Matvei Yankelevich is the author of Alpha Donut (United Artists Books) and Boris by the Sea (Octopus Books), as well as several chapbooks. He is the translator and editor of Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook, 2007). His translations of Russian poetry have appeared in many periodicals including Harpers, New American Writing, Poetry, and The New Yorker, and in several anthologies including OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (Northwestern) and Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky (FSG). He is one of the founding editors of Ugly Duckling Presse, where he edits the Eastern European Poets Series; and a member of the writing faculty of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.
Eugene Ostashevsky, born in 1968 in Leningrad, is currently an American poet from New York City. His most recent full-length book of poems, The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza, employs characters such as MC Squared, Peepeesaurus, the Begriffon and, of course, DJ Spinoza, to explore the shortcomings of axiomatic systems with the insouciance and energy of Saturday-morning cartoons. Spinoza, as well as his earlier collection, Iterature, came out from Ugly Duckling Presse. As translator, Ostashevsky has edited the first English-language anthology of OBERIU, a Russian avant-garde group from the 1920s and 30s, led by Alexander Vvedensky and Daniil Kharms. His awards include the NEA and a number of other letters. He teaches literature at New York University.
Mirza Waheed was born and brought up in Srinagar, Kashmir. He moved to Delhi when he was eighteen to study English Literature at the University of Delhi and worked as a journalist in the city for four years. He came to London in 2001 to join the BBC's Urdu Service, where he now works as an editor. His critically acclaimed first novel The Collaborator is the story of a young man in the midst of the Kashmiri conflict of the early 1990s, which the Guardian has called "devastating," "haunting," and "gripping in its narrative drama."
Keorapetse Kgositsile is a South African poet of international acclaim. From 1961 to 1975 he lived in exile in the United States as an influential member of the African National Congress. In the US he became a significant member of the African-American poetry community through his identity as an African poet; he is recognized as having bridged an important gap between African poetry and American Black poetry.
Among Kgositsile's influences are Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Charles Dickens, and D.H. Lawrence. His published work includes the poetry collections My Name is Afrika, Heartprints, To the Bitter End, If I Could Sing, and This Way I Salute You. He has received literary awards such as the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, the Harlem Cultural Council Poetry Award, the Conrad Kent Rivers Memorial Poetry Award, the Herman Charles Bosman Prize, a nd others. In 2008 he was awarded the National Order of Ikhamanga: Silver (OIS).
He has been National Poet Laureate of South Africa since December of 2006.
Digital artist Roderick Coover (Temple University), e-poet Nick Montfort (MIT) and e-fiction writer Scott Rettberg (University of Bergen) present an evening of works created through intercontinental collaboration and across media forms. Coover and Montfort will present Currency, a series of 60 second video poems created through writing and image-making constraints and filmed in Puerto Rico, Switzerland, London, Brooklyn and Philadelphia. Montfort and Rettberg will read from Implementation, a novel published on stickers, stuck and photographed around the world; and, Coover and Rettberg will premiere works from the Norwegian Trilogy, a set of video narratives concerning legend, love, plague, volcanic dust and a great flood.
Roderick Coover's works include films and interactive arts such as Unknown Territories (unknownterritories.org), The Theory of Time Here (Video Data Bank) and Cultures In Webs (Eastgate Systems), as well as print publications such as Switching Codes: Thinking Through Digital Technology In The Humanities And Arts (Chicago). He is Associate Professor at Temple University. His website is at www.roderickcoover.com.
Nick Montfort develops creative text generators and interactive fiction; he has done dozens of literary and academic collaborations. Montfort co-edited The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 and The New Media Reader. He wrote Twisty Little Passages, Racing the Beam (with Ian Bogost), Riddle & Bind, and with several others a book, forthcoming from MIT Press, entitled 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. He is an alumnus of Penn, where he was part of the Kelly Writers House community. He is now associate professor of digital media at MIT and president of the Electronic Literature Organization.
Scott Rettberg is associate professor of digital culture in the department of linguistic, literary, and aesthetic studies at the University of Bergen, Norway. Rettberg is the author or coauthor of works of electronic literature including The Unknown, Kind of Blue, and Implementation. Rettberg is the cofounder and served as the first executive director of the Electronic Literature Organization. He is the project leader of the HERA-funded collaborative research project ELMCIP (Developing a network-based creative community: Electronic Literature as a model of creativity and innovation in practice ). Rettberg writes a column on electronic literature for the Norwegian literary magazine Vagant and is working on a book about contemporary electronic literature in the context of the twentieth century avant-garde.
Aharon Appelfeld’s work is recognized worldwide as among the most profound literature revolving around the Holocaust. His Modernist works do not offer a realistic depiction of the events – instead, they evoke the Holocaust metaphorically without relating to it directly. Appelfeld was born in 1932 near Czernowitz, Romania (now in Ukraine). When he was eight years old, his mother was killed by the Nazis, and he and his father were deported to a concentration camp. Appelfeld escaped and spent three years in hiding in the forests before joining the Soviet Army and eventually finding his way to a displaced persons camp in Italy, and then to Palestine in 1946. He is now one of the last living survivors of the Holocaust.
One of the world’s most important and influential writers, Appelfeld has been a candidate for the Nobel Prize. Together with Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua, he was one of the literary pillars who created Israeli Hebrew literature in the aftermath of Israel’s War of Independence, and for this was awarded the Israel Prize in 1983. Appelfeld belongs to the pioneering generation of Israeli writers who created a thriving Hebrew literature that gave voice to the Jewish and Israeli experience in the turbulent years of the early Israeli state. He has published twenty-five novels, novellas, and books of essays and short stories in Hebrew, and his fiction has been translated into over twenty-eight languages. Philip Roth’s interviews of Appelfeld in the New York Times were also published in Beyond Despair. Later, Roth made him a character in one of his novels. Appelfeld received the Brenner Prize, the Bialik Prize (1979), the Prix M!dicis Etranger (2004) and the Nelly Sachs Prize (2005). He has been visiting Professor at Boston, Brandeis and Yale Universities and a visiting Scholar at Oxford and Harvard.
December 21, 1963: Having served 20 years for a murder he didn't commit, "Moth" exits Central Sofia Prison anticipating his first night of freedom. Instead he steps into a new and alien world—the nightmarish totalitarianism of Communist Bulgaria. In his first hours of freedom he traverses the map of a diabolical city, full of decaying neighborhoods, gloomy streets, and a bizarre parade of characters. A novel of grave wit, Zift unfolds in the course of a single, frenetic night, offering a fast-paced, ghoulish, even grotesque—but also enchanting—tour of shadowy, socialist Sofia. To achieve his depiction of totalitarian absurdity, Vladislav Todorov combines the methods of hardboiled American crime fiction and film noir with socialist symbols and communist ideological clichés.
Author of five books of poetry (most recently the visual poem suite Silence) and three volumes of conceptual fiction (most recently the short fiction collection How to Write), Derek Beaulieu's work is consistently praised as some of the most radical and challenging contemporary Canadian writing.
His work has appeared in over 150 journals internationally, has been translated into Turkish, Polish, French and Icelandic and has been featured in over 200 small press publications. His conceptual novels Flatland and Local Colour, both explorations of texts without texts, were published in the UK and Finland respectively and are limit cases of prose.
Publisher of the acclaimed smallpresses housepress (1997-2004) and no press (2005-present), and past editor of several small magazines, Beaulieu has spoken and written on poetics internationally. Toro magazine recently wrote "using techniques drawn from graphic design, fine art and experimental writing, [Beaulieu] vigorously tests the restrictions, conventions, and denotations of the letters of the alphabet."
Shahar Bram is a poet, scholar, and translator. He teaches Hebrew & Comparative Literature at the University of Haifa, specializing in theory and American literature. He is the author of The Ambassadors of Death: The Sister Arts, Western Canon and the Silent Lines of a Hebrew Survivor (translated by Batya Stein), A Backward Look: The Long Poem in the Writings of Israel Pincas, Harold Schimmel and Aharon Shabtay (The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2005), and Charles Olson and Alfred North Whitehead: An Essay on Poetry (translated by Batya Stein, Bucknell University Press, 2004), among other works. His books of poetry include: Walls (Nahar Books, 2008), The Blooming of Memory (Am-Oved, 2005) and City of Love (Carmel Publishers, 1999). His essays, articles and translations have been published in literary journals such as Word & Image, Partial Answers, Connotations, and Salamander.
Jessica Greenbaum was born in Brooklyn where she lives, finally. A graduate of Barnard College and an initiating graduate of the University of Houston's Writing Program, she has worked as a business reporter for Forbes Magazine, a researcher for The Anti-Defamation League's Civil Rights Division, an English Dept adjunct, and as an editor for a magazine-on-tape for people who are visually impaired. She is presently the chief domestic scientist for a family of husband and two teenage girls, and poetry editor of the Massachusetts based annual, upstreet. Her first book, Inventing Difficulty, won the Gerald Cable Prize, and poems from her second manuscript have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Poetry, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, The Torah: A Woman's Commentary, CCAR Journal: A Reform Jewish Quarterly, Nextbook and . . . ZEEK. She is the founder of Foot Traffic Presents, which sells home-made muffins to passersby for charities benefiting girls and women in the third world (mostly), and which raised $1,500 in its first eleven weeks. Last year she was a runner-up to be Brooklyn's Poet Laureate, and that's a good thing because it sounds like it would have been the hardest of all her non-paying jobs to date.
Bob Perelman teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published 19 books of poems, including: IFLIFE (2006, N.Y: Roof); Playing Bodies, in collaboration with painter Francie Shaw (2004, N.Y.: Granary); and Ten to One: Selected Poems (1999, Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press). His critical books are The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (1996, Princeton University) and The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky (1994, University of California). His work can be accessed on Penn Sound.
Rivka Fogel is finishing up her last semester at Penn, where she is the Behrman scholar at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. Her work has been published in various journals including Peregrine and The Brighton Post, and has been featured in Institute of Contemporary Art publications and Arts in the City Crawl. She has poetry forthcoming in The Penn Review and in ZEEK, for which she is also a contributing editor. A past features writer for The Jewish Week, Rivka writes on contemporary art for Art Observed, and was the editor-in-chief of The Kedma Journal, Penn's journal on Israel and Jewish culture. She focuses much of her own research on religion in postwar language theory, and was awarded grants from the Penn English Department and the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships to travel to Jerusalem, where she studied language theory in Orthodox Judaism. Her most recent project, LOL_face, is a web index of identity.
North of Invention presents 10 Canadian poets working at the cutting edge of contemporary poetic practice, bringing them first to the Kelly Writers House, then to Poets House in New York City for two days of readings, presentations and discussion in each location. Celebrating the breadth and complexity of poetic experimentation in Canada, North of Invention features emerging and established poets working across multiple traditions, and represents nearly fifty years of experimental writing. North of Invention aims to initiate a new dialogue in North American poetics, addressing the hotly debated areas of "innovation" and "conceptual writing," the history of sound poetry and contemporary performance, multilingualism and translation, and connections to activism.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. It was also short-listed for the Orange Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and long-listed for the Booker. Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) is set before and during the Biafran War. Her collection of short stories, The Thing around Your Neck, was published in 2009. In 2010, Adichie was featured in The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" Fiction Issue. Her story, "Birdsong," appeared in the September 20, 2010, issue. She holds a Masters degree in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins and a Masters degree in African Studies from Yale. She divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.
Born in Potsdam, Germany, Arkadii Trofimovich Dragomoshchenko spent his youth in the Ukraine of the Soviet Union. While working on his eight book-length collections of poetry and two full-length plays, he also worked as a stoker at the former Leningrad State University Psychological Department. His first book was Nebo Sootvetstvii (Sky of Correspondence), published in 1990. The same year a collection in English, Description, translated by Lyn Hejinian and Elena Balashova was published by Sun & Moon Press in the USA. Xenia followed in 1994, published the same year in English, again by Sun & Moon Press. Other books of poetry, followed, Pod Podozreniem (Under Suspicion), and his selected poetry, Opisanie in 2000. Dragomoshchenko has also published several books of fiction and prose, including Phosphor, Kitajskoe Solnce, translated into English as Chinese Sun (Ugly Duckling Press), and Bezrazlichia (Indifferences), a book of collected prose. Dalkey Archive Press published a selection of Dragomoshchenko's prose as Dust in 2009. Dragomoshchenko's work has been collected into several anthologies and he has lectured in the Department of Philosophy at the St. Petersburg State University and been a visiting Professor at the University of California, San Diego, SUNY Buffalo, and the Smolny Institute of Liberal Arts and Science, an affiliate of Bard College.
Jorgen Gassilewski (born in 1961) is a Swedish writer, translator, cultural journalist and critic. His literary debut was the collection of poetry Du ("You", 1987). All in all he has published nine books, most recently the novel Goteborgshandelserna ("The Gothenburg Events", 2006). Next February a new book of poetry with the classic title Karleksdikter ("Love Poems") will appear. His poetry has been translated into Mandarin, Russian, French, English, Spanish, Polish, Hindi, Danish, Norwegian and German.
Anna Hallberg (born in 1975) is a Swedish poet and critic. Her first book was the collection of poetry Friktion ("Friction", 2001). Three years later it was followed by pa era platser ("on your marks", 2004), and she has been nominated for The Nordic Council's Literature Prize and other awards. This spring her third volume Mil ("Mile", 2008) was published. Hallberg also works with visual poetry, and has had several exhibitions at Nordic galleries. She writes literary criticism for the largest Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, and regularly publishes essays and articles in literary magazines.
Book description from UC Press: "Cuba's cultural influence throughout the Western Hemisphere, and especially in the United States, has been disproportionally large for so small a country. This landmark volume is the first comprehensive overview of poetry written over the past sixty years. Presented in a beautiful Spanish-English en face edition, The Whole Island makes available the astonishing achievement of a wide range of Cuban poets, including such well-known figures as Nicolás Guillén, José Lezama Lima, and Nancy Morejón, but also poets widely read in Spanish who remain almost unknown to the English-speaking world—among them Fina García Marruz, José Kozer, Raúl Hernández Novás, and Ángel Escobar—and poets born since the Revolution, like Rogelio Saunders, Omar Pérez, Alessandra Molina, and Javier Marimón. The translations, almost all of them new, convey the intensity and beauty of the accompanying Spanish originals. With their work deeply rooted in Cuban culture, many of these poets—both on and off the island—have been at the center of the political and social changes of this tempestuous period. The poems offered here constitute an essential source for understanding the literature and culture of Cuba, its diaspora, and the Caribbean at large, and provide an unparalleled perspective on what it means to be Cuban."
Adachi Tomomi (family name is Adachi), born in Kanazawa, Japan in 1972, is a performer, composer, sound poet, installation artist, and occasional theater director. He studied philosophy and aesthetics at Waseda University in Tokyo. His improvised poetics include voice, live electronics and self-made instruments. The "Tomomin"—a handmade electric instrument—is familiar to many musicians. His performances of contemporary music by John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, Christian Wolff, Tom Johnson, Dieter Schnebel, Takahashi Yuji, Yuasa Joji and Fluxus have included world and Japanese premiers. He has performed with numerous musicians including Jaap Blonk, Nicolas Collins, Carl Stone, Sakata Akira, Ichiyanagi Toshi, Tanaka Yumiko, dj sniff, Jerome Noetinger, Furudate Tetsuo, Dickson Dee, Zbigniew Karkowski, Johannes Bergmark, Erhart hirt, Makigami Koichi, Butch Morris, Jon Rose, Otomo Yoshihide in Japan, United States and Europe. His work has been presented variously at IRCAM/Centre Pompidou, Waker Art Center, STEIM, Experimental Intermedia Foundation, Tonic, The National Museum of Art Osaka, Super Deluxe, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, La Mama Theatre Melbourne, Anthology Film Archives, 21th Century Museum of Contemporary Art Kanazawa and Vooruit. Currently, he is focusing his activities on solo performance (with voice, sensors, computer, self-made instruments), sound poetry (especially to the unknown great Japanese sound poetry tradition), video installation, and workshop-style ensembles with non-professional voice and instruments.
Tianna Kennedy has a Masters in Performance Studies from New York University. She has taught courses in Radio Culture and Sight, Sound, and Motion at Brooklyn College in the department of Television and Radio. She is interested in public art and geography, and has written for liveartmagazine, Reckless Sleepers, and Glowlab. She was a founding member of the Empty Vessel Project (an Action, Art and Design Center); free103point9, (a transmission arts nonprofit); and the August Sound Coalition (which fostered community organizing throug LPFM). In 2009 she project-managed a successful pirate intervention/performance on the Venice Biennale originating in Slovenia with Swimming Cities of Serenissima (swimmingcities.org). Finally, she is a cellist and wood-finisher by trade.
Thomas Kinsella is one of a number of young Irishmen who began to write in the years following World War II, and he has played a major role in invigorating the world of Irish verse.
Dimitry Golynko is an accomplished St. Petersburg-based poet and translator and a contributing editor of Moscow Art magazine. He has written articles for numerous Russian- and English-language literature publications and, in 2008, Ugly Duckling Presse released an English translation of his book As it Turned Out.
The author of eleven books of poetry, along with several translations and an anthology of contemporary Brazilian poetry he co-edited, Régis Bonvicino has come to be recognized as one of the most talented and innovative of Brazilian writers. Bonvicino's poetry combines an intense, sprung lyricism with an engagement with artifice of poetic construction.
Wystan Curnow visited Penn and the Writers House as a Distinguished International Scholar, a program developed through the Office of the Provost which aims to promote global engagement with leading international scholars and artists. Curnow's visit included a talk on contemporary curatorial practice, recording sessions with Charles Bernstein and Al Filreis, class visits, and a capstone poetry reading on April 14th.
Marjane Satrapi was born in 1969 in Rasht, Iran. She now lives in Paris, where she is a regular contributor to magazines and newspapers throughout the world, including The New Yorker and The New York Times. She is also the author of several children's books, Embroideries, and the internationally best-selling and award-winning comic book autobiography in two parts, Persepolis and Persepolis 2. Persepolis has been made into an animated feature film, co-written and co-directed by Satrapi, and distributed by Sony Picture Classics in 2007.
Zhimin Li will read from his work and discuss contemporary trends in Chinese poetry.
Poet and scholar Zhimin Li is currently serving as Associate Professor in The School of Foreign Studies of Guangzhou University, as well as Director of The Chinese and Western Culture Study Institute and Director of The English Training Center of Guangzhou University. He also serves as the Secretary-General of English Poetry Study Association of China, and the Vice Secretary-General of Foreign Literature Study Association of Guangdong Province. Li's books include Appreciations on William Shakespeare's Works (1998, 2001, 2005, 2007), Selective Readings of Twentieth Century English and American Poetry (2003), New Chinese Poetry under the Influence of Western Poetics: The Origins, Development and Sense of Nativeness (2005), and Poetics Reconstruction: The Form and The Image (forthcoming in 2008).
A native of South Africa, Breyten Breytenbach is a distinguished painter, activist and writer of more than 30 books of poetry and fiction, as well as essays and dramatic works in both Afrikaans and English.
Co-sponsored by Temple-Penn poetics, NourbeSe Philip will discuss poetry and poetics in the Writers House Arts Cafe, following her November 20th reading at Temple University.
Hanan al-Shaykh will be joined in her reading by Penn professor and translator Roger Allen. The program is co-sponsored by the Middle East Center and Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture.
Bina Sharif, an immigrant to the U.S. from Pakistan, is an award-winning playwright, actress, poet, performance artist, and visual artist. Since the 1980s, her plays have premiered off-Broadway at venues like Theater for the New City, Performance Space 122, and the WOW Cafe. Some of her plays have been anthologized, including Afghan Woman, Fire, and My Ancestor's House. She has performed her one-woman shows at theatres and universities across the U.S. as well as in Belgium, England, and Pakistan.
The program is co-sponsored by the Critical Writing Program and the Middle East Center.
Download a recording of this event here.
Watch a streaming QuickTime video of this event here.
Bina Sharif, an immigrant to the U.S. from Pakistan, is an award-winning playwright, actress, poet, performance artist, and visual artist. The program is co-sponsored by the Critical Writing Program and the Middle East Center.
New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008) presents the exciting works of poets from across Europe. In compiling this landmark anthology, editors Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer enlisted twenty-four regional editors to select and translate 290 poets, whose writing was first published after 1968. These poets represent every country in Europe, and many of them are published here for the first time in English or in the United States. The resulting anthology collects some of the very best work of a new generation of poets who have come of age since Paul Celan, Anna Akhmatova, Federico Garcia Lorca, Eugenio Montale, and Czeslaw Milosz.
On September 23, 2008, we welcomed translators and editors for a discussion of the anthology -- the joys and challenges of translation, the process of selection, the field of European poetry and poetics. After a delicious reception, we capped off the evening with selected readings by translator-editors Marella Feltrin-Morris, Murat Nemet-Nejat, Adam J. Sorkin, J.C. Todd and moderator Wayne Miller.
Cecilia Vicuña, acclaimed Chilean poet, filmmaker and performance artist visited the Writers House for a reading and performance of her work. Opening her reading by tossing flower petal "confetti" (collected moments earlier in the KWH garden), Vicuña lead the rapt audience into a communal space where poetry unfolded in real time through playful improvisations, stories and chants.
A recording of the event is available on PennSound.
Vicuña, acclaimed Chilean poet, filmmaker and performance artist weaves time, space and sound to evoke ancient sensory memories. Through playful improvisations, stories and chants she leads her audience into a communal space where poetry unfolds. In her work indigenous word-play interfaces the contemporary realities of ecological disaster. Cecilia Vicuña is the author of sixteen poetry books published in Europe, Latin America and the US. Born and raised in Santiago de Chile, she has been an exile since the Pinochet coup in the early 1970s, and since 1980 has resided in New York, spending several months a year in Latin America. Currently she is co-editing the Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry, forthcoming 2008.
