
TABLE OF CONTENTS
When I was first in Czechoslovakia, it occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters. This isn’t to say I wished to change places. —Philip Roth
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Minna Zallman Proctor
Editor’s Letter
Time gives generously of its passage, and The Literary Review has been sixty long, prolific years in the making this fall. We’re celebrating our birthday with a special archival issue.
Katrina Elwertowski, Matthew College, Zachary Heffner, Maisia Grimes
Anniversary Issue Student Editors Letters
Each intern can describe what “Writers Respond” means to him or her in a hundred ways. For me, the act of responding necessarily implies a dialogue. The dialogue featured here can either be seen within the framework of the work’s original conception or recontextualized, redefined, to meet the needs of our modern lives.
Mao Tse-Tung
Translated from Chinese and with an introduction by Robert Payne
Changsha
The Pavilion of the Yellow Crane
Chinkan Mountain
Huei-Ch’ang
New Year’s Day
The Lou Pass
The Snow
Another Poem for Liu Ya-Tzu
Swimming
In the summer of 1946 I flew from Peking to the remote valley of Yenan, where Mao Tse-Tung had his temporary headquarters. A year before, one of the Chungking newspapers had published one of Mao’s poems called “The Snow,” and my principal objective was to discover more poems written by him, and perhaps through his poetry it would be possible to evaluate the strength of this man who was even then threatening to dominate the whole of China.
Francisco Arcellana
The Yellow Shawl
The doors came to a standstill simultaneously. I noticed the man before the farther side of the inner door. I stood and waited. It seemed the man could sustain silence and stillness longer than I could, so I decided to call out to him.
Clarence Major
The Necessity of Saints
Not to measure my height into the clouds
And cheat in the reflected vision,
So judge myself soberly
Tamiki Hara (Japan)
Translated by Richard H. Minear
Summer Flowers
After setting a match to the incense I had brought and bowing in silent respect, I took a drink of water at the well nearby. Then I walked home the roundabout way, via Nigitsu Park; that day and the next, the smell of incense clung to my pocket. It was on the third day that the atomic bomb fell.
Jerzy Putrament (Polish)
Translated by Jerzy Hummel
Holy Bullet
He stood nearest the door, stepping heavily from one foot to the other. “They cannot do anything to me,” he would repeat to himself persistently. One night he noticed that this “nothing” was quite different than the night before
Zofia Nałkowska (Polish)
Translated by Diana Kuprel
By the Railway Track
Yet another person now belongs to the dead: the young woman by the railway track whose escape attempt failed.
Okogbule Wonodi (Nigeria)
Ashes for Granny
She stood still at break of day,
the palm tree, erect and slim;
I see her still but who would say
that such rays could dim.
Joyce Carol Oates
Dead Actors
Shouting off-screen
the soundtrack buckles in fear
perhaps the actors are abandoning
the holy script
Václav Havel (Czechoslovakia)
Translated by Vera Blackwell
Monologue from a Play, The Garden Party
Me? You mean who am I? Now look here. I don’t like these one-sided questions, honestly I don’t. You think you can put the question in such a simplified way?
Aziz Nesin (Turkey)
Translated by Maxine F. Salamon
Milady Monkey
There were far too many monkeys in the cage. Several of them were performing tricks like trapeze artists on the heavy perches. One alone, in the pose of Rodin’s Thinker, sat motionless. “Just like a human being,” I said to myself.
George Blake
The Expatriate
That night Wendell got out of bed and as usual when constructing the future began to pace in a square. “The war’s ten years old. How long?”
Moacyr Scliar (Brazil)
Translated by Eloah F. Giacomelli
The Prescript
“We must get used to death,” the Director of Social Welfare declared to a newsman. “The thought of death is at the onset of all discipline.” At first people grumbled; then, since all picnic expenses were paid for by the Bank of the Nation, they ended up by liking it.
Ignácio de Loyola Brandão (Brazil)
Translated by John M. Parker
The Men Who Discovered Forbidden Chairs
The men didn’t knock, because in that city, or country, the police had long since ceased having to knock in order to gain entrance. They didn’t carry official warrants, because there had long ago ceased to be any need for the existence of warrants. There was not a state of law.
Wiesław Kazanecki (Poland)
Translated by Peter Harris and Danuta Lopozyko
No Smoking
Insane builder of the tower reaching to the feet of God.
Insane builder of the ladder reaching to the lips of God.
Insane ravager who burned the city so the smoke could reach the tears of God.
Edoardo Cacciatore (Italy)
Translated by Annalisa Saccà
Excessus
Between heaven and hell—History
is no respector of the weak or the strong
Guido Ceronetti (Italy)
Translated by Michael F. Moore
From The Silence of the Body
Optimism is like carbon monoxide; it leaves a rosy imprint on the body when it kills.
Shiraishi Kazuko (Japan)
Translated by John Solt
Yellow Night
Yellow reflected on electric lights
Yellow first entered the couple’s bedroom
at 3 in the morning
Rachel Hadas
Mortalities
Unmake, remake the self: this means assuming
not that the center holds
but that there is a center.
Kenzaburō Ōe (Japan)
Translated by Yoshio Iwamoto and Yoshiko Yokochi Samuel
The Day Another Izumi Shikibu Was Born
I’ve been hoping to write a long story about the legendary “Great Women” widely known in the valley of my forest home. I laid down a plan for it long ago—in fact, so long that it seems it’s been with me since birth
Krystyna Lars (Poland)
Translated by Daniel Bourne
Seven Scenes from the Life of Men
Over Petersburg comes the wind. The scent of grain. At times the dawn sky is red and white, at times like the blue of a swordblade, at times it bursts forth like a burning bush.
Robert Cooperman
Mary McCormick Talks to a Lawyer, Five Years After Being Seduced by Three Priests
Mrs. Lynch Talks of Mary McCormick, the Girl Who Accused Three Priests of Seducing Her
Mrs. Miller Talks of the Priests Who Seduced Mary McCormick
Worse than doing it was knowing
they’d want you again, if not
right away, then in a day or two
Allen Learst
A Sheet, a Clothesline, a Bed
A green patch floats on the South China Sea, but looks white to me until I know it’s green because Mr. Brown says so. Is white a primary color? The absence of color? The whole world gone white.
John Agard
Limbo Dancer & the Press
The western press never took kindly
to limbo dancer gyrations
Marguerite Bouvard
In Argentina
In another country, you would be telling stories
to your grandchildren. You would be sweeping
your house with gusto
Nicholas Rinaldi
Handkerchief
The leaflets from the planes
tell us how to surrender: hands in the air,
no guns, wave a white flag.
Ghada Samman (Lebanon)
Translated by Paula Haydar
From Beirut Nightmares
I see the man emerge from the heart of the darkness. I see the man put a black mask on his face. I see the man knock on the big door. I see the man meet the man (the big one). I see them conclude the deal.
Patricia Sarafian Ward
The History
If I were to tell the consul anything, I would tell him this: From the moment he arrived, Raymond just could not stop looking at Lulwa’s scars. He fell in love with those scars.
Joseph O. Legaspi
Departure: July 30, 1984
We were not prepared for it—
America, the land cut like a massive slab
of steak. Our mother did not sit us down
to explain, and nothing was said
Melita Schaum
Exposure
In the summer, when we window-shopped in pairs down Colfax Street’s pricey gauntlet of boutiques, we knew that we were leaning toward the display windows mainly to catch our own reflections—after all, we were the goods
Leslie Ullman
Calypso, Twilight
From Nymph to Elder: Beyond the Viability of Seduction
The blind stallion, having learned
my braille of leg and hand,
carries me without flinching
Terese Svoboda
Learning to Translate
I learned only acute embarrassment in my kindergarten class of French at a Sacred Heart school because my father dropped me off at the immaculate convent in his dirty old pickup.
Samantha Hunt
Between the Storm and the Window
The man who handles my call to the Department of Motor Vehicles is required to tell me that he’s a convict in one of our state’s prisons. Next he asks, “What can I do to help?”
Jeffery Renard Allen
Holding Pattern
Then her head fall right offah her neck and go bouncin and rollin down the aisle. You shouldah seen it. Everybody screamin, tryin to jump off the train wit nowhere to go.
Prageeta Sharma
Belonging as Consequence: On Poetry
Then it awakens:
Becomes a nonconformist of happenstance—
a person saddled beneath
Paula Delgado-Kling
Child Soldiers: An Excerpt
Leonor grew up without much parental support, and poverty-struck, without schooling and unemployed. As a teenager, trying to find her place, she joined the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
R.G. Evans
“And Then What America, And Then What?”
What if California wasn’t the end of possibility?
Gleaming out past Alcatraz and Coronado—
someplace real to reach, if only you could walk across the water.
Percival Everett
Little Faith
The desert rolled like always, constant, brown, ochre, and especially red in the distance. The pressure of people, the efforts of people had killed off much of the life, but none of the desert. His mother had said it: you can kill everything, you can tear it all up and build, you can pipe water to it, but the desert is the desert, more desert every day.
Alex Dimitrov
This Is Not a Personal Poem
This is not a personal poem.
I don’t write about my life.
I don’t have a life.
Brandon Davis Jennings
Obnoxioneering in a Not-Yet-War; Dakedo, Sayo-fuckin-nar(o)?, Mr. Roboto
In order to pass the time in a not-yet-war, there are many activities to choose from. I will not list them all here, but believe me, there is a list, and from that list, I chose to be obnoxious.
Susan Thornton
Border Crossing
A young girl stood in a desert canyon just north of the border between the United States and Mexico.
Ruth Ellen Kocher
#106LinesOnBlacknessForWhitePoetsAndPolicemen
I know all of the words to “Gimme Three Steps”
I love and regret the color red
I want to know how you got that scar
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CONTRIBUTORS
John Agard’s (“The Limbo Dancer & the Press”) home until 1977, when he moved to Britain. He is an award-winning poet and has also written for children. His most recent poetry collections are Travel Light Travel Dark (2013) and Playing the Ghost of Maimonides. He is the winner of the 2012 Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. For more about him and his work, visit here.
Jeffrey Renard Allen (“Holding Pattern”) is the author of five books including the novels Song of the Shank (2014), which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Rails Under My Back, which won the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for Fiction, the short story collection Holding Pattern, which received the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence; and two collections of poetry. He is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. For more, visit his website.
Francisco (“Franz”) Arcellana (1916-2002) (“The Yellow Shawl”) was a Filipino writer and poet, recognized in particular for his seminal influence on the modern Filipino short story in English. For more, visit here.
Vera Blackwell(translation) was the first English translator of Václav Havel’s plays and has translated and adapted six of them in total.
George W. Blake(1926-2013) (“The Expatriate”) was a professor, poet and short story writer. His stories appeared in the Martha Foley collection, The Best American Short Stories 1967, The O. Henry Prize Stories 1970, and many quarterlies.
Daniel Bourne (translation). His stories have appeared in a number of literary magazines. His books include The Household Golds and Where No One Spoke the Language (2006), as well as a collection of translations of Polish political poet Tomasz Jastrun, On The Crossroads of Asia and Europe. He teaches at The College of Wooster in Ohio, where he edits Artful Dodge. For more about him, visit here.
Marguerite Guzman Boulevard (“In Argentina”) is the author of eight poetry books, one of which won the Mass Book Award for Poetry, and twelve non-fiction books, including Social Justice and the Power of Compassion (2017). She is a resident scholar the Women Studies Center for Research at Brandeis University, as well as a visiting scholar at its Environmental Studies Program. Visit her website here.
Ignácio de Loyola Brandão (“The Men Who Discovered Forbidden Chairs”) lives in São Paulo, Brazil. He has published forty-five books: novels, short histories, chronicles, trips, and biographies (Ruth Cardoso: Fragments of a Life). He is best known for his novel Zero, which was initially banned in Brazil and went on to win the prestigious Brasilia Prize and became a controversial best seller.
Edoardo Cacciatore (1912-1996) (“Excessus”) was a Roman poet and essayist. Although he didn’t publish his first book until he was forty, he went on to publish six volumes of poetry in his lifetime and two posthumously, as well as several books of essays.
Guido Ceronetti (“From The Silence of the Body”) is a prolific author of epigrams, essays, poems and plays and a translator as well. A regular contributor to the Italian daily La Stampa, he is rather notorious for his fiercely iconoclastic and anti-modern stances. The Silence of the Body is his first and only book to appear in English.
Robert Cooperman’s latest collections are Draft Board Blues and City Hat Frame Factory. In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains won the Colorado Book Award for Poetry. My Shtetl won the Holland Prize from Logan House Books. Forthcoming from Aldrich Press is Their Wars.
Paula Delgado-Kling‘s Child Soldiers (“Child Soldiers: An Excerpt”) is a book about her native Colombia, for which she has earned two grants from the Canadian Council for the Arts. She has been published in Narrative Magazine, Pacifica Literary Review, and The Grief Diaries, among others. She is the winner of the 2008 PALF Oneworld Nonfiction contest. For more, follow her on Twitter @ColombiaTalk or on her blog.
Alex Dimitrov (“This Is Not A Personal Poem”) is the recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Prize for younger poets from The American Poetry review and the founder of the Wilde Boys, a queer poetry salon in New York City. His first collection is Begging for It and his most recent collection is Together and By Ourselves (2017). For more, visit here or here. “This Is Not A Personal Poem” first appeared in TLR: Loss Control.
R.G. Evans‘s (“And Then What America, And Then What?”) books include Overtipping the Ferryman, The Noise of Wings, and The Holy Both. His original music has been featured in the poetry documentaries All That Lies Between Us and Unburying Malcolm Miller. Evans teaches high school and college English and creative writing in southern New Jersey. For more, visit his website. “And Then What America, And Then What?” was first published in TLR: Manifest Destiny.
Percival Everett (“Little Faith”) is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California and the author of nearly thirty books, including Percival Everett by Virgil Russell, and Glyph. Among other awards, he received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. “Little Faith” first appeared in TLR: Loss Control. Read his story, Confluence, from TLR: How To Read Music.
Eloah F. Giacomelli(translation) was born and raised in Brazil before emigrating to Canada. She is the longtime translator from Portuguese of eminent Brazilian writer, Moacyr Scliar.
Rachel Hadas (“Mortalities”) is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, essays, memoir, and translations. Her latest book of poems is Questions in the Vestibule and her new verse translations of Euripide’s two Iphigenia plays are forthcoming next year. Hadas is Board of Governor’s Professor of English at Rutger’s University-Newark. For more, visit her website.
Tamiki Hara (1905-1951) (“Summer Flowers”) was a Japanese author who survived the atomic bomb at Hiroshima just a year after losing his wife. His best-known work, Summer Flowers, was written in the aftermath of those tragedies. It is considered one of the four monuments of Hiroshima survivor literature. He died by suicide at the age of forty-six.
Peter Harris (translation), poet and translator, spent the Year of Solidarity (1980-1981) teaching in Poland at Marie-Curie Sklodowska University in Lublin, where he met his co-translator Danuta Loposzyko. Their collaborative translations also appear in Shifting Borders: Eastern European Poetry of the Eighties.
Václav Havel (1936-2011) (“Monologue from a Play, The Garden Party”). Czech leader and writer of worldwide renown first appeared in The Literary Review shortly after the Prague Spring Uprising–in the wake of which his theater work was banned in Czechoslovakia. His 1969 contributor’s biographical note for this magazine read: “Václav Havel is a producer with the Balustrades theater group. The same group has performed several of his satirical plays. His critical essays appear regularly in the magazine Divadlo.” For more, visit his website.
Paula Haydar (translation) is clinical assistant professor of Arabic at the University of Arkansas. She has translated ten novels by contemporary Lebanese authors Jabbour Douaihy, Rashid Daif, and Elias Khoury; Palestinian authors Sahar Khalifeh and Adania Shibli; and Jordanian author Jamal Naji. She translated Douaihy’s award-winning June Rain, her translation of Khoury’s The Kingdom of Strangers won the 1996 Arkansas Arabic Translation Award, and her translation of Adania Shibli’s Touch made the longest of 2011 Best Translated Book Awards.
Jerzy Hummel (translation) translated Jerzy Putrament’s short story, “Holy Bullet” for The Literary Review in the Spring of 1967.
Samantha Hunt (“In Between the Storm and the Window”) is the author of four books of fiction: Mr. Splitfoot, The Dark Dark: Stories, The Invention of Everything Else, and The Seas. She is the recipient of a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bard Fiction Prize, the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Prize and a finalist for the Orange Prize. Hunt has been published by the New Yorker, the New York Times, Tin House, the Guardian, and elsewhere. For more about her and her work, visit her website.
Yoshiko Iwamoto (translation) is professor of emeritus of East Asian languages and cultures and of comparative literature at Indiana University.
Brandon Davis Jennings (“Obnoxioneering in a Not-Yet-War…”) is an Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran from West Virginia. His collection of essays The Red Book or Operation Iraqi Freedom Is My Fault just came out, and he is also the author of the novella Battle Rattle, and an award-winning chapbook, Waiting for the Enemy. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Crazyhorse, Black Warrior Review, and Passages North. To learn more of his work, visit his website.
Wieslaw Kazanecki (1939-1989) (“No Smoking”) was a poet who lives and wrote in Poland.
Shiraishi Kazuko (“Yellow Night”) is one of the foremost Japanese poets of her generation and perhaps the most flamboyant. In the 1960s she pioneered the reading of poetry and jazz in Japan. Her English language publications include Seasons of Sacred Lust, translated by Kenneth Rexroth, John Solt, and others.
Ruth Ellen Kocher (“#106LinesOnBlacknessForWhitePoetsAndPolicemen”) is the author of seven books of poetry, including Third Voice, Ending in Planes (winner of the Noemi Poetry Prize), Goodbye Lyric: The Gigans and the Lovely Fun, and domina Un/blued. Her poems have been translated into Persian in the Iranian literary magazine She’r and have appeared in various anthologies including Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poets, Black Nature, From the Fishouse, and An Anthology for Creative Writers: The Garden of Forking Paths. She is currently associate dean for the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder where she teaches Poetry, Poetics, and Literature. For more, visit here.
Diana Krupel (translation) is a Toronto-based translator, editor, and communications professional. She translated Zofia Nałkowska’s Holocaust masterpiece, Medallions, and co-translated (with Marek Kusiba) the selected poetry of Ryszard Kapuściński, I Wrote Stone. She was the editor of Books in Canada and idea&s: the art & science review, and has served on the editorial committee form the Literary Review of Canada.
Krystyna Lars (“Seven Scenes from the Life of Men”) is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Kraina pamiętek (“The Land of Souvenirs”), in which “Seven Scenes from the Life of Men” originally appeared. She lives in Gdansk, where, along with her husband Stefan Chwin, she runs the literary publishing house Tytuł.
Allen Learst (“A Sheet, A Clothesline, A Bed”) won the 2011 Leapfrog Fiction Contest for his short story collection, Dancing at the Gold Monkey. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry appeared in War, Literature and the Arts, Alaska Quarterly Review, Chattahoochee Review, and Passages North. For more, visit his website.
Joseph O. Legaspi (“Departure: July 30, 1984”) is the author of the poetry collections Threshold (2017) and Imago, and two chapbooks: Aviary, Bestiary and Subways. His works have appeared in Poetry, New England Review, and Orion. He co-founded Kundiman, a non-profit organization serving Asian American writers. For more, visit here.
Danuta Loposzko (translation) is a Polish translator. He met Peter Harris, his co-translator, at the Marie-Curie Sklodowska University in Lublin in 1980. Their collaborative translations also appear in Shifting Borders: Eastern European Poetry of the Eighties.
Clarence Major (“The Necessity of Saints”). His most recent book of poems is My Studio.
Richard H. Minear (translation) is professor of emeritus of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His Hiroshima translations include Hiroshima: Three Witnesses, which includes the tryptich Summer Flowers; black Eggs: Poems by Kurihara Sadako; and Hiroshima: The Autobiography of Barefoot Gen.
Michael F. Moore (translation) is a translator and interpreter for the Italian Mission to the United Nations. His most recent translations include The Animal Gazer by Edgardo Franzosini, The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi, and Agostino by Alberto Moravia. He is currently completely a new translation of Alessandro Manzoni’s 19th century classic The Betrothed, for which he has been awarded and NEA grant a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center.
Sofia Nałkowska (1884-1954) (“By the Railway Track”) was a Polish novelist, short-story writer, and essayist. Born in Warsaw, she was part of the Young Poland movement that defined the country’s fin de siècle cultural world. She became the first female member of the Polish Academy of Literature in 1937, and was patron of a popular Warsaw literary salon. After surviving five years of Nazi occupation in Warsaw, Nałkowska joined the editorial staff of the literary weekly Kuźnica and was on the Commission for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes.
Aziz Nesin (1915-1995) (“Milady Monkey”) was a Turkish writer, satirist, and activist whose many novels, short stories and fables have been translated into over thirty languages.
Joyce Carol Oates (“Dead Actors”) is currently visiting writer in residence in the graduate writing program at New York University. She is a recipient of the President’s Medal in the Humanities, the National Book Award, the PEN American Lifetime Achievement Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award, among other honors. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Philosophical Society. Her most recent novel is A Book of American Martyrs (2017).
Kenzaburō Ōe (“The Day Another Izumi Shikibu Was Born”) is a writer of fiction, essays, and literary theories. He is the 1994 Nobel Prize laureate in Literature and one of the most highly esteemed writers to have emerged in post-war Japan.
John M. Parker (translation) is a translator from Portuguese, working from and writing about both Portuguese and Brazilian literature. His specialty is contemporary Brazilian poetry, in particular, on the poets of the Generation of 1945.
Robert Payne (1911-1983) had over 100 books published during his lifetime, among them such notable works as the biographies of Stalin, Lenin, Hitler, Gandhi, Mao tse-Tung. He also wrote novels and poetry and could translate from several languages. Apart from writing his own books, he served as Chairman of the Translation Committee at PEN until 1976 and then co-founded the Translation Center at Columbia University. During WW II he lived in China and taught English poetry and naval architecture at Lienta University in Kunming from 1943 to 1946. Together with Chinese scholars at the university he compiled and co-translated The White Pony, a collection culled from 3,000 years of Chinese poetry. Further information on his life and career can be found on his website.
Jerzy Putrament (1910-1986) (“Holy Bullet”) was a Polish poet, writer, editor, and politician. He was general secretary of the Society of Polish Writers from 1950-53. Although a prolific and influential figure, his work was sparsely translated.
Nicholas Rinaldi (“Handkerchief”) has written three collections of poetry and four novels, the most recent of which is The Remarkable Courtship of General Tom Thumb.
Dr. Annalisa Saccà (translation) is a professor of Italian at St. John’s University. She has published books on literary criticism as well as five books of her own poetry in Italian: Storie del Sud, Gli occhi di mia madre, Dove non è mai sera, Nominare Delfi, and Il tempo del grano. Saccà founded the Center for Global Development. She also co-founded the Rielo Institute for Integral Development (RIID) and the World Federation for Health and Migration (WFHM).
Maxine F. Salamon (translation) translated Aziz Nesin for The Literary Review’s Turkish Issue in 1972 while a doctoral student at New York University.
Ghana Samman (“From Beirut Nightmares”) is a prolific Arab woman writer with over twenty-five titles to her name, including the controversial Al-Raghif Yanbud ka ‘l-Qalb. She has also published numerous collections of short stories and poetry and a novel, Kawabis Beirut, based on the early years of the Lebanese wars. Many of her works have been translated into Western and Eastern European languages. She lives and writes in Paris.
Yoshiko Yokochi Samuel (translation) is a professor emerita of Asian Languages and Literature at Wesleyan University.
Melina Schaum (“Exposure”) poetry and prose have appeared in such journals as The Denver Quarterly, The Colorado Review, Notre Dame Review, New Letters, and Mississippi Review. She has authored five books, including a collection of memoir essays, A Sinner of Memory.
Moacyr Scliar (1935-2011) (“The Prescript”), was a Brazilian writer and physician who wrote frequently about the Jewish diaspora in Brazil. He is best-known abroad for the novel, Max and the Cats, and had twelve books translated into English.
Prageeta Sharma (“Belonging as Consequence: On Poetry”) is the author of four poetry collections, the most recent of which is Undergloom. She teaches in the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Montana in Missoula.
John Solt (translation) is a poet, translator, and critic. He was awarded in 1996 the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. Solt co-edited the selected poetry and prose in Japanese of his mentor, Kenneth Rexroth, issued in 2017 by Shichōsha in their World Poets Series.
Terese Svoboda (“Learning to Translate”) is a recent recipient of a Guggenheim in fiction and award-winning author of seven books of poetry, six novels, a memoir, a biography, and a book of translation from Nuer, a South Sudanese language. Her opera, WET, premiered at L.S.’s Disney Hall in 2005. Anthing That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet and Professor Harriman’s Steam Air-Ship appeared in 2016.
Susan Thornton (“Border Crossing”) lives in Binghamton, NY. Her memoir is On Broken Glass: Loving and Losing John Gardner, and her stories have been anthologized in Puerto Del Sol, The Best American Mystery Stories 2016, and Flash Fiction Annual 2017. Work has also appeared in Blackbird, The Santa Fe Literary Review and Rat’s Ass Review.
Mao Tse-Tung (Zedong) (1893-1976) (poems) was a Chinese communist revolutionary, political theorist, and poet. He served as chairman of the People’s Republic of China from 1949-1959, and led the Chinese Communist Party from 1935 until his death.
Leslie Ullman (“Calypso, Twilight” 191-194; “From Nymph to Elder: Beyond the Viability of Seduction”) has published four poetry collections and a hybrid volume of craft essays, poems, and writing exercises titled Library of Small Happiness. Professor Emerita at University of Texas-El Paso, she works as a freelance manuscript consultant and faculty member in the low-residency MFA Program at Vermont College of the Fine Arts.
Patricia Sarrafian Ward (“The History”) was born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon. She is the author of two novels, The Bullet Collection and Skinner Luce.
Okogbule Wonodi (1935-2001) (“Ashes for Granny”) was the first published Ikwerre poet, as well as being a college principal, lecturer, university administrator, company manager, newspaper publisher, and for several years in the 1970s, Chairman of the Port Harcourt Town Council in Eastern Nigeria.