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Joel Agee is the author of
TWELVE YEARS: AN AMERICAN BOYHOOD IN EAST GERMANY (University of
Chicago Press, p.b., 2000), a memoir of his life
behind the Iron Curtain from ages eight to twenty. His essays and
stories have appeared in publications such as Harper’s, The
New Yorker, and The Best American Essays. He is also known as
a translator of German literary works, among them Rilke’s
LETTERS ON CÉZANNE (Fromm International Publishing Corporation,
1985) and Elias Canetti’s THE
SECRET HEART OF THE CLOCK (Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
1989).† He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship
and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In
1999 he won the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his
translation of Heinrich von Kleist’s PENTHESILEA
(HarperCollins, 2000). (See “Passion,”
Archipelago, Vol. 3, No. 1.) Joel Agee has
just completed a memoir-novel, IN THE HOUSE OF MY FEAR,
from which the two stories in this issue are taken. “Killing a Turtle”
appeared in DoubleTake, Issue 6, Summer
1996; “German Lessons,” in Harper’s,
February 2001. His story “The Storm” appeared in
Vol. 4, No. 4.
Miriam Ben-Yaacov, a native of South Africa, is a graduate of UNO Writer’s Workshop. During her late teens and early twenties she lived in Israel. There she met her husband. They have two sons and have lived in Omaha for the last twenty-three years. Miriam Ben-Yaacov has published fiction and poetry and participated in local and regional readings. Her writing reflects life in the Midwest and her South African and Eastern European Jewish heritage. She is a winner of the Merit Award from the Nebraska Arts Council’s Individual Artists Fellowships Program (1997). Miriam Ben-Yaacov also was a Hatha Yoga instructor. Rosamond Casey is an artist and calligrapher. Her mixed media paintings, books and calligraphy have been exhibited or published abroad as well as in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Virginia, Maryland, and Washington D.C. Most recently, her work was exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. She is the sole proprietor of Treehouse Book Arts, a school for adults and children in the arts of handmade papermaking, calligraphy and book making, and the current President of the McGuffey Art Center a cooperative arts organization in Charlottesville, Virginia, comprised of 40 artists studios and several public exhibition spaces. Rosamond Casey holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts and Tufts University. She lives with her husband, novelist John Casey, in Charlottesville, Virginia. Cara Chamberlain is an instructor at Florida Southern College. Her work has appeared widely and is forthcoming in The Spoon River Poetry Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Rosebud, The MacGuffin, and Albatross, among others. She was recently nominated for the third time for a Pushcart Prize. Gu Cheng (1956-1993) was a figurehead of Obscure or “Misty” Chinese poetry, which flourished in the 1980’s. He burst onto the Beijing literary scene in 1979 with poems that were affectingly simply and melancholy, willfully naïve, even sentimental, but lurid and strange, like Blake’s. He met and befriended Bei Dao, Shu Ting, Yang Lian and others at the underground Today magazine. Gu Cheng’s later poetry is starkly disillusioned and powerful. In 1998 a film based on his life entitled The Poet was released in Hong Kong. Aaron Crippen is in the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. For his translations of Gu Cheng he won the 2001 American Translators Association Student Award. In 2001 he also received the PEN Texas Literary Award for Poetry. Fred Johnston was born Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1951. He founded Galway city’s annual literature festival and its writers’ centre. His poetry, prose and criticism have appeared in the U.S. and U.K. in, among others, The Sewanee Review, Southern Review, Literary Review (N.Y.), The Sunday Times, The Times Literary Supplement (TLS). He is also involved in playing traditional music. He lives in Galway. Kate Shapira’s work has appeared in a number of print and online publications. Her story “Atwater I/i” was recently nominated for a 2003 Pushcart prize, and she is currently in the throes of a novel. She teaches U.S. Women’s History at Camp Beacon Women’s Correctional Facility, thanks to a grant from the American Association of University Women, and lives in the Hudson Valley. Raymond D. Strother, except for a brief stint with the Associated Press, has “been involved in political hackdom all my adult life.” He began at a firm in Baton Rouge in the 1960s; in 1980, he opened Raymond D. Strother, Ltd., in Washington, D.C. Today he is president of Strother, Duffy, Strother, and lives in Washington and Montana. He is a former president of the American Association of Political Consultants, a former fellow of the John F. Kennedy Institute of Politics at Harvard University, a member of the Louisiana State University Journalism Hall of Fame, the recipient of a Pollie Award (2000) for Best Political Television, and the author of the political novel COTTONWOOD. His political memoir, FALLING UP: HOW A REDNECK HELPED INVENT POLITICAL CONSULTING has just been published by LSU Press. Holly Woodward was a doctoral fellow for a year at Moscow State University and studied a semester in Saint Petersburg. She serves as an Artist in Education for New Jersey’s schools. One of her stories, “The Captive,” was nominated for a best of the year anthology; it can be read at Three Candles. Her “Eros and Psyche” appeared in Archipelago, Vol. 4, No. 4. She is working on a novel.
News of Our Contributors; Notices Jane Barnes, novelist, scriptwriter, and a director of Archipelago, is among the writers in The Paris Review’s roundtable (Winter 2003) on crime-writing. In “The Man in the Back Row has a Question,” she joins Boris Akunin, Ann Arensberg, David Grand, Chloe Hooper, Jonathan Lethem, Tim Parks, Budd Schulberg, and Paul West, who talk about murder and mayhem in literature. Christopher Metress is the editor of THE LYNCHING OF EMMETT TILL, A Documentary Narrative (University of Virginia Press, 2002). The book was used as a source in the documentary film “The Murder of Emmett Till,” by Stanley Nelson, shown on PBS in January. Information about the murder of Emmett Till and the part his death played in the civil rights movement is on PBS’s “American Experience” Web site, which also links to “‘They Stand Accused’: James L. Hicks’s Investigations in Sumner, Mississippi, September 1955,” published in Archipelago, Vol. 6, No. 1. Martin Goodman is the editor of a new website, The Biggest Ideas. James Thornton (author of A FIELD GUIDE TO THE SOUL and the executive director of the Heffter Research Institute) is among the contributors “coming up with one such big idea every two weeks this year. These 25 big ideas are designed to link up into a big picture. Times are threatening in many ways....” Goodman and Thornton hope their series of articles “will set current problems in context, and give us all some sense of how we can address the various responsibilities and privileges of being alive in the present age.” Re-Imagining Ireland, an international conference and gathering of artists, writers, musicians, actors, filmmakers, journalists, scholars, and talkers will take place in Charlottesville, Virginia, May 7-10, 2003. A huge cast of guests from Ireland and the States will explore Irish identity in a global context. Mary MacAleese, President of Ireland, will give the keynote speech. All information, schedules, and registration forms, are contained on the Web site. For the third year, Davoren Hanna Poetry Competition seeks poets, whose work will be judged this year by Charles Simic and Matthew Sweeny. The Dubliner magazine, a sponsor, will publish the winners of the competition in its September issue. Named after Davoren Hanna, the gifted young Dublin poet who died in 1994, the competition is open to both published and unpublished poets over the age of 18. The competition is one of the most valuable in Ireland and the U.K., with a first prize of EUR6,500 and second and third prizes of EUR2,500 and EUR1,250 respectively. The closing date is 31 May 2003, and entry forms, along with rules and guidelines, are available on Eason Bookshop’s Web site or by sending a stamped addressed envelope to The Davoren Hanna Poetry Competition, The Muse Café, Eason Bookshop, O’Connell Street, Dublin 1. Forms will also be available from Eason Bookshops nationwide and in the March, April and May issues of The Dubliner. Last year’s competition was won by Kim Addonizio, with James McGonigle taking second prize and Jeff Walt third. For further information contact: Cian Cafferky, Competition Director, Ph (01) 2693322. More news from Ireland: Chris Agee, editor of the fine journal
Irish Pages, announces the publication of
UNFINISHED IRELAND: Essays on Hubert Butler. In October
2000, the Hubert Butler Centenary
Celebration became the first conference devoted to the life and work of
this extraordinary Irish countryman, European and citizen of the world.
Out of that remarkable gathering now comes this volume, which
brings together, in original or revised form, all nineteen of the talks
given at the conference, as well as a selection of historic photographs
and two comprehensive bibliographies. The publisher is Irish Pages,
who believe it is a book that will become the foundation stone for the
future study of the life and writing of Hubert Butler.
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