Spring 2011 - Contributors
Cheryl Alu is this year’s First Prize winner of the Mississippi Review Prize. She also had stories published in the Barcelona Review, The Robert Olin Butler Prize Anthology, Other Voices and the Bridport Prize published in the U.K.
Gustavo Adolfo Becquer (Seville, Spain; 1836-1870)
Son of a well-known painter of Flemish ancestry who died when the boy was only 5, Becquer was also, like several of his brothers, artistically gifted. He lost his mother when he was 11, and was brought up by relatives and his godmother. In his late teens he left Andalucia for Madrid to initiate a Bohemian life with poet and artist friends, and there earned a precarious living at free-lance writing, art, editing, journalism, translation, government work, and the writing of comic plays for the local theater. Eventually he was joined by his brother Valeriano, a noted painter, who shared with him a life that included constant poverty, the pain of several unrequited loves, and an unhappy marriage that produced three children, one of them perhaps the child of his wife's lover.
When Valeriano died in 1870, Gustavo suffered a severe depression, sickened unaccountably, and died within 3 months. His last words to friends were, "Remember my children." Those friends managed to publish his works--poetry and short stories--after his death, in order to help support Gustavo's widow and orphans. Those works were strongly influenced by the Latin classic poets, especially Horace, and by the German Romantics, especially Hoffman and Heine. A precursos of Modernismo, he shared the then-current German interest in folklore and legend, and is considered the founder of Spanish lyrical Romanticism. He is, to this day, a poet whose work Spanish speakers learn by heart in both Spain and Latin America.
Gerri Brightwell is a British writer who lives in Alaska with her husband and three sons. She teaches in the M.F.A. programme at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks and has two published novels: Cold Country (Duckworth, 2003) and The Dark Lantern (Crown 2008).
Rebecca Burns has published in a variety of online and print journals, including The London Magazine, Random Acts of Writing, Menda City Review, and has forthcoming stories in Controlled Burn and Pale House. She lives in the UK with her husband and two children.
Astrid Cabral is a leading poet and environmentalist from the Amazonian region of Brazil. She is the translator of Thoreau’s Walden and Civil Disobedience into Portuguese. Recent collections of her poetry include The Anteroom, Gazing Through Water, and Cage. Her work has appeared in over forty anthologies in Brazil and abroad. In this country, over fifty of her poems have appeared in various literary magazines such as Amazonian Literary Review, Cincinnati Review, Confrontation, Calque, Dirty Goat, Evansville Review, Home Planet News, Northwest Review, Osiris, Per Contra, Pleiades, Poetry East, Runes, Sirena and Two-Lines.
Rhina P. Espaillat See Staff Bios
Manuel Gonzalez Prada (Lima, Peru; 1844-1918) Son of a wealthy, conservative Spanish family, Gonzalez Prada studied law and from an early age demonstrated an interest in science, progressive thought and liberal politics. He became a strong critic of his own class, a positivist enemy of the Roman Catholic Church, an anarchist and a passionate advocate of working class rights, but nevertheless rejected the Russian Revolution of 1917 and opposed Communism for its rigidity. He served Peru as a politician, literary critic, director of the Peruvian National Library, and a social critic who influenced the intellectual life of his country.
As the first Latin American author to adopt the style that came to be known as Modernismo, Gonzalez Prada anticipated the great Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario who spread the style throughout the Spanish-speaking world. He also introduced into Spanish numerous poetic forms from other cultures and languages, such as the triolet and the pantoum, and composed essays that revitalized the form and had an enduring influence on future Latin American writers.
Dorothea Grossman is award-winning poet lives, works and writes in Los Angeles. The late Allen Ginsberg called Dorothea Grossman's poetry, "clear, odd, personal, funny or wild-weird, curious and lucid."Her work has appeared in numerous journals and collections, and she has published three books: “Cuttings: Selected Poetry 1978-1988,” “Poems From Cave 17” and “Museum of Rain.” Two CDs, ““Call And Response” and “Call And Response And Friends,” on the pfMentum label, feature the poet in live performance with improvising trombonist Michael Vlatkovich and other like-minded musicians. A chapbook, published by Zerx Press in 2008, is “The First Time I Ate Sushi.” She has been a featured poet in the March, 2010 issue of Poetry Magazine, and the recipient of The J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize.
Gail Holst-Warhaft was born in Australia, but moved to Greece in the 1970’s and played in the orchestras of Mikis Theodorakis and Dionysios Savvopoulos. She is a poet, translator, academic and musician who directs Mediterranean Studies at Cornell University. She has published her poems, translations of Greek poetry and prose, and essays on Greece in the U.K., the U.S., Greece, and Australia. Among her books are Road to Rembetika (4th edition, 2006), Theodorakis (1980), The Collected Poems of Nikos Kavadias (1987), Dangerous Voices (1992), and The Cue for Passion (2000). Her first collection of poetry, Penelope’s Confession, was published in 2007. She is the 2011 Poet Laureate of Tomkins County, and was recently elected to the council of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers.
Suzanne McConnell’s fiction has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and has appeared in journals and anthologies such as The Saint’s Ann’s Review, The Hamilton Stone Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Calyx, Green Mountains Review, Personal Fiction Writing, and The Fiddlehead. Her poetry and non-fiction have been published in The Huffington Post, Provincetown Arts, Poets & Writers, Cape Women and elsewhere. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, teaches at Hunter College, leads seminars for the Literature and Medicine programs at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and the Veterans Affairs Administration, and is Fiction Editor of the Bellevue Literary Review. An excerpt from her first novel won Second Prize in So To Speak's '08 Fiction Contest, and the novel, Fence of Earth, is now available for publication. She lives in New York with her husband, Gary Kuehn, a sculptor.
Alfred Nicol's second collection of poems, Elegy for Everyone, published in June 2010, was chosen for the first Anita Dorn Memorial Prize. His first book of poems, Winter Light, received the 2004 Richard Wilbur Award. Nicol edited The Powow River Anthology, and his essay on the life and work of Rhina Espaillat appears in American Writers Supplement XXI.
Steven Schrader has published four collections of stories. The three pieces in this issue are from a book to be published in 2012 by Hanging Loose Press, tentatively called The Ultrasuede King.
David Slavitt See Staff Bios
Phiip Sultz is a painter, collagist and has been represented by the Allan Stone Gallery in New York since 1977. He is also included in the Saatchi Gallery website in London. He first exhibited in New York in a bicentennial exhibit, Forty Years of American Collage, at the Buecker and Harpsicord Gallery. He received a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship in painting in 1975, and has exhibited country wide, and in Canada, Australia and Italy. He’s a published poet, a short story writer, and Professor Emeritus, Webster University, St. Louis. He’s married to Jan Sultz, the potter, who have two daughters who are also artists. In 1990, he moved to Maine to pursue art and life on 88 wooded acres, and produces maple syrup. He worked as a quarter horse wrangler in Montana, fire lookout, patrol ranger and mountain rescuer in Wyoming’s Teton Range. He’s a published photographer and writer of western settlement life, with an extensive collection of photographs acquired by the Jackson Hole Museum. As a young man he attended Albright Art School in Buffalo, studied with Charles Burchfield, and early on, was a steel worker at Bethlehem Steel. He later served in the Headquarters Company, Eighty-Second Airborne Division, during the Korean War. He moved to New York, painted in a loft, while working nights in front service at the Astor Hotel. He was awarded a full painting scholarship to attend the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan under Zoltan Sepeshy. He taught studio art at the Kansas City Art Institute, Rhode Island School of Design, and Webster University. While at Webster University, he was a mid-west coordinator for the Wounded Knee Legal Defense Committee, founder of Americans for Indian Self Determination, in St. Louis, and briefly, poetry editor of Green Revolution Magazine, York, Pa.
Lewis Turco See Staff Bios
