PER CONTRA:  EDITORIAL BOARD

 

Miriam N. Kotzin, Founding Editor, Editor-in-chief

Miriam N. Kotzin writes both poetry and fiction that has appeared in more than 100 print and online publications; her poetry received five nominations for a Pushcart Prize. She writes both formal poetry and free verse; her fiction ranges from flash fiction to a blognovel. She has been a contributing editor of Boulevard since its inception. A teacher of creative writing and literature, she co-directs Drexel University’s Certificate Program in Writing and Publishing and is a former director of the Literature Program. She is the author of A History of Drexel University, two collections of poetry Reclaiming the Dead (New American Press 2008) and Weights & Measures (Star Cloud Press 2009), and a collection of flash fiction, Just Desserts (Star Cloud Press 2010). A third collection of poems, Taking Stock, will be published by Star Cloud Press in 2010.  She writes a bi-weekly column "Second Acts" in The Smart Set. Don Gastwirth represents her literary novel, Cutter's Vision.

Her book reviews appeared in numerous publications ranging from College Literature to The Daily Planet. From 1973-1982 she was a juror for the American Film Festival and has also judged competitions in poetry, the literary short story and the popular short story for the Mad Poets Review and the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference. She received her BA in English, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Pennsylvania, and her Ph.D. in English with distinction from New York University.

 

Bill Turner, Founding Editor, Editor Emeritus

Bill Turner was formally trained in Political Science and Post-Colonial Latin American History. He taught History and Political Science for four years at a preparatory school in Puerto Rico, before accepting a position as the executive director of one of the largest environmental non-governmental organizations in the Caribbean (St. Croix Environmental Association). He has been called as an expert witness on issues ranging from conservation to public health by the United States Department of the Interior, the Congress of the United States, the Senate of the United States Virgin Islands, The Congressional Black Caucus and has been interviewed by ABC Television and BBC News.

He has served as a political analyst for a gubernatorial campaign, and as a researcher for a state senatorial campaign and worked in various positions on other state and national campaigns. He was a newspaper columnist for the Virgin Islands Daily News and The Virgin Islands Source Online. 

 

Peter Groesbeck, Associate Editor

A winner of the Toppan Drawing Prize, the Cecilia Beaux Portrait Prize, and the Cresson Traveling Scholarship at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Peter Groesbeck is currently employed by Drexel University and maintains a freelance photography business.  His work has been most recently displayed at the Pentimenti Gallery, Philadelphia, and the JMS Gallery in Chestnut Hill, PA.  His photography has appeared in Darkroom Photography, Collector’s Photography, Popular Photography, and has been published in several books, including Graphis Nude, and Sensual Photography.

 

Richard Burgin, Contributing Editor

Richard Burgin is the author of 14 books, including most recently the novel Rivers Last Longer and the story collections The Conference on Beautiful Moments and The Identity Club: New and Selected Stories and Songs. His 15th book Shadow Traffic, a new collection of short stories, is forthcoming from John Hopkins University Press in October 2011. Burgin's stories have won 5 Pushcart Prizes and been anthologized in The Best American Mystery Stories 2005 and The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction, among many others. His book The Identity Club was listed as one of "The Best Books of 2006" by The Times Literary Supplement and as one of "The 40 Best Books of Fiction of the Last Decade" by The Huffington Post. In February 2011, a Richard Burgin Reader will be published in France, in French, called L'Ecume des Flammes by 13 eNote Editions. He is a professor of Communication and English at Saint Louis University where he edits Boulevard, the literary journal he founded.

 

Rhina P. Espaillat, Contributing Editor

Rhina P. Espaillat is Dominican-born and bilingual in English and Spanish. She has published poetry, short stories and essays in both languages, in numerous anthologies and periodicals, as well as in three chapbooks and eight full-length books, most recently Her Place in These Designs. She has also translated in both directions, including work by Saint John of the Cross, Miguel Hernandez, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Robert Frost and many others, and is currently working on Spanish translations of poems by Richard Wilbur. Espaillat lives in Newburyport, MA, with her sculptor husband, Alfred Moskowitz.

 

Paul D. Green, Contributing Editor

Paul D. Green is a Professor of English at West Chester University in West Chester, PA. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University with High Honors. His academic writing has appeared in such places as Journal of the History of Ideas, Studies in the Renaissance, Studies in English Literature: 1500 - 1900, as well as in a number of anthologies of selected scholarly conference papers.

 

 

Al Gury, Contributing Editor

Al Gury is Chair of the Painting Department of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, awarded the National Medal of Arts for Distinguished Service to the Arts in America, the only art school to be so honored. PAFA is America’s oldest art school and art museum, founded in 1805. A painter, educator, writer and curator, he received his BA in fine arts and humanities from Saint Louis University, a Certificate of Art from PAFA, and an MFA from the University of Delaware.

He is a recipient of the Cresson Traveling Fellowship and numerous awards for painting and education, and was designated a master teacher by both The University of the Arts in Philadelphia as well as American Artist Magazine.

A painter of the figure, landscape, still life and portraits, he is represented by F.A.N. Gallery in Philadelphia. His paintings have been exhibited, among other places at the National Academy of Design in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Capitol in Washington D.C., Washington and Lee University, the University of Pennsylvania and galleries across the country.

He is a contributing editor for, Per Contra-The International Journal of Arts, Literature and Ideas, a contributor to a variety of periodicals, and has written two books on the history of color in painting and the history of painting techniques: Alla Prima-A Contemporary Guide to Direct Painting, Random House, 2009, and, Color-It's Traditions and Practice in Painting, Random House, 2010. Gury has also written for American Artist Magazine, and for Artist And Illustrator Magazine in London.

He also is a frequent juror of national exhibitions and a curator of museum exhibitions of painting and drawing.

A longtime advocate of social justice, Al is a supporter, volunteer and foster parent for PAWS, the Philadelphia Animal Welfare Society.

 

Daniel Hoffman, Contributing Editor

Daniel Hoffman has published eleven books of poetry, including his recent volume, Makes You Stop and Think: Sonnets (George Braziller, 2005). He is also the author of Zone of the Interior: A Memoir, 1942-1947 (Louisiana State University Press, 2000) and seven volumes of criticism, including Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (1971, Reprint Edition Louisiana State University Press, 1985), which was nominated for a National Book Award.

Among his other awards, Hoffman received the Arthur Rense Poetry Prize "for an exceptional poet" from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, and the Memorial Medal of the Maygar P.E.N. for his translations of contemporary Hungarian poetry.

He served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1973 to 1974 (now called the Poet Laureate) and is a Chancellor Emeritus of The Academy of American Poets. From 1988 to 1999 Hoffman was Poet in Residence at St. John the Divine, where he administered the American Poets' Corner. Until 1996, Hoffman was Felix E. Schelling Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.

 

Donald Kuspit, Contributing Editor

Donald Kuspit is one of America's most distinguished art critics.  Winner of the prestigeous Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art Criticism (1983), given by the College Art Association, Professor Kuspit is Contributing Editor at Artforum, Sculpture, and Tema Celeste magazines, and the Editor of Art Criticism.  He has doctorates in philosophy (University of Frankfurt) and art history (University of Michigan), as well as degrees from Columbia University, Yale University, and Pennsylvania State University.  He has also completed the course of study at the Psychoanalytic Institute of the New York University Medical Center.  He received honorary doctorates in fine arts from Davidson College (1993) and the San Francisco Institute of Art (1996).  In 1997 the National Association of the Schools of Art and Design gave him a Citation for Distinguished Service to the Visual Arts.  In 1998 he received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  In 2000 he delivered the Getty Lectures at the University of Southern California.  In 2005 he was the Robertson Fellow at the University of Glasgow.  He is Professor of Art History and Philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and has been the A. D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University (1991-97).  He has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Fulbright Commission, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, and Asian Cultural Council, among other organizations. 

He has written numerous articles, exhibition reviews, and catalogue essays, and lectured at many universities and art schools.  He is the editorial advisor for European art 1900-50 and art criticism for the new Encyclopedia Britannica (16^th edition), and wrote the entry on Art Criticism for it.  He is on the advisory board of the Lucy Daniels Foundation for the psychoanalytic study of creativity.  Among his most recent books are The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist (New York:  Cambridge University Press, 1993; also in German, Klagenfurt:  Ritter Verlag, 1995), The Dialectic of Decadence (New York:  Stux Press, 1993; reissued New York:  Allworth Press, 2000), The New Subjectivism:  Art in the 1980s (Ann Arbor:  UMI Research Press, 1988; reissued New York:  Da Capo Press, 1993), The Photography of Albert Renger-Patzsch (New York:  Aperture, 1993), Signs of Psyche in Modern and Postmodern Art (New York:  Cambridge University Press, 1994; also in Spanish, Madrid:  Akal, 2002), Primordial Presences:  The Sculpture of Karel Appel (New York: Abrams, 1994), Health and Happiness in Twentieth Century Avant-Garde Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), Idiosyncratic Identities:  Artists at the End of the Avant-Garde (New York:  Camridge University Press, 1996), Chihuly (New York:  Abrams, 1997), Jamali (New York:  Rizzoli, 1997; reissue with expanded text, 2004), Joseph Raffael (New York:  Abbeville, 1998), Daniel Brush (New York:  Abrams, 1998), Hans Hartung (Antibes/Nagoya:  Aichi Museum of Art, 1998), The Rebirth of Painting in the Late 20^th Century (New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2000), Psychostrategies of Avant Garde Art (New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2000), Redeeming Art:  Critical Reveries (New York:  Allworth Press, 2000), Don Eddy (New York:  Hudson Hills, 2002), Hunt Slonem (New York: Abrams, 2002), Hans  Breder (Muenster:  Hachmeister, 2002),  Steven Tobin (New York:  Hudson Hills, 2003), Mel Ramos (New York:  Watson Guptill, 2004), and The End of Art (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2004; also in Chinese (University of Bejing Press), Polish (Gdansk:  National Museum), Spanish (Madrid:  Akal), and Turkish (Istanbul:  Metis), April Gornik (New York:  Hudson Hills, 2005), Cristobal Gabarron (New York and Valencia:  Chelsea Art Museum and Valencia Museum of Art,  2005), Marlene Yu (New  York:  Queensboro College Art Museum, 2005), Horst Antes (Mainz: Wolf Huber, 2005), Albert Paley (Geneva:  Skira, 2006).  He has also written Clement Greenberg, Art Critic; Leon Golub: Existentialist/Activist Painter; Eric Fischl; Louise Bourgeois; Alex Katz:  Night Paintings; and The Critic Is Artist:  The Intentionality of Art.  He is also the author of three Books of poetry, Self-Refraction (1983; visual accompaniment by Rudolf Baranik), Apocalypse with Jewels in the Distance; visual accompaniment by Rosalind Schwartz), and On the Gathering Emptiness (2004; visual accompaniment by Walter Feldman and Hans Breder). 

 

Alexis Levitin, Contributing Editor

Alexis Levitin's thirty books of translation include Clarice Lispector's Soulstorm and Eugenio de Andrade's Forbidden Words, both from New Directions. Recent books include Astrid Cabral's Amazonian poems, Cage (Host Publications), a co-translation from the Bulgarian of And Other Stories by Georgi Gospodinov (Northwestern University Press), and a co-translation of Wallace Stevens' Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction into Portuguese (Relogio d'Agua, Lisbon). This summer his co-translation of Tapestry of the Sun: An Anthology of Ecuadorian Poetry came out from Coimbra Editions as the first Ecuadorian anthology ever published in English. This fall his newest book, A Traveler's Literary Companion to Brazil will be published by Whereabouts Press. Meanwhile, he continues to place numerous poems from Portugal, Brazil, and Ecuador in a variety of magazines such as Confrontation, The Connecticut Review, Dirty Goat, The Literary Review, Per Contra, Pleiades, Rhino, Rosebud, and Words Without Borders.  He is a Distinguished Professor in English Department of the State University of New York, Plattsburgh.

 

Larry Silver, Contributing Editor

Larry Silver holds the Farquhar Chair of Art History at the University of Pennsylvania and previously taught at Berkeley and Northwestern.  A specialist in painting and graphics of Holland, Belgium, and Germany, he has recently published a monograph on Hieronymus Bosch (Abbeville, 2006) and a study of "Peasant Scenes and Landscapes" of the sixteenth century (U. Pennsylvania Press, 2006).  He has also served as President of the College Art Association and as editor-in-chief of their online reviews journal, caa reviews. 

 

 

David R. Slavitt, Contributing Editor

David R. Slavitt is the author of many books, including his own fiction and poetry as well as his translations from the Greek and the Latin, including, among others: Seneca, Ovid, Virgil, Sophocles, and Aeschylus. His non-fiction includes a book on Virgil (also published by Yale) and Physicians Observed, Doubleday, as well as his account of running for office, Blue States Blues, published in April 2006 by Wesleyan University Press. He has also published under the names Henry Sutton, David Benjamin, Lynn Meyer and Henry Lazarus. Slavitt’s translation of The Theban Plays of Sophocles, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007, is the winner of the Umhoefer Foundation Award in Arts and Humanities.

David Slavitt’s latest books are Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (Harvard) and George Sanders, Zsa Zsa, and Me (Northwestern). His forthcoming books include: Poems from the Greek Anthology (Sheep Meadow); The Latin Epigrams of Giovanni Boccaccio (Johns Hopkins); and The Dukes Man: a novel (Northwestern). He lives in Cambridge, MA.

 

 

Lewis Turco, Contributing Editor

 

Lewis Turco was founding director of both the Cleveland State University Poetry Center (1962) and the Program in Writing Arts at the State University of New York College at Oswego (1968) from which he retired as Emeritus Professor of English in 1996. He took his B. A. from the University of Connecticut in 1959 and his M. A. from the University of Iowa in 1962. In 2000 he received an honorary degree, Doctor of Humane Letters, from Ashland University. His poems, essays, stories and plays have appeared in most of the major literary periodicals over the past half-century, and in over one hundred books and anthologies. In 1999 he received the John Ciardi Award for lifetime achievement in poetry sponsored by the periodical Italian Americana and the National Italian American Foundation.

Prof. Turco’s The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics has been called “the poet’s Bible” since its original publication by E. P. Dutton in 1968, through three editions, the most recent in 2000, and many printings; it was included in the New York City Schools’ list of “Recommended Books for Teachers.” A companion volume, The Book of Literary Terms, received a Choice citation as an “Outstanding Academic Title ”for the year 2000. A third volume in this series, The Book of Dialogue, How to Write Effective Conversation in Fiction, Screenplays, Drama, and Poetry, appeared in February 2004 and was chosen in 2005 by the AAUP as a “University Press Book Selected for Public and Secondary School Libraries.” The publisher of all three books is the University Press of New England.

Turco’s first book of criticism, Visions and Revisions of American Poetry, published by the University of Arkansas Press, won the Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America in 1986, and his A Book of Fears: Poems, with Italian translations by Joseph Alessia, won the first annual Bordighera Bi-Lingual Poetry Prize in 1998.

Star Cloud Press of Scottsdale, Arizona, published The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, the latter sobriquet being an anagram pseudonym under which Lewis Turco has published most of his traditionally formal poems. In 2007 the same publisher brought out Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, a gathering of non-traditionally written poems, some of which had originally won three chapbook prizes: the American Weave Chapbook Award for The Sketches in 1962, the Silverfish Review Chapbook Award for A Family Album in 1990, and the Cooper House Chapbook Competition for Murmurs in the Walls in 1992.

 

His most recent book is The Museum of Ordinary People and Other Stories, published in 2008 by Star Cloud Press of Scottsdale AZ which also published his Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems 1959-2007 and will publish, in the spring of 2009, his tome Satan's Scourge, A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New England 1580-1697. Bordighera Press will publish his La Famiglia/The Family, a book of memoirs.