Osama Alomar was born in Damascus, Syria in 1968 and now lives in Chicago. A poet, short-story writer, and musician, Alomar is the author of three collections of short stories and a volume of poetry. He is a regular contributor to various newspapers and journals within the Arab world.
Lydia Davis is the author of one novel and seven story collections. Her collection Varieties of Disturbance: Stories was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She is the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Award of Merit Medal, and was named a Chevalier of the Order of the Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers, including Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, and Marcel Proust.LydiaDavis is the winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize.
H.D. (1886-1961) (the pen name of Hilda Doolittle) was born in the Moravian community of Bethlehem, PA in 1886. A major twentieth century poet with “an ear more subtle than Pound’s, Moore’s, or Yeats’s” as Marie Ponsot writes, she was the author of several volumes of poetry, fiction, essays, and memoirs. She is perhaps one of the best-known and prolific women poets of the Modernist era. Bryher Ellerman was a novelist and H.D.’s wealthy companion. She financed H.D.’s therapy with Freud.
The poet, publisher, and activist Lawrence Ferlinghetti, born in Yonkers, New York in 1919, has received the Robert Frost Memorial Medal and the first Literarian Award of the National Book Foundation. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is the subject of Christopher Felver’s film documentary, Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder.
Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert and grew up in Virginia. In addition to writing poetry, he has translated works by Coral Bracho, Alfonso D’Aquino, Pura Lopez-Colome, Pablo Neruda, and Jaime Saenz. The recipient of grants from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim, Howard, Whiting, and United States Artists Foundations, he taught for many years as the AK Seaver Professor of Literary Arts & Comparative Literature at Brown University.
Oliverio Girondo was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1891, and the author of seven innovative books of poetry. He traveled often to Europe where he forged ties with the French Symbolists and the Spanish avant-garde. Girondo eventually died from injuries sustained in a 1964 car accident in 1967.
Author of more than a dozen books of poetry and two of literary criticism, Susan Howe's recent collection of poems That This, published by New Directions won the Bollingen Prize in 2011. Her earlier critical study, My Emily Dickinson, was re-issued in 2007 with an introduction by Eliot Weinberger. Three CDs in collaboration with the musician/composer David Grubbs, Thiefth,Souls of the Labadie Tract, and Frolic Architecturewere released on the Blue Chopsticks label (2005; 2011). Howe held the Samuel P. Capen Chair in Poetry and the Humanities at the State University New York at Buffalo until her retirement in 2007. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1999 and served as a Chancellor to the Academy of American Poets between 2000-2006. In fall, 2009 she was awarded a Fellowship to the American Academy at Berlin. Grenfell Press published a fine press edition of “Frolic Architecture with photographic prints by James Welling in 2009. Recently she was an Artist In Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. In October, 2013 her word collages were exhibited at the Yale Union in Portland, Oregon, and in the Whitney Biennial Spring, 2014. A limited press edition of Tom Tit Tot (the word collages which amount to a series poem) with art work by R.H. Quaytman has just been published by MoMA in New York, and Spontaneous Particulars:The Telepathy of Archives, (2014) published by Christine Burgin and New Directions.
Sylvia Legris was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and now lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Conjunctions, and Granta, and her third collection of poetry, Nerve Squall, won the 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize.
Called “a consummate poet” by Robert Creeley, Bernadette Mayer was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1945. A most prolific poet, her first book was published at the age of twenty-three. Many texts later she continues to write progressive poetry from her home in East Nassau, New
York. For many years Mayer lived and worked on the Lower East Side of
Manhattan where she was the Director of St. Mark’s Poetry Project from
1980-1984. Bernadette Mayer has received grants and awards from PEN
American Center, The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art, the
NEA, The Academy of American Poets, and The American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Dunya Mikhail was born in Iraq in 1965. While working as a journalist for the Baghdad Observer, she faced increasing threats from the authorities and fled to the United States in the mid 1990s. Her first poetry book in English, The War Works Hard, was named one of twenty-five Books to Remember by the New York Public Library and Diary of A Wave Outside the Sea won the 2010 Arab American Book Award for poetry.
Alejandra Pizarnik (1936–1972)
was born in Argentina and educated in
Spanish and Yiddish. In addition to poetry, Pizarnik also wrote experimental works of theater and prose. She died of a deliberate drug overdose at the age of thirty-six.
The American poet Nathaniel Tarn was born in
Paris in 1928 and emigrated to the US in 1970, where he has lived ever since,
mostly in the New Mexican desert. A leading anthropologist for many years and a pioneering translator of Pablo Neruda and Victor Segalen, Tarn, “one of the most outstanding poets of his generation” (Kenneth Rexroth), has published more than thirty books of poetry, essays, and translations—including most recently, The Beautiful Contradictions and Ins and Outs of the Forest Rivers, both available from New Directions.
Eliot Weinberger
is an essayist, editor, and translator. He lives in New York City.
