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Search Results for: Dilruba Ahmed

Behind the Byline

Dilruba Ahmed

August 23, 2018

NER author Dilruba Ahmed          Photo: Mike Drza

NER poet Dilruba Ahmed (“Underground,” NER 39.2) talks with Editorial Panel member Angela Narciso Torres about public acts of resistance and private acts of opposition, the music and mystery of her own mother’s poetry, and the wonder of a new collaboration with an old friend.

 

Angela Narciso Torres: Like many of the poems in your poetry collection, Dhaka Dust, “Underground” addresses contemporary social issues while also being deeply rooted in history. Can you talk more specifically about the origins and the historical/societal context that gave rise to this poem?

Dilruba Ahmed: The word “resistance” has been on my mind recently: what does it mean to engage in very public acts of resistance, such as protests and marches, as well as more subtle or even private acts of opposition? Part of the lesser-known history of the South Asian immigrant community here in the US, for example, includes families organizing fundraisers together to support Bangladesh’s war for independence. Women prepared pounds and pounds of “chana chur” (a spicy and savory snack) in Philadelphia and the tri-state area to sell at a large gathering in Washington, DC, and then sent the proceeds back home. I’m interested in the ways that—particularly during difficult times—a seemingly small act can contribute to a greater purpose. And how those acts, even when they occur in relative isolation, can bind people together toward a common goal.

On a more public level, I only recently learned of my aunts’ participation in anti-government rallies in the ’50s, during a time of Pakistani rule in present-day Bangladesh. Crowds of women involved in the Bengali language movement shouted in the streets, wearing black saris—with even my mother (just a child at that time) swept along in the tide of vocal resistors.

In this particular poem, I was thinking of the various forms of private and public resistance by women under Taliban rule in Afghanistan, and the risks involved. I was interested in conveying the notion of resistance as not only fighting back, but also finding ways to thrive under very difficult circumstances.

When I consider the incredible resurgence of civic engagement of the last two years here in the US, I find it very humbling to dwell on the lives of women in situations like this. Doing so certainly lends some perspective to the present challenge of organizing and/or participating in protests and other calls to action, engaging lawmakers, placing phone calls, etc. in the midst of the demands of work and family, but still within an existence (for many of us) of relative privilege, comfort, and/or freedom.

ANT: This poem uses anaphora (“they are turning,” “they look on,” “they paint,” “they are stripping veils,” etc.), achieving a cumulative, incantatory power. Can you discuss how you decided to employ this device for furthering your intentions for this poem?

DA: An early draft of the poem emerged in past tense from the point of view of one woman. But midway through that initial draft, the poem slipped into a third person POV, and shifted to the present tense. Since—for the women in this poem—navigating everyday existence is a continual act of resistance and survival, moving toward a more active and immediate verb tense seemed truer to the material. The repetition came about as the scene unfolded, as I tried to depict action after action that embodied the courage, strength, and perseverance of women under continual threat. I hoped to convey their sense of agency within that realm.

ANT: I’ve often noticed themes of motherhood and family weaving through your poems. They’re especially significant in this poem in which mothers serve as both nurturing/protective and empowering figures for their daughters in a society that fails to provide the freedoms and opportunities they rightfully deserve. How has your own experience of daughterhood and/or motherhood influenced your writing?

DA: My mother was one of my key writing inspirations—as a young woman in Bengal, she had participated in Bengali poetry recitation competitions and also composed her own poems. During my childhood in Ohio, she continued to recite, record, and compose Bengali poetry. Because I could neither understand the formal Bengali of her recitations, nor read the Bengali script I found on her drafts around the house, some of my early experiences of language were imbued with both music and mystery. I think that notion of language as music deeply affected me. Even now, many of my draft poems are initially driven more by sound than by content. In some ways, I think that her interest in poetry gave me permission to be in tune with something I couldn’t really articulate at the time.

ANT: Meena Alexander writes, “We have poetry/ So we do not die of history.” What I admire about your work is that while it may sometimes be rooted in autobiography, it always remains keenly aware of both the contemporary moment and the undercurrents of history. What do you see as the poet’s responsibility in our current political climate?

DA: I love those lines! Going back to the idea of resistance in acts large and small, public and private, I tend to think that the poet’s responsibility remains unchanged in some ways—that is, to create: to transmute emotional truths into art, and to follow one’s creative impulses. In our earliest stages of writing, this freedom to follow our poetic impulses is sacred.

That said, I think that we truly honor our responsibility as writers when we continually strive to hone our craft strategies so we can better serve our poems—and that part of that growth is acknowledging the social, political, cultural, and historical contexts that can and should inform our work. I guess both of these aspects come into sharper focus during the revision phase, when we try to scrutinize what our work is attempting to do, how and whether it gets there, and what’s missing.

Personally, I often find myself drawn to topics that are overtly political. However, I would never deny that a poem about the sky at dawn, or the love of one’s dog, or a thought experiment that imagines a cross between a crocodile and a kitten—I think that in our current context these poems too, can be a kind of resistance. Given the present conditions in our country—a time of violence, greed, corruption, racism, homophobia, sexism, and so on—I think even a seemingly apolitical poem can assume elevated status as an act of survival. That is, couldn’t we argue that an evocation of humor, beauty, love, generosity, compassion, or even frivolity is also a form of resistance against all of the ugliness before us? Such poems hold the potential to move us to protect what we cherish the most about our lives and about the world, just as more overtly political poems might inspire us through different means to take similar action. I’m thinking, too, of a quote from Auden’s Age of Anxiety: “In times of war even the crudest kind of positive affection between persons seems extraordinarily beautiful, a noble symbol of the peace and forgiveness of which the whole world stands so desperately in need.” In a way, any gesture to create might be regarded as a crude affection, or even a form of love—one that just might help to restore our sense of humanity in some small or unexpected way.

ANT: What creative projects are you currently working on, poetry-related or otherwise?

DA: I’m in the midst of a new collaboration with an old friend: we send each other rough material for a poem, and the other person takes a crack at the first draft. We then try to revise and polish the piece together. Working with someone else’s raw material has proven to be a fun and liberating experience—I’m much more likely to consider a wider set of possibilities because my relationship with the material seems more distanced and playful. At the same time, seeing what someone else creates with some of my raw material has been an eye-opening experience that has helped me expand my approaches to revision. Working on this collaboration has definitely restored a sense of fun and spontaneity to my writing process.

Thanks for all your great questions, Angela!

 

Dilruba Ahmed’s book, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press, 2011), won the Bakeless Prize. Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, PEN America, Poetry, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. Ahmed is the recipient of the Florida Review’s Editors’ Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Prize, and the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship in Poetry awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She holds degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers.  www.dilrubaahmed.com.

Filed Under: News & Notes Tagged With: Angela Narciso Torres, Behind the Byline, Dilruba Ahmed

June 2020

New Books from NER Authors

June 30, 2020

Support independent bookstores by purchasing these titles and others from bookshop.org.


I devoured this book! Sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, a savvy business woman, a social and medicinal revolution: What’s not to love? —Rebecca Skloot, bestselling author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

From the publisher: During the ’70s in San Francisco, Alia’s mother ran the underground Sticky Fingers Brownies, delivering upwards of 10,000 illegal marijuana edibles per month throughout the circus-like atmosphere of a city in the throes of major change. Decades before cannabusiness went mainstream, when marijuana was as illicit as heroin, they ingeniously hid themselves in plain sight, parading through town—and through the scenes and upheavals of the day, from Gay Liberation to the tragedy of the Peoples Temple—in bright and elaborate outfits, the goods wrapped in hand-designed packaging and tucked into Alia’s stroller. But the stars were not aligned forever and, after leaving the city and a shoulda-seen-it-coming divorce, Alia and her mom returned to San Francisco in the mid-80s, this time using Sticky Fingers’ distribution channels to provide medical marijuana to friends and former customers now suffering the depredations of AIDS. Exhilarating, laugh-out-loud funny, and heartbreaking, Home Baked celebrates an eccentric and remarkable extended family, taking us through love, loss, and finding home.

Alia Volz is a homegrown San Franciscan. Her writing appears in The Best American Essays 2017, the New York Times, Tin House, Threepenny Review, River Teeth, Nowhere magazine, Utne, New England Review, and the recent anthologies Dig If You Will the Picture: Writers Reflect on Prince and Golden State 2017: Best New Writing from California. A 2018 MacDowell Colony fellow, Volz has also been an Artist in Residence with Writing Between the Vines and the Soaring Gardens Artists Retreat. The Squaw Valley Community of Writers awarded her the Oakley Hall Memorial Scholarship twice. She was runner-up of The Moth’s GrandSLAM Championship in 2014 and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her piece “Chasing Arrows” appears in NER 37.1.

Home Baked can be purchased from bookshop.org—support independent bookstores! 


Two New Translations by Alexander Booth

Bossong is acclaimed in Germany for both her prose and poetry, but she remains one amongst many young German authors who have yet to be discovered through translation. —New Books in German

From the publisher: Forty-six-year-old Anton Stöver’s marriage is broken. His affairs are a thing of the past, and his career at the university has reached a dead end. One day he is offered the chance to go to Rome to conduct research on Antonio Gramsci, at one time the leading figure of Italian communism. Once there, he falls obsessively in love with a young woman he has met, while continuing to focus his attention on the past: the frail and feverish Gramsci recovering in a Soviet sanatorium. Though Gramsci is supposed to save Italy from Mussolini’s seizure of power, he falls in love with a Russian comrade instead. With a subtle sense of the absurd, Nora Bossong explores the conflicts between having intense feelings for another and fighting for great ideals. Translated by Alexander Booth.

Gramsci’s Fall can be purchased from Bookshop.org—support independent bookstores!

“I believe that one day, in another age, if there is another age, the poetry of Sandro Penna will be read by all and his greatness recognized by all.” —Natalia Ginzburg, author of Family Sayings

From the publisher: Juggling traditional Italian prosody and subject matter with their gritty urban opposites in taut, highly concentrated poems, Penna’s lyrics revel in love and the eruption of Eros together with the extraordinary that can be found within simple everyday life. There is something ancient in Penna’s poetry, and something Etruscan or Greek about the poems, though the landscape is most often of Rome: sensual yet severe, sinuous yet solid, inscrutable, intangible, and languorous, with a Sphinx-like and sun-soaked smile. Penna’s city is eternal—a mythically decadent Rome that brings to mind Paris or Alexandria. And though the echoes resound—from Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Baudelaire to Leopardi, D’Annunzio, and Cavafy—the voice is always undeniably and wonderfully Penna’s own. Translated by Alexander Booth.

Within the Sweet Noise of Life can be purchased from Bookshop.org—support independent bookstores!

Alexander Booth is a writer and translator who lives and works in Berlin.  A recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for his translations of Lutz Seiler’s in field latin (Seagull Books, 2016), he has also published his own poems and other translations in numerous print and online journals. His poetry translations appeared in NER 37.3.


[W]hat sets Shrapnel Maps apart from many of its contemporaries is its insistence on reaching for the light, in reaching for unity, in reaching for new definitions of peace and new definitions of a sustainable joy. —Cleveland Review of Books

From the publisher: Writing into the wounds and reverberations of the Israel/Palestine conflict, Philip Metres’s fourth book of poems, Shrapnel Maps, is at once elegiac and activist, an exploratory surgery to extract the slivers of cartography through palimpsest and erasure. A wedding in Toura, a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, uneasy interactions between Arab and Jewish neighbors in University Heights, the expulsion of Palestinians in Jaffa, another bombing in Gaza: Shrapnel Maps traces the hurt and tender places, where political noise turns into the voices of Palestinians and Israelis. Working with documentary flyers, vintage postcards, travelogues, cartographic language, and first person testimonies, Shrapnel Maps ranges from monologue sonnets to prose vignettes, polyphonics to blackouts, indices to simultaneities, as Palestinians and Israelis long for justice and peace, for understanding and survival.

Philip Metres is the author of ten books, including The Sound of Listening (essays), Pictures at an Exhibition (poems), the translation I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky, and Sand Opera. His work has garnered fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as six Ohio Arts Council grants, the Hunt Prize, the Adrienne Rich Award, two Arab American Book Awards, the Watson Fellowship, the Lyric Poetry Award, the Alice James Award, the Creative Workforce Fellowship, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University. Read his most recent poem in our current issue, NER 41.1. 

Shrapnel Maps be purchased from Bookshop.org—support independent bookstores! 


“What a healing collection of poems Ahmed has given us.” —Patrick Rosal author of Brooklyn Antediluvian 

From the publisher: This collection juxtaposes text from Google Search autocomplete with the intimate language of prayer. Corporate jargon coexists with the incantatory and ancient ghazal form. [Dilruba] Ahmed’s second book of poetry explores the terrain of loss—of a beloved family member, of human dignity and potential, of the earth as it stands, of hope. Her poems weave mourning with the erratic process of healing, skepticism with an unsteady attempt to regain faith. With poems that are by turns elegiac, biting, and tender, Bring Now the Angels conveys a desire to move toward transformation and rebirth, even among seemingly insurmountable obstacles: chronic disease, corporate greed, environmental harm, and a general atmosphere of anxiety and violence.

Dilruba Ahmed’s debut book, Dhaka Dust, won the Bakeless Prize for Poetry, awarded by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Blackbird, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. Ahmed is the recipient of the Florida Review’s Editors’ Award and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Prize. Her poem “Underground” appears NER 39.2 and you can read her conversation with our Editorial Panel member Angela Narciso Torres here. 

Bring Now the Angels can be purchased from Bookshop.org—support independent bookstores! 

Filed Under: NER Authors' Books, News & Notes

Introducing NER 39.2

NER All Summer Long

June 12, 2018

NER 39.2 presents a summer’s worth of reading, with new poetry, fiction, essays, and translations, plus a special feature on the films of Terrence Malick. 

Order your print copy today, or get the e-book delivered to your inbox. 

As  nonfiction editor J. M. Tyree writes in his introduction to the feature, “when I asked poets, novelists, artists, and critics about the films that meant the most to them, Malick was the figure that kept cropping up in our conversations.” Gradually what came together—and what is presented now in our summer issue—is eleven takes on nine films. “Some of the pieces are personal essays while others offer critical perspectives. Some of the writers remain in Malick’s corner, while others are falling out of love before our eyes.”

TERRENCE MALICK NOW: Elizabeth Bradfield • Maud Casey • Jennifer Chang • Daupo • Skip Horack • A. Van Jordan • Kristi McKim • Morgan Meis • Michael Parker • Imad Rahman • Justin St. Germain

POETRY: Dilruba Ahmed • Heather Christle • Tiana Clark • Geffrey Davis • Bob Hicok • Richie Hofmann • Garrett Hongo • Luther Hughes • Christopher Kempf • Keetje Kuipers • Karyna McGlynn • Patrick Phillips • Susan Rich • Jeffrey Skinner • Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

FICTION: Castle Freeman Jr. • Chandra Graham Garcia • Sacha Idell • Holly Beth Pratt • Janet Towle • Cady Vishniac

TRANSLATIONS: Sylvie Durbec trans. by Denis Hirson • Alla Gorbunova trans. by Elina Alter

NONFICTION: François Scarborough Clemmons • Thomas Mann • India Hixon Radfar • Maureen Stanton

COVER ART: Jenny Kemp

Get a copy of the new issue HERE
Or, better yet, SUBSCRIBE

 

Filed Under: News & Notes

Contributors’ Notes 39.2

Dilruba Ahmed’s book, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press, 2011), won the Bakeless Prize. Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, PEN America, Poetry, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. Ahmed is the recipient of Florida Review’s Editors’ Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Prize, and the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellowship in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She holds degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers.

Elina Alter is a writer and translator in New York. Her work has appeared in BOMB, Paris Review Daily, Modern Poetry in Translation, Guernica, Slice, Brooklyn Magazine, and Southeast Review. She is the editor of Circumference: Poetry in Translation.

Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of the poetry collections Once Removed (Persea Books, 2015), Approaching Ice  (Persea Books, 2010), Interpretive Work (Red Hen Press, 2008), and the forthcoming Toward Antarctica (Red Hen Press, 2019). Her poems and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, West Branch, and Orion, and her awards include a Stegner Fellowship and the Audre Lorde Prize. Founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press, she lives on Cape Cod, works as a naturalist locally as well as on expedition ships around the globe, and teaches creative writing at Brandeis University.

Maud Casey is the author of three novels, most recently The Man Who Walked Away (Bloomsbury, 2014); a short story collection, Drastic (William Morrow, 2002); andThe Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions (Graywolf Press, 2018).  She is the grateful recipient of the Calvino Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the St. Francis College Literary Prize. She lives in Washington, DC, and teaches at the University of Maryland.

Jennifer Chang is the author of two collections of poetry, The History of Anonymity (University of Georgia Press, 2008) and Some Say the Lark (Alice James Books, 2017), which received the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Booksand Volta, and her poems are forthcoming in the New Yorker and the Literary Review. She teaches at George Washington University and lives in Washington, DC.

Heather Christle is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Heliopause (Wesleyan University Press, 2015). She lives in a small village in Ohio.

Tiana Clark is the 2017–2018 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. Her first full-length collection, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. She is the author of Equilibrium (Bull City Press,2016), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the New Yorker, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, Best New Poets 2015, BOAAT, the Journal, and elsewhere.

François Scarborough Clemmons is a singer, actor, and writer who had a long career as an opera singer, performing with the New York City Opera, Cincinnati Opera, and more. He created and played the role of Officer Clemmons on the children’s TV show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and founded and directed the Harlem Spiritual Ensemble. He was Alexander Twilight Artist in Residence at Middlebury College from 1997 to 2013, where he directed the Martin Luther King Spiritual Choir. He is currently working on a series of children’s books and a memoir, DivaMan: My Life in Song.

Daupo lives in Ridgewood, Queens, and works in every medium under the sun, having yet to master one. His illustrations have appeared in the Nation, Lapham’s Quarterly, and elsewhere, and he has had a long and fruitful collaboration with Flux Factory.

Geffrey Davis is the author of Revising the Storm (BOA Editions, 2014), winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist. His honors include fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation and the Vermont Studio Center, the Anne Halley Poetry Prize, the Dogwood Prize in Poetry, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. His poems have been published in Massachusetts Review, the New York Times Magazine, and Ploughshares, among other places. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches at the University of Arkansas.

Sylvie Durbec was born in Marseille and lives in Provence. She writes texts in both prose and poetry, paints and makes collages, as well as running a monthly bookshop for independent French poetry publishers from her home. Her numerous publications include Marseille: éclats et quartiers [Marseille, fragments and quarters] which won the prestigious Jean Follain prize of the City of Saint Lô; Prendre place [Taking  place]; Sanpatri [Nohomeland]; and the long poem “Soutine,” which appeared in English translation in the Common.

Castle Freeman Jr. is a longtime contributor of short fiction to NER, most recently with “Enough of Billy” (NER 38.2, 2017). He lives in southeastern Vermont.

Chandra Graham Garcia is a commercial real estate analyst and emerging writer. She is a contributor at the conceptual humor quarterly Razed. Us and a two-time finalist in the William Faulkner–William Wisdom Competition for short fiction. She lives in Arizona, and this is her first fiction publication.

Alla Gorbunova, born in Leningrad in 1985, is a poet, prose writer, translator, and critic. She has published five books of poetry and one book of short prose, and her work has been translated into English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Serbian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Latvian, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Czech.

Bob Hicok’s ninth book, Hold, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2018.

Denis Hirson lived in South Africa until the age of twenty-two, then settled in France in 1975. His first seven books are concerned with the memory of South Africa under apartheid, including the poetry collection Gardening in the Dark (Jacana Media, 2007).His most recent publications are Footnotes for the Panther: Conversations between William Kentridge and Denis Hirson (Fourthwall Books, 2017) and Ma langue au chat (Éditions du Seuil, 2017), about the torture and delight experienced by an Anglophone when speaking and writing in French.

Richie Hofmanis the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship and the author of Second Empire (Alice James Books, 2015), winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award. He is a 2017–19 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.

Garrett Hongo was born in Volcano, Hawai‘i, and grew up in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Mirror Diary: Selected Essays (University of Michigan Press, 2017). His most recent book of poems is Coral Road (Knopf, 2011). He teaches at the University of Oregon.

Skip Horack is the author of three books: the novels The Other Joseph (Ecco, 2015) and The Eden Hunter (Counterpoint, 2010), and the story collection The Southern Cross (Mariner Books, 2009). He teaches at Florida State University.

Luther Hughes is a Seattle native and author of Touched (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2018). He is the founder/editor-in-chief of Shade Journal and associate poetry editor for the Offing. A Cave Canem fellow and Windy City Times Chicago: 30 Under 30Honoree, he has published his work in Columbia Poetry Review, BOAAT, TriQuarterly, Adroit Journal, and others. He is currently an MFA candidate in the Writing Program at Washington University in St. Louis. You can follow him on Twitter @lutherxhughes. He thinks you are beautiful.

Sacha Idell is a writer and translator from Northern California. His stories appear in the Chicago Tribune, Electric Literature, Ploughshares, and elsewhere, and his translations include stories by the Japanese mystery writer Kyūsaku Yumeno. He is fiction editor of the Arkansas Internationaland an MFA candidate at the University of Arkansas, where he has received fellowships in both fiction and literary translation.

Van Jordan is the author of four poetry collections: Rise (Tia Chucha Press, 2001), which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award; M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A (W. W. Norton, 2004), which was listed as one the Best Books of 2005 by the London Times ; Quantum Lyrics (W. W. Norton, 2007); and The Cineaste (W. W. Norton, 2013). Jordan has received a Whiting Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a United States Artists Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award. He currently serves as the Robert Hayden Collegiate Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan.

Jenny Kemp earned an MFA in painting from the University at Albany and a BS in Art from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her work has been exhibited nationally, most recently at Surface 4 in Brooklyn and in When We Were Young: Rethinking Abstraction from the University at Albany Art Collection. She has been featured in 100 Painters of Tomorrow, the Huffington Post, the New York Times, Apogee, and more. A recipient of the 2015 NYFA fellowship in painting, and of the 2015 Emerging Artist Award from the Art Center of the Capital Region in Troy, New York, where she lives and works, Kemp sits on the board of Collar Works, a not-for-profit, artist-run exhibition space.

Christopher Kempf is the author of Late in the Empire of Men, which won the 2015 Levis Prize in Poetry (Four Way Books, 2017). He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. His work has appeared in Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, New Republic, PEN America, and Ploughshares, among other places. A recent Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College, he is a doctoral student in English Literature at the University of Chicago.

Keetje Kuipers has been a Stegner Fellow, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Fellow, and Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. Her work has been published widely, and her poems have appeared in the Pushcart Prizeand Best American Poetry anthologies. She is the author of the poetry collections Beautiful in the Mouth (BOA, 2010), The Keys to the Jail (BOA, 2014), and the forthcoming Outside the Refugium (BOA, 2019). An associate editor at Poetry Northwest and teacher at Hugo House, she lives with her family at the edge of the Salish Sea where she is at work on a novel and a memoir.

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) was a German novelist and essayist, and winner of the 1929 Nobel Prize for Literature. Among his most celebrated works are Buddenbrooks (1900), Death in Venice (1913), The Magic Mountain (1924), a tetralogy entitled Joseph and His Brothers (1933–1943), and Doctor Faustus (1947). He remained in Germany through World War I, but shortly after Hitler came into power in 1933 he moved to Switzerland and was formally expatriated in 1936. He became an American citizen in 1940 and settled in California. He visited Europe frequently after the war and in 1952 returned to Europe to live in Switzerland, until his death in 1955.

Karyna McGlynn is the author of Hothouse (Sarabande, 2017), The 9-Day Queen Gets Lost on Her Way to the Execution (Willow Springs, 2016), and I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl(Sarabande, 2009). Her poems have recently appeared in Kenyon Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Ninth Letter, Georgia Review, Witness, and 32 Poems. She earned her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston and was recently the Diane Middlebrook Fellow in Poetry at the University of Wisconsin. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Christian Brothers University in Memphis.

Kristi McKim is Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at Hendrix College, where she was awarded the Charles S. and Lucile Esmon Shivley Odyssey Professorship, honored as the 2014–15 United Methodist Exemplary Professor, and nominated for a CASE US Professor of the Year Award. Her publications include Love in the Time of Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Cinema as Weather: Stylistic Screens and Atmospheric Change (Routledge, 2013), and essays in Bennington Review, Camera Obscura, Studies in French Cinema, Senses of Cinema, and The Cine-Files. Her current project stretches academic film study into lyrical essays on pedagogy and film experience.

Morgan Meis has a PhD in philosophy and is a founding member of Flux Factory, an arts collective in New York. He has written for the New Yorker, n+1, theBeliever, Harper’s, and Virginia Quarterly Review. He won the Whiting Award in 2013 and is the author of Ruins (Fallen Bros. Press, 2013) and Dead People (Zero Books, 2016).

Michael Parker is the author of six novels and three collections of stories. His most recent book, Everything, Then and Since (Bull City Press, 2017), contains two O. Henry Award–winning stories, one of which was published in New England Review (NER 38.1). A new novel, Only the Horse Knew the Way, is forthcoming from Algonquin Books in 2019.

Patrick Phillips is the author of three poetry collections, including Elegy for a Broken Machine (Knopf, 2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. His first nonfiction book, Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (W. W. Norton, 2016), received the American Book Award and was named a best book of the year by the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Smithsonian. Phillips teaches writing and literature at Stanford.

Holly Beth Pratt was born in South Africa. In 2014, she moved to the US to pursue her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Florida. She is currently an editorial intern at Tin House Books and a book reviewer for Kirkus. She lives in Spokane, Washington.

India Hixon Radfar lives in Los Angeles and has published four books of poetry: India Poem (Pir Press, 2002), the desire to meet with the beautiful(Tender Buttons Press, 2003), Breathe (Shivastan Publications, 2004), and Position & Relation (Station Hill/Barrytown Books, 2009). As a Certified Applied Poetry Facilitator with the International Federation for Biblio/Poetry Therapy, she writes alongside people living with challenges and has edited four collections of their work, which can be found on her website at indiaradfar.com. She has twice been the recipient of Artist-in-Residence Grants from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs to work with homeless veterans, in 2015–2016 and again in 2017–18.

Imad Rahman is the author of I Dream of Microwaves (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004), a collection of connected stories. His work has appeared in One Story, Gulf Coast, Fairy Tale Review, Chelsea, NER Digital, and the anthology xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths (Penguin, 2013), among other venues. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council and the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture. He currently teaches creative writing at Cleveland State University.

Susan Rich’s most recent book, Cloud Pharmacy (2014), was shortlisted for the Julie Suk Prize. Other books include The Alchemist’s Kitchen (2010), Cures Include Travel (2006), and The Cartographer’s Tongue (2000), all from White Pine Press. She is co-editor of The Strangest of Theatres: Poets Crossing Borders, published by the Poetry Foundation. Her awards include a PEN USA Award, a Fulbright Foundation Fellowship, and a TLS Award. Rich’s work has appeared in O Magazine, Pleiades, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. She is co-founder of Poets on the Coast: A Writing Retreat for Women and teaches at Highline College, outside Seattle.

Justin St. Germain is the author of the memoir Son of a Gun (Random House, 2013). His essays have recently appeared in Tin House, DIAGRAM, and Barrelhouse. He teaches at Oregon State University.

Jeffrey Skinner’s most recent collection, Chance Divine, won the Field Prize and was published by Oberlin Press in 2017. Other of his recent poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Plume. He is the recipient of a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Maureen Stanton’s essays have been published in Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, River Teeth, Florida Review, the Sun, Iowa Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She is the author of Killer Stuff and Tons of Money: An Insider’s Look at the World of Flea Markets, Antiques, and Collecting (Penguin, 2011), which won the Massachusetts Book Award in nonfiction. She teaches creative nonfiction and literary journalism at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

Janet Towle grew up between forest fires. She has an MFA from the University of Arizona, and her short stories have appeared in Carve, Eleven Eleven, the Normal School, and Passages North.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is an American poet of Palestinian, Syrian, and Jordanian heritage. She is the author of Water & Salt (Red Hen Press, 2017) and Arab inNewsland, winner of the 2016 Two Sylvias Chapbook Prize. She earned her MFA in Poetry at the Rainier Writing Workshop of Pacific Lutheran University. Her poems and essays have been published in Kenyon Review Online,World Literature Today, Alaska Quarterly Review, Black Warrior Review, and Winter Tangerine. This year, she is the inaugural Poet-in-Residence at Open Books: A Poem Emporium, in Seattle.

Cady Vishniacis a Big Ten Academic Alliance Traveling Scholar in Jewish studies at the University of Michigan and a Translation Fellow at the Yiddish Book Center. Most recently, her work has appeared in Glimmer Train and Salamander, where she won the 2017 Fiction Contest.

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Vol. 43, No. 4

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Tomas Venclova

Literature & Democracy

Tomas Venclova

“A principled stance against aggression should never turn into blind hatred. Such hatred does not help anyone to win . . .”

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