Procession of Goats, Cotonou, La République du Bénin, West Africa. Photo: Bronwyn Mills
CONTRIBUTORS
Issue 18
Fall/Winter 2022
Issue 18
Fall/Winter 2022
Colloquy
Nabaneeta Dev Sen (1938–2019) remains one of the most beloved, versatile, and prolific Bengali writers of all time. She published her first book of poems at the age of 21, and grew to be immensely popular in every genre. Equally expressive in poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction, she has over 100 books to her credit, including compilations of poems, novels, plays, stories, memoirs, academic essays, children's literature, political columns, literary translations, and multiple volumes of her collected works. Educated in Presidency College and Jadavpur University in Kolkata, and then at Harvard, Berkeley and Indiana Universities, Dev Sen lived a parallel life as a highly acclaimed international scholar and feminist, and a distinguished professor of comparative literature. Her many honors include the Padma Shri, Sahitya Akademi Award, Bangla Academy Lifetime Achievement Award, Big Little Book Award for Children’s Literature, and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Publishers and Booksellers Guild. A tireless mentor to students and young writers, Dev Sen was the Founder and President of the West Bengal Women Writers’ Association, Soi.
Nandana Dev Sen is a writer, child-rights activist, and an award-winning actor. She is the author of six children’s books and two collections of her translations of the poetry of her mother, Nabaneeta Dev Sen. Nandana Dev Sen grew up in India, England, and America, and has starred in 20 feature films from four continents and in multiple languages. Her first book, Kangaroo Kisses was selected by 320 UK nurseries as a “Book of Excellence.” After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard University and studying filmmaking at the USC School of Cinema-Television, Dev Sen worked as a book editor, screenwriter, translator, and advocate for child protection. The winner of several Best Actress awards, the Wingword Poetry Prize, and the Last-Girl Champion Award for lifetime achievement in child protection, Dev Senhas served on numerous child-rights commissions and juries of global film festivals and international literary prizes. As an advocate and ambassador, she has represented such prominent organizations as UNICEF and Operation Smile. Dev Sen is the Child Protection Ambassador for Save the Children India, a global Author Advocate for Girls' Education for Room to Read, and a Director of the Women’s Refugee Commission New York. Visit her at: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and nandanadevsen.com.
Nabaneeta Dev Sen (1938–2019) remains one of the most beloved, versatile, and prolific Bengali writers of all time. She published her first book of poems at the age of 21, and grew to be immensely popular in every genre. Equally expressive in poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction, she has over 100 books to her credit, including compilations of poems, novels, plays, stories, memoirs, academic essays, children's literature, political columns, literary translations, and multiple volumes of her collected works. Educated in Presidency College and Jadavpur University in Kolkata, and then at Harvard, Berkeley and Indiana Universities, Dev Sen lived a parallel life as a highly acclaimed international scholar and feminist, and a distinguished professor of comparative literature. Her many honors include the Padma Shri, Sahitya Akademi Award, Bangla Academy Lifetime Achievement Award, Big Little Book Award for Children’s Literature, and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Publishers and Booksellers Guild. A tireless mentor to students and young writers, Dev Sen was the Founder and President of the West Bengal Women Writers’ Association, Soi.
Nandana Dev Sen is a writer, child-rights activist, and an award-winning actor. She is the author of six children’s books and two collections of her translations of the poetry of her mother, Nabaneeta Dev Sen. Nandana Dev Sen grew up in India, England, and America, and has starred in 20 feature films from four continents and in multiple languages. Her first book, Kangaroo Kisses was selected by 320 UK nurseries as a “Book of Excellence.” After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard University and studying filmmaking at the USC School of Cinema-Television, Dev Sen worked as a book editor, screenwriter, translator, and advocate for child protection. The winner of several Best Actress awards, the Wingword Poetry Prize, and the Last-Girl Champion Award for lifetime achievement in child protection, Dev Senhas served on numerous child-rights commissions and juries of global film festivals and international literary prizes. As an advocate and ambassador, she has represented such prominent organizations as UNICEF and Operation Smile. Dev Sen is the Child Protection Ambassador for Save the Children India, a global Author Advocate for Girls' Education for Room to Read, and a Director of the Women’s Refugee Commission New York. Visit her at: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and nandanadevsen.com.
Poetry
Trish Crapo is a writer, photographer, and collage artist, She’s been an arts columnist for local newspapers, a fiction columnist for Women’s Review of Books, and has written for Los Angeles Review of Books and Provincetown Arts. Her poems have appeared in Osiris, Southern Poetry Review, Meat for Tea, and in Ted Kooser’s nationally syndicated column, American Life in Poetry, among other places. Her chapbook, Walk through Paradise Backwards, was recently reissued by Slate Roof Press, and a new collection, adrift, a rowboat, was published in 2021 by Open Field Press. Her photography and collage have been exhibited across New England, at The New School, in Moscow, Tula, Russia, and Havana, Cuba. She’s a founding member of the word/performance/art group Exploded View, which won Best Experimental Film for Bitter Sweet Feast at The LAVA Film Festival, 2022.
Kelly Egan, who writes from dream, reverie, and long drives, is the author of the chapbook, A Series of Septembers, from Dancing Girl Press. A second chapbook, Millennial, is forthcoming from White Stag. Her poems can also be found in Colorado Review, Maiden Magazine, Laurel Review, RHINO, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has been the recipient of a Russell and Yvonne Lannan Poetry Prize, a semi-finalist in the Saturnalia Poetry Prize, a long listee for the Ghost Peach Press Poetry prize, and a nominee for Best of the Net, among other awards. Kelly has an MFA from Saint Mary’s College of CA and has participated in writing residencies in Iceland and the Peruvian Amazon. She lives in San Francisco, CA. Find her at kellyjeanegan.com.
Michael Franco is a poet, playwright and artist. His publications include: The Marvels of David Leering (Pressed Wafer 2017), A Book of Measure Volume One: The Journals of the Man who Keeps Bees (Talisman House 2017), The Library Of Dr Dee, (dromenon press for Pressed Wafer 2006), and How To Live (Zoland 1998). He was the founder of the Word of Mouth Readings Series in Cambridge, MA, is a board member for the Pioneer Valley Poetry Festival, and curates the Xit The Bear reading series in Somerville, MA, where he works and lives with his wife Isabel and son Thomas.
Translation
Bronwyn Mills (see below under "Editors.")
Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno (See below, under "Contributing Editor at Large")
Drummings
Jan Schmidt (See below under "Consulting Editors."
Fable
Christina Lago is a London-based writer and Journalist. Born and bred in Madrid, she made the UK her permanent home in 2010. Although she still dreams mostly in Spanish (with English subtitles), her writing these days is primarily for English language publications.
Editors' Pocket Anthology
Editors (see below)
Guillermo Ureña Badilla, translator, trained in English at Universidad de Costa Rica and Magister University. He later went on to the Universidad Autonomo de Centro America where he studied philology, history, Greek and Latin. He studied Italian at the Asocíacíon Cultural Dante Aligieri; and Portuguese, privately. He and his two brothers maintain Cafe Kabu in Sta. Maria de Dota, Costa Rica, where people gather for interesting conversations.
Trish Crapo is a writer, photographer, and collage artist, She’s been an arts columnist for local newspapers, a fiction columnist for Women’s Review of Books, and has written for Los Angeles Review of Books and Provincetown Arts. Her poems have appeared in Osiris, Southern Poetry Review, Meat for Tea, and in Ted Kooser’s nationally syndicated column, American Life in Poetry, among other places. Her chapbook, Walk through Paradise Backwards, was recently reissued by Slate Roof Press, and a new collection, adrift, a rowboat, was published in 2021 by Open Field Press. Her photography and collage have been exhibited across New England, at The New School, in Moscow, Tula, Russia, and Havana, Cuba. She’s a founding member of the word/performance/art group Exploded View, which won Best Experimental Film for Bitter Sweet Feast at The LAVA Film Festival, 2022.
Kelly Egan, who writes from dream, reverie, and long drives, is the author of the chapbook, A Series of Septembers, from Dancing Girl Press. A second chapbook, Millennial, is forthcoming from White Stag. Her poems can also be found in Colorado Review, Maiden Magazine, Laurel Review, RHINO, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. She has been the recipient of a Russell and Yvonne Lannan Poetry Prize, a semi-finalist in the Saturnalia Poetry Prize, a long listee for the Ghost Peach Press Poetry prize, and a nominee for Best of the Net, among other awards. Kelly has an MFA from Saint Mary’s College of CA and has participated in writing residencies in Iceland and the Peruvian Amazon. She lives in San Francisco, CA. Find her at kellyjeanegan.com.
Michael Franco is a poet, playwright and artist. His publications include: The Marvels of David Leering (Pressed Wafer 2017), A Book of Measure Volume One: The Journals of the Man who Keeps Bees (Talisman House 2017), The Library Of Dr Dee, (dromenon press for Pressed Wafer 2006), and How To Live (Zoland 1998). He was the founder of the Word of Mouth Readings Series in Cambridge, MA, is a board member for the Pioneer Valley Poetry Festival, and curates the Xit The Bear reading series in Somerville, MA, where he works and lives with his wife Isabel and son Thomas.
Translation
Bronwyn Mills (see below under "Editors.")
Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno (See below, under "Contributing Editor at Large")
Drummings
Jan Schmidt (See below under "Consulting Editors."
Fable
Christina Lago is a London-based writer and Journalist. Born and bred in Madrid, she made the UK her permanent home in 2010. Although she still dreams mostly in Spanish (with English subtitles), her writing these days is primarily for English language publications.
Editors' Pocket Anthology
Editors (see below)
Guillermo Ureña Badilla, translator, trained in English at Universidad de Costa Rica and Magister University. He later went on to the Universidad Autonomo de Centro America where he studied philology, history, Greek and Latin. He studied Italian at the Asocíacíon Cultural Dante Aligieri; and Portuguese, privately. He and his two brothers maintain Cafe Kabu in Sta. Maria de Dota, Costa Rica, where people gather for interesting conversations.
The Day
David “Irish” “Sully” Sullivan was born in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1951. Over the course of his life, Sully’s vocations, occupations and identities included historian, tactician, steelworker, labor organizer, builder, welder, husband and father. Beginning at age 17, he was arrested numerous times for his anti-Vietnam war and civil rights activities. An avid hiker and traveler, Sully had a particular love of the Austrian Tyrol. He died unexpectedly in 2009 while working on Troublemaker, a memoir of growing up, and staying, radical.
David “Irish” “Sully” Sullivan was born in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1951. Over the course of his life, Sully’s vocations, occupations and identities included historian, tactician, steelworker, labor organizer, builder, welder, husband and father. Beginning at age 17, he was arrested numerous times for his anti-Vietnam war and civil rights activities. An avid hiker and traveler, Sully had a particular love of the Austrian Tyrol. He died unexpectedly in 2009 while working on Troublemaker, a memoir of growing up, and staying, radical.
Memoir
Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno (See below, under "Contributing Editor at Large")
Portfolio
Nuran Akkaya was born in Istanbul in 1972 and became interested in photography at the early age of 12. He discovered the dark room when his older brothers bought him a Czechoslovakian enlarger in 1984. His photographs have been featured in many different exhibitions beginning in high school. In 2006 and 2008, he was a member of Haluk Çobanoğlu’s documentary photography studio. Now married with one child, Nuran is the Technical Service Manager for a French medical firm in Istanbul.
Ngugi wa Thiongo is a Kenyan writer now living in exile in the US for a number of years. As noted in the review, he is the author of numerous novels, short fiction and what he calls 'explanatory' prose. Imprisoned by the Daniel arap Moi dictatorship in 1977, he decided to write only in Gikuyu, his mother tongue. Among his numerous awards and commendations, on February 2, 2022, he was awarded the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature by PEN/America. Please see https://ngugiwathiongo.com/ for far more eloquent information than we have given here.
¡Viva!
Eric Darton, Founding Editor (see below)
Dana Delibovi, Consulting Editor (see below)
Soundings
Brian Cullman is a writer & musician living in New York and in France. He is also a member of the Lisbon-based group Rua Das Pretas.
Remarkable Reads
Elissa Favero (reviewer) teaches at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle and previously worked at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Seattle Art Museum. She writes about art, architecture, landscape, and books, and her art criticism, reviews, and essays have appeared in Art Nerd Seattle, ARCADE Magazine, Temporary Art Review, The Timberline Review, River Teeth Journal's Beautiful Things series, and The Rumpus. She is currently studying creative nonfiction at the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency M.F.A. program.
Sandra Ionescu (translator) grew up in Romania but has spent half of her life abroad. Ionescu (aka Marina Sofia) translates from Romanian and German into English, and was part of the Romanian spotlight for the Stephen Spender Creative Translation in the Classroom in 2021/22. She is the co-founder of Corylus Books, a publishing house dedicated to crime fiction in translation, for whom she has translated two novels from Romanian. Her translation of Mihail Sebastian's play The Holiday Game was highly commended in the John Dryden translation competition in 2022.
Paul Doru Mugur (author) writes fiction, poetry, philosophy, and visual art criticism. In 2020, he founded Respiro, an electronic multicultural magazine, www.respiro.org. He currently lives in New York.
Brandon Rushton (author) was born and raised in Michigan. His poems have received awards from Gulf Coast and Ninth Letter and appear widely in publications like The Southern Review, Denver Quarterly, Pleiades, Bennington Review, and Passages North. His essays appear in Alaska Quarterly Review and the critical anthology, A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke, and have been listed as notable by Best American Essays. His book, The Air in the Air Behind It was selected by Bin Ramke for the 2020 Berkshire Prize from Tupelo Press. He was also a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the American Poetry Review/Honickman Book Prize.
Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno (translator; see below, under "Contributing Editor at Large")
Jan Schmidt (reviewer; see below under "Consulting Editors.")
Marcela Sulak (author) has published three poetry collections--City of Skypapers, Decency, and Immigrant. She co-edited the 2015 Rose Metal Press title Family Resemblance. An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres. Sulak, who translates from the Hebrew, Czech, and French, is a 2019 NEA Translation Fellow, and her fourth book-length translation of poetry: Twenty Girls to Envy Me: Selected Poems of Orit Gidali, was nominated for the 2017 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Her essays have appeared in The Boston Review, The Iowa Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, and other journals. She is an associate professor in American Literature at Bar-Ilan University, Tel Aviv.
Elissa Favero (reviewer) teaches at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle and previously worked at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Seattle Art Museum. She writes about art, architecture, landscape, and books, and her art criticism, reviews, and essays have appeared in Art Nerd Seattle, ARCADE Magazine, Temporary Art Review, The Timberline Review, River Teeth Journal's Beautiful Things series, and The Rumpus. She is currently studying creative nonfiction at the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency M.F.A. program.
Sandra Ionescu (translator) grew up in Romania but has spent half of her life abroad. Ionescu (aka Marina Sofia) translates from Romanian and German into English, and was part of the Romanian spotlight for the Stephen Spender Creative Translation in the Classroom in 2021/22. She is the co-founder of Corylus Books, a publishing house dedicated to crime fiction in translation, for whom she has translated two novels from Romanian. Her translation of Mihail Sebastian's play The Holiday Game was highly commended in the John Dryden translation competition in 2022.
Paul Doru Mugur (author) writes fiction, poetry, philosophy, and visual art criticism. In 2020, he founded Respiro, an electronic multicultural magazine, www.respiro.org. He currently lives in New York.
Brandon Rushton (author) was born and raised in Michigan. His poems have received awards from Gulf Coast and Ninth Letter and appear widely in publications like The Southern Review, Denver Quarterly, Pleiades, Bennington Review, and Passages North. His essays appear in Alaska Quarterly Review and the critical anthology, A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke, and have been listed as notable by Best American Essays. His book, The Air in the Air Behind It was selected by Bin Ramke for the 2020 Berkshire Prize from Tupelo Press. He was also a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the American Poetry Review/Honickman Book Prize.
Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno (translator; see below, under "Contributing Editor at Large")
Jan Schmidt (reviewer; see below under "Consulting Editors.")
Marcela Sulak (author) has published three poetry collections--City of Skypapers, Decency, and Immigrant. She co-edited the 2015 Rose Metal Press title Family Resemblance. An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres. Sulak, who translates from the Hebrew, Czech, and French, is a 2019 NEA Translation Fellow, and her fourth book-length translation of poetry: Twenty Girls to Envy Me: Selected Poems of Orit Gidali, was nominated for the 2017 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Her essays have appeared in The Boston Review, The Iowa Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, and other journals. She is an associate professor in American Literature at Bar-Ilan University, Tel Aviv.
Editors
Bronwyn Mills' books include Beastly’s Tale (a novel) and Night of the Luna Moths (poetry); her education, an MFA from UMass, Amherst, a Ph.D. from NYU. She was mentored by James Tate, Samuel Delany, Kamau Brathwaite, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. An Anais Nin Fellow and Fulbright Fellow (La République du Bénin, West Africa) she has lived in Paris, France, New York City, Istanbul, Turkey; Cotonou, Bénin, and Latin America and taught Caribbean literature, African literature and writing in Istanbul, Bénin, and just outside New York City. Formerly a dance and theatre writer in New England, Bronwyn is a founding co-editor for Witty Partition and a Senior Prose Editor for Tupelo Quarterly. Guest-editor for the Turkish issue of Absinthe; New European Writing (#19), her current projects include By the Spoonmaker's Tomb, a collection of vignettes from her time in Istanbul and the newly finished Canary Club, a novel set in medieval Spain. Most recently, Agni Online has published an excerpt from Spoonmaker. She has also published work on African vodou. More of her work can be found at https://bronwynmills.org/. Bronwyn now lives and writes in a tiny mountain village far, far away.
Eric Darton’s books include Free City, a novel, first published in 1996 by WW. Norton and recently re-released by Dalkey Archive Press, and the New York Times bestseller Divided We Stand: A Biography of The World Trade Center (Basic Books, 1999, 2011). Other of his writings may be found at at bookoftheworldcourant.net, ericdarton.net
and tupeloquarterly.com. He co-wrote, co-produced, and appears in the award-winning feature Asphalt, Muscle & Bone, directed by Bill Hayward. Darton teaches literature, writing, urban design and Ba Gua Zhang, a Chinese internal martial art. He leads Writing at the Crossroads, an interdisciplinary prose workshop.
and tupeloquarterly.com. He co-wrote, co-produced, and appears in the award-winning feature Asphalt, Muscle & Bone, directed by Bill Hayward. Darton teaches literature, writing, urban design and Ba Gua Zhang, a Chinese internal martial art. He leads Writing at the Crossroads, an interdisciplinary prose workshop.
Hardy Griffin has a Ph.D. from Boğaziçi University, and has published writing in Fresh.ink, New Flash Fiction, Alimentum, Assisi, The Washington Post, American Letters & Commentary, and a chapter in The Gotham Guide to Writing Fiction (Bloomsbury). His translations can be found in Words Without Borders, The Istanbul Biennial, and for the award-winning EU-sponsored study Armenians, which documents the lives of Armenians living in contemporary Turkey. A selection of his work can be found here. He is the founding editor of the literary magazine Novel Slices, dedicated solely to the publication of novel excerpts of all genres.
Consulting Editors
Dana Delibovi, our Consulting Poetry Editor, is a poet, essayist, and translator from Missouri. Her poetry and essays have recently appeared in After the Art, Bluestem, The Confluence, Linden Avenue, Moria, Noon, Psaltery & Lyre, Slippery Elm, and Riverside Quarterly. She has published translations in Apple Valley Review, Ezra Translations, Presence, and US Catholic. She is a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee, author of a 2020 Notable Essay in Best American Essays, and a 2023 Best of the Net nominee for translation. Visit her at https://danadelibovi.wordpress.com/ and on Twitter.
Jan Schmidt, our Consulting Prose Editor, has had fiction published in Anti-Heroin Chic, The Wall, Tupelo Quarterly, The Long Story, IKON and New York Stories. In Downtown she published a series of oral history interviews with hard-core, risky individuals and their brushes with salvation. Her short story collection Everything I Need and Other New York Stories was a semi-finalist for the Eludia Award from Hidden River Arts, 2021. Her unpublished novel Sunlight Underground was a finalist for the Novel Slices Award, 2021. Till 2015, she held the position of Curator of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Some of her published writing can be seen on her website http://contactprod.com/janschmidt/
Jan Schmidt, our Consulting Prose Editor, has had fiction published in Anti-Heroin Chic, The Wall, Tupelo Quarterly, The Long Story, IKON and New York Stories. In Downtown she published a series of oral history interviews with hard-core, risky individuals and their brushes with salvation. Her short story collection Everything I Need and Other New York Stories was a semi-finalist for the Eludia Award from Hidden River Arts, 2021. Her unpublished novel Sunlight Underground was a finalist for the Novel Slices Award, 2021. Till 2015, she held the position of Curator of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Some of her published writing can be seen on her website http://contactprod.com/janschmidt/
Contributing Editor-at-Large
Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, whose memoir we continue to serialize, is the author of more than a dozen books including biographies of Paul Bowles, E.E. Cummings, and a group portrait of American writers in Paris 1944-1960, The Continual Pilgrimage. For Witty Partition (now Cable Street) he translated Salvador Dalí's prose poem, "San Sebastien," and several other works. Book translations include work by Paul Eluard, Rafael Alberti, Panaït Istrati, García Lorca as well as the Mayan Books of Chilam Balam. The inaugural issue of Wet Cement Magazine has new work by the author: https://www.wetcementpress.com/wcpmag. Night Suite, his newest book of poems, will be out later this year from Talisman House. Other books include, Dix méditations sur quelques mots d’Antonin Artaud, translated by Patricia Pruitt (Paris: Alyscamps, 2018) Remission (Talisman House, 2016) and Mussoorie-Montague Miscellany (Talisman House, 2014) He has written librettos for Thomas Adès (America: A Prophecy Part I) Faber Music/Warner Classics CD, 2011, and for Andrey Kasparaov (Lorca: An Operatic Cycle in Five Acts. Alyscamps, 2022. ). Until retiring he taught writing at MIT for over a quarter-century. He lives in Turners Falls, Massachusetts. Many of his books are on Amazon and Bookshop.org.