Cervena Barva Press Poetry Interviews

POETS AND WRITERS INTERVIEWED BY GLORIA MINDOCK & OTHERS

August, 2005 Interview with Catherine Sasanov

Poet Catherine Sasanov is the author of Traditions of Bread and Violence (Four Way Books) and All the Blood Tethers (Morse Poetry Prize, Northeastern University Press). Her poem, "Day of the Dead: La Dulcería de Celaya," is part of the Červená Barva Postcard Series: One... more

September, 2005 Interview with UK Playright Michael Nash

As far back as I can remember, I have always had an affiliation with the theatre! I was born, a few weeks prematurely, seven hours after VE day - my mother was celebrating at a backstage party when I decided to arrive. Her cousin was Sir Rex Harrison... more

October, 2005 Interview with Diane Wald

The poetry stuff is easy to look up, so I'll tell you about my "real" life. I grew up in northern New Jersey, not far from New York City. After my mother moved last year, the small white house where my brother and I grew up was sold, razed, and replaced by a monster mansion---not exactly progress... more

November, 2005 Interview with Susan Tepper

I came to writing through the back doors of acting and music. In my early teens I began devouring the plays of Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams, just blown away by what those guys had to say. I was growing up on Long Island, sandwiched between New York City and a farm... more

December, 2005 Interview with Luisa Igloria

I grew up in Baguio, a city in the northern part of the Philippines, designed in the early 1900s by the Chicago architect Daniel Burnham as a hill station for the American colonial government. It's beautiful, temperate all year round; the city is part of the Cordillera region - fog in the early mornings and late afternoons... more

January, 2006 Interview with Barry Casselman

I write my first drafts of poems in many rooms and spaces. These first drafts are often written in restaurants, or on trains. Sometimes they are written during concerts. Or outdoors. Music is very nurturing to me when I write. I usually write first drafts in longhand on pads of paper. In recent years, I do final drafts on my computer located in an office in my apartment. This office is filled with books and files, but has a large window which face the street. I can look out this window when I write... more

February, 2006 Interview with Flavia Cosma

As time passes by, my bio seems more and more like a tale I've invented, in collaboration with natural elements such as weather, calamities, missed earthquakes, etc. and man made disasters such as a totalitarian society, destructions, suppression of Human Rights, disregard for the laws. And amid those, the rare moments of pure joy such as the birth of my son, the illusions of love, freedom as I imagined it... more

March, 2006 Interview with Natalia Zaretsky

Growing up in a loving family, I was married very young. I taught Physics in college in Moscow. My genius scientist husband and I were too involved in our careers and gave little time to our daughter. I managed to teach our pretty girl many things - poems, logic, to make decisions, carry a latchkey, be able to defend herself from anti-Semitic bullies... more

Interview with Judy Ray

Biographical information always seems to begin with where one came from, or the first book, or the first significant job. But I will go backwards, pointing out just a few of the stepping stones along the way. Since 1997, I have lived in Tucson, Arizona, with my poet husband, David Ray. We moved here after twenty-something years in Kansas City, Missouri. There I helped set up and direct the first three years of The Writers Place, a wonderful community center for the literary arts. I also assisted David in his long-term editorship of New Letters magazine and with production of the New Letters on the Air radio program... more

April, 2006 Interview with William James Austin

I got my start in the music business when I was sixteen years old. Fancied myself a songwriter. One day I took my material to the old Ed Sullivan building in Manhattan. Back in the day, the place was clogged with music publishing companies. One of my stops was Baldwin Enterprises. They weren't very impressed with my songs, but they were thrilled by my ability to actually read and write sheet music... more

Interview with Jennifer Barber

I grew up in the Boston area. Poetry has always been important to me, from Mother Goose on. After college-I went to Colby, in Maine-and studies in medieval literature in England, I went to Columbia for an M.F.A. New York City is also where I had my first several jobs in publishing, as a production assistant and later production editor for college textbooks and professional books... more

Interview with CL Bledsoe

I grew up on a catfish farm in eastern Arkansas in the Mississippi Delta, one of the poorest places in the country. During the summer, my family raised rice and soybeans as well as cattle and other things. During the winter, my father and uncles and my brother sold catfish and buffalo fish... more

Interview with Gian Lombardo

Gian Lombardo is Publisher-in-Residence in the Writing, Literature & Publishing Department at Emerson College, where he teaches courses on book and magazine publishing. He is also Coordinator of Emerson College's graduate Certificate in Publishing program. Gian has had over 25 years of experience in a wide range of publishing environments -- trade, association, literary and consumer magazines as well as professional, literary and textbook publishing... more

Interview with Rebecca Seiferle

Oh, bios, ergh: usually with writers there's the bio of publication, but there could be the geographical bio, the bio of the interior realities of writing poetry or fishing or carving wood, etc, or the bio of one's sexuality, or the bio of relationships, or the bio of the books one has read, or the bio of all one has loved, or the bio of perceptions, or the bio of life-changing dreams, any of which might be more interesting... more

Interview with Judith Skillman

Judith Skillman is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Eric Mathieu King Fund from the Academy of American Poets for her book "Storm," Blue Begonia Press, 1998. Grants include a Writer's Fellowship from the Washington State Arts Commission, a publication prize and public arts grant from the King County Arts Commission... more

Interview with Ian Randall Wilson

Here's the official bio as Hollyridge Press might send it out:
Since concentrating his attention on writing literature two decades ago, Ian Randall Wilson has published nearly two dozen stories, a novella, and over a hundred poems in such prestigious literary journals as the North American Review, The Gettysburg Review and Poetry East... more

May, 2006 Interview with Doug Holder

I was born July 5 1955 in Manhattan. I graduated the State College at Buffalo in 1977 with a B.A. in History. Later, in 1997, I got an M.A. in American Literature and Language from Harvard University. I have worked at McLean Hospital since 1982, and for many of those years I have lead poetry workshops for inpatient psychiatric patients. I have been an editorial assistant for the Boston Review, assistant to the poetry editor at Spare Change News, and former president of Stone Soup Poets... more

Interview with Simon Perchik

As for a bio perhaps this will do: I'm an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Readers interested in learning more are invited to read Magic, Illusion and Other Realities at http://www.geocities.com/simonthepoet which site lists a more complete biography... more

June, 2006 Interview with Rane Arroyo

Rane Arroyo is a poet and playwright who was born in Chicago, a first generation Puerto Rican mainlander and a citizen who is also gay. He has published five poetry collections, one book of experimental fiction, and had eighteen plays produced and eight of them published. He has won the John Ciardi Poetry Prize, Gwendolyn Brooks Prize, Carl Sandburg Poetry Prize, Hart Crane Memorial Prize and many other awards. He started out as a performance artist in the crazy Chicago of the 1980's and is now a professor at the University of Toledo... more

Interview with Ed Miller

Writing assignment? That seems hardly fair, but here goes: my worklife has spanned thirty years in a gray smear of jobs, none of which could be imputed as glamorous. Mostly I've masqueraded as a timid bureaucrat for the feds, and for the last ten years or so have been employed in the field of immigration as an adjudications officer, taking testimony, issuing decisions, administering oaths... more

July, 2006 Interview with Mary Bonina

I grew up in a very circumscribed universe. It was Catholic parish in a working class city and I went to St. Peter's, our neighborhood school, for twelve years. I probably spent more hours of my childhood in Church or school (which was a lot like Church) than doing anything else. Having an active fantasy life was an antidote to that rigidity... more

Interview with Etkin Getir

I don’t like to get lost in personal details, thus it’s going to be a short one. I’ve been writing fiction and ocassionally poetry for years and I am a published author in Turkey. However, as you can see from my literary career, I’m more of an editor than an author. I was the editor of Storyteller Web Magazine for two years between 2000 and 2002... more

August, 2006 Interview with Emmanuel Ngwainmbi

I was Born in Kom, Cameroon, Emmanuel K. Ngwainmbi (pseudo. Sim E. Kombem). I earned my doctorate in Communication from Howard University, Masters and Bachelor degrees in English & Literature from Jackson State and Yaoundé Universities, respectively. I am a full Professor, Director of International Programs and former Chairperson in the Department of Language, Literature & Communication... more

Interview with Norman MacAfee

Every year around my birthday, March 18, I wait for the night air to turn so that humidity is 60, temperature 50, breeze 7 mph, or some such. My cheeks, my face, recall with joy my first taste of the air of the outside world-when I was taken from Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia March 25, 1943, suddenly on the street,... more

September, 2006 Interview with Denis Emorine

That's such a difficult thing - talking about oneself! Let me try to be objective, if possible. I was born near Paris in 1956. As far back as I can remember, I was fascinated by literature, so I studied it at the Sorbonne ( University of Paris). Later, I fall in love and married a French teacher, of course! For me, writing is a way of harnassing time in its incessant flight. My favourites themes are about the passage of time, lost or shattered identity, and mythical places such as Venice, Prague, and St.Petersburg. I am also fascinated by Eastern Europe... more

Interview with John Minczeski

Born and raised in South Bend, Indiana, educated by Polish nuns (elementary school) and brothers of the Holy Cross (high school). Two years at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas. Anti-war activist, draft resistor. I spent my 20th year in Italy after dropping out of school and lived in Spoleto with a family. Later, I lived in Rome. Read Pound, Whitman, and Ulysses, wrote experimentally, befriended an art-dealer named Topazia Alliata who introduced me to some of the avant-garde Italian artists of the day as well as political figures and poets... more

Interview with Michael Graves

I think this is the question I am most reluctant to answer. In the formal setting of an interview, I would rather write or talk about literary interests and experiences, but I will try to provide some information that might be interesting and useful. I come from a troubled background. My father, whose approval I wanted desperately was a non-commissioned officer in the army, a musician, his instrument was the clarinet, and alcoholic. My mother worked in middle age as a para-professional for The New York City Board of Education... more

October, 2006 Interview with Mark Pawlak

Mark Pawlak grew up in Buffalo. He came to Boston to attend college and has never really left. He attended MIT, where he majored in physics and studied poetry with Denise Levertov. He has taught poetry, mathematics and science at the middle school, high school and college levels. For a period he was poet-in-residence for Worcester public schools. He currently teaches mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he is the Director of Academic Support Programs. He has been the recipient of two Massachusetts Artist Fellowship awards. He lives in Cambridge with his wife and his teenage son... more

November, 2006 Interview with Afaa Michael Weaver

In Baltimore I was a child in the fifties, during segregation. My parents had typical dreams for their children, and as the oldest, I was the point person, sent out into life with four siblings behind me. I got the usual messages, succeed and take care of the others, which is to say I think Americans are very similar once you get beyond the idea of race. Saying that, my ancestors are African, European, and Native American, but it comes out as African-American, the current nomenclature. My dad was a steelworker and my mom a part time beautician. I finished high school early at sixteen and spent two years... more

Interview with George Held

I grew up poor in a wealthy community on the other side of the tracks from Scarsdale, NY. My father worked a variety of jobs, including building superintendent, assembly-line worker, and hairdresser, while my mother was a nurse before she had me, and she was the soloist in our church choir. Both of my parents abused alcohol, and so did I as a teenager, but after a miserable bout of alcohol poisoning at 16, I tapered off my drinking until I became a teetotaler about 20 years ago... more

December, 2006 Interview with Ifeanyi Menkiti

Ifeanyi Menkiti grew up in Onitsha, Nigeria. He moved to the United States to attend college. He received a B.A. from Pamona College in California, a M.S. from Columbia University, a M.A. from New York University and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University. Ifeanyi has been published in numerous literary journals including Ploughshares, New Letters, New Directions, The Massachusetts Review and others. He also published numerous articles on philosophical issues in many journals such as Philosophical Forum, The Journal of Value Inquiry, The Harvard Education Review, and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion... more

Interview with Irene Koronas

Irene Koronas has a fine arts degree from Mass College of Art Boston. She is a multi- media artist working with paint, collage, mono-printing, artists books and poetry. She is currently the poetry editor for Wilderness House Literary Review. Koronas is a retired teacher, (private teacher), she taught collage and mono-printing. Her poetry has appeared in Lummox Journal, Free Verse Journal, Posey Magazine and online zines such as Arcanam Café, Spearhead, Index Poetry, Unblog, Haiku Hut and Lynx.... more

January, 2007 Interview with John Bradley

I was born in Brooklyn, and grew up all over the place--Germany (though I was only two and can't recall it), Framingham, Massachusetts; Lincoln and Omaha, Nebraska; Massapequa and Lynbrook, New York; Wayzata, Minnesota. My father was a travelling salesman, so our family was always on the move. One constant in my life was a love of books. Rock music came along, and my interest in song lyrics (Beatles, Doors, Jefferson Airplane, etc.) made me want to try writing poetry... more

Interview with Diana Der-Hovanessian

Diana…Well, when I told my grandfather I was going to be a poet. This was when I was in college and he asked me what I was studying and wanted to become. He said " Oh! We Armenians have too many poets. What we need are journalists to tell our story."... more

Interview with Larissa Shmailo

I was born into an unusual family. My parents were non-Jewish holocaust survivors of the Nazi camp Northausen. They were slave laborers there, building components, unbeknownst to them at the time, of V-2 rockets. They did not speak easily of their experiences, but when they did, they spoke with great power. I recorded some of what they told me in the poem How My Family Survived the Camps... more

February, 2007 Interview with Gary Fincke

Gary Fincke is the Writers Institute Director as well as Professor of English and Creative Writing at Susquehanna University. Winner of the 2003 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and the 2003 Ohio State University/The Journal Poetry Prize for recent collections of stories and poems, he has published nineteen books of poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction, most recently Standing Around the Heart (poems, Arkansas, 2005), Sorry I Worried You (stories, Georgia, 2004), and Amp'd: A Father's Backstage Pass, a nonfiction account of his son's life as a rock guitarist in the band Breaking Benjamin (Michigan State, 2004)... more

Interview with Andrey Gritsman

Andrey Gritsman is a native of Moscow, Russia, immigrated to the US in 1981, lives in the New York City area, works as a physician.

He is a poet, essayist and translator and writes in English and in his native Russian. Mr. Gritsman is the author of five volumes of poetry in Russian: No Man's Land (Petropol, S.-Petersburg), Double (Hermitage, New York), Transfer (Arion, Moscow) and Island in the Woods from the Pushkin Foundation Publishing House in S.-Petersburg. Book of essay on poetry Poet in Intercultural Space was published in Moscow in 2005... more

Interview with Don Share

Don Share is Curator of the Poetry Room at Harvard University, where he teaches and is Poetry Editor of Harvard Review; he also teaches in the M.F.A. program in Creative Writing at Lesley University and is Editor of Literary Imagination: the Review of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, an Oxford Academic Journal. His new book of poems, Squandermania (Salt Publishing), was finalist for the Dorset Prize in Poetry and his previous book, Union (Zoo Press), was finalist for the PEN-New England Winship Award for outstanding book.... more

March, 2007 Interview with Louis McKee

Born in Philadelphia (July 31, 1951) I've been a part of the Philadelphia poetry scene since the late 60s / early 70s. My books include Schuylkill County (Wampeter, 1982), The True Speed of Things (Slash & Burn, 1984) and eleven other collections. More recently, I've published River Architecture: Poems from Here & There 1973-1993 (Cynic, 1999), Loose Change (Marsh River Editions, 2001) and a volume in the Pudding House Greatest Hits series. Near Occasions of Sin was issued in 2006 by Cynic Press... more

Interview with David McNamara

I was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, and am a terribly, ridiculously lucky person, especially when one considers that I don't believe in luck. To wit, my parents love me more than I deserve and I'm living the sitcom paradox-the fat, dumb guy who somehow ends up with the smart, sexy woman... more

Interview with Nahid Rachlin

Nahid Rachlin, born in Iran, came to the United States to attend college and stayed. She has been writing and publishing novels and short stories, in English. Among her publications are four novels, JUMPING OVER FIRE (City Lights), FOREIGNER (W.W. Norton), MARRIED TO A STRANGER (E.P.Dutton), THE HEART'S DESIRE (City Lights), and a collection of short stories, VEILS(City Lights). Her latest publication is a memoir, PERSIAN GIRLS (October 2006, Penguin)... more

April, 2007 Interview with Martha Collins

Born in Nebraska, raised in Iowa, educated at Stanford and the University of Iowa, I began to think seriously about poetry while pursuing a PhD in literature and working in a bookstore. Several years later, while I was teaching at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, I began writing. I founded the creative writing program at UMass, and since 1997 have taught half-time at Oberlin College, where I'm Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing... more

Interview with Steve Glines

I grew up in an environment where reading (a lot) and writing (a lot) was considered normal. We had floor to ceiling books in the house I grew up in. My mother was a part time journalist, a stringer, who wrote for the New York Times, the Ridgefield Press and on occasion the Readers Digest. My Grandfather wrote book after book after book had an oft-repeated motto "If all else fails you can always write a book."... more

May, 2007 Interview with John Amen

I'm committed to green, red, black, and yellow. I like summer, but winter's growing on me. I'm probably at my best in crowds, though I resist the idea. Food still seems like the best thing since the wheel. I used to collect clocks and demerits, but I'm giving away my souvenirs now. Dusk is beginning to feel like a colleague... more

Interview with F. D. Reeve

During childhood, the best part of every year was summer: we went to an old, unheated wooden house my great-great-aunt had built on the shore of a small Pocono lake. Pines, firs, tamaracks, bass, trout, and blueberries; real iceboxes and kerosene lamps; backpacking, swimming, canoeing, even dinghy sailing-I see it and smell it clearly as if we had just arrived and opened the kitchen door and stepped onto the worn linoleum... more

June, 2007 Interview with Jamie Cat Callan

Jamie Cat Callan grew up in Stamford, Connecticut and graduated from Bard College in 1975 with a degree in literature. She went on to get an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College and an MFA in Screenwriting from U.C.L.A.'s School of Film and Television. Over the past twenty years, Jamie has taught writing, worked in the international division of cosmetic company Estee Lauder, and served as a script developer for the actress Meg Ryan's production company at Paramount Pictures... more

Interview with Kazue Daikoku by Denis Emorine

I am a publisher, an editor and a translator. Sometimes I work on web design as an editor and if it's needed I arrange and mix the sound for audio works and photo movies. I am also in charge of the books distribution, sales promotion, shipping, accounting, stock control ……, I do anything I can when needed... more

Interview with William R. Mayo

I began writing poetry at a difficult time of my life perhaps as a way to work through it, and the romance of law if there is such a thing had long since left me. At the time Northwest Arkansas did not have an independent publication of poetry and poetry reviews apart from the University there, and I thought it was something both the community and I narcissistically needed. A long, painful and nightmarish relationship had ended, and in a sense Poesia saved me. As you know, publishing poetry is generally not a paying proposition, and... more

Interview with Jean Monahan

I grew up in a small town in CT and graduated from Bates College in Maine. After a summer working on a farm in Maine I migrated toward Boston, where I had always wanted to live. I worked and took night classes at Harvard for a few years before enrolling in the Creative Writing Program at Columbia University... more

Interview with Susanne Morning

New Zealand, clean green and the pearl of the Pacific is my home. I was raised in the dense tropical bush where parrots, wood pigeons and peacocks entertained me by day, possums and owls sang to me at night. Nature has always been my solace, my church. ... more

July, 2007 Interview with Ramesh Avadhani by Susan Tepper

Bombay and its more than ten million people is a stimulating milieu for anyone young and ambitious. I was 21, married and a father to boot when I started working there. The city kept me on my toes 24/7. The crowded streets and jam-packed trains, the vibrant marketplaces and buzzing offices, even the pavement vendors and belligerent hawkers-they seemed to throw a silent question at me all the time-When are you going to make it? But by the time I crossed 35 and achieved some success in my career, everything started to get jaded... more

Interview with Eric Darton by Susan Tepper

Some of my earliest memories are aural impressions of naptimes. The old tenement I lived in was bookended by industrial buildings and I recall the rhythms of various machines as a kind of dreamscape. Also, across the back alley stood another tenement where women used to hang out washing on clotheslines, ... more

Interview with David Ray by Susan Tepper

DAVID RAY's latest book is Music of Time: Selected and New Poems. Some of his previous volumes are: The Death of Sardanapalus and Other Poems of the Iraq Wars; One Thousand Years: Poems About the Holocaust; Demons In The Diner; Kangaroo Paws, Wool Highways, and Sam's Book. He is also author of The Endless Search: A Memoir which was praised by Robert Coles as "a story of childhood vulnerability become, in the hands of a gifted, knowing poet and essayist, the stirring reason for a lyrically expressive memoir."... more

August, 2007 Interview with John M. Bennett

A short bio is available at http://www.library.ohiou.edu/archives/mss/mss116.pdf
A more complete autobiography was published in CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS AUTOBIOGRAPHY SERIES, v. 25, Detriot: Gale, 1996. This may be found in many libraries. ... more

Interview with Peter Krok

I was born in West Berlin in 1947. I was the child of a German war bride and an American GI. My dad was stationed in Berlin where he met my mother. His name is Richard Krok and my mother's maiden name is Ingeborg Pfingst. We came to the United States during the Berlin airlift in 1948. In fact there is a picture of my father and mother and little me on the front page of the Philadelphia Bulletin ... more

Interview with Lina Ramona Vitkauskas by Denis Emorine

It was Jodorowsky who said,
"You cease to exist when you say, 'this is what I am.' "
However, who I am is not the same although actions define the soul.
I ask life questions in poetic forms, consider my Buddha nature and try to maintain mindfulness in everything I do ... more

September, 2007 Interview with Richard Wollman

I started out working with severely disturbed three and four year olds.. I was a clam shucker for a while, but it was ruining my hands. I spent time working on an excavation of an ancient city in Israel. I was both an editor and a production coordinator in the art department of medical magazine. Then I became a student again and put in 6 years of graduate work to get a doctorate at Columbia University, where my specialty was 17th-Century literature. In one way or another I loved these jobs ... more

October, 2007 Interview with Ann Carhart

Ann Carhart considers herself to be an old Cambridge poet but readily admits to being born in Brooklyn and falling in love with poetry while living in the Village and attending NYU. She has an M.A. in Writing and one in Counseling/Psychology from Cambridge's Lesley College and an Ed.D. in Human Development from University of Massachusetts (earned in 1998 at age 65). She has read her poems at Harvard University, The Blacksmith House, The Episcopal Divinty School, and the Out of the Blue Gallery ... more

Interview with Dick Lourie

My family background is Depression era-middle class-left wing-socialist-communist- Brooklyn-Jewish, not necessarily in that order. The culture and the music were indissolubly linked. So we had Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger and Leadbelly and Almanac Singers and Josh White and Sonny Terry/Brownie McGee records, old 78s that are still on the shelves in my study. My aunt and uncle literally sat at Leadbelly's feet as teenagers in summer camp in the 1930s. This was the music of my youth-I was born in 1937. Then as a college student and trumpet player in the late fifties I got interested for some time in jazz ... more

November, 2007 Interview with Peter Money

Currently I operate Harbor Mountain Press ( www.harbormountainpress.com and teach a class or two at the relatively new Center For Cartoon Studies ( www.cartoonstudies.org ), and at a small independent community college called Lebanon College. But to go back: Born, November 6th 1963, Queen of the Valley hospital, Napa California. Third son of two teachers-a Vermonter and a Californian ... more

Interview with Marc Widershien

That's an interesting question since I have written in many rooms and places since I began- from my mother and fathers' house in Dorchester to Sycamore Street in Roslindale where I live with my wife, D'Anna and three cats. Mark Twain considered cats to be superior to humans-which might explain why he had 19 of them in his home at Hartford, Connecticut. The center of the room is occupied by the computer where I do most of my work now ... more

Interview with Adam Zagajewski by Izabela J.Bozek, Translation by Katarzyna Newcomer

Adam Zagajewski covers his biography in his essays and interviews, so I will say only a few essential facts and a few his statements relating to his writing. He was born in Lvov (in Ukrainian "Lviv") in 1945. That part, also called Eastern Galicia, used to belong to the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, later it was occupied by the Russian Empire. After World War II, when Zagajewski was only 4 months old, the borders of Poland were re-arranged and Easter Galicia stayed in the Soviet Union; the family of Zagajewskis, together with their aunts and grandfathers, moved to Gliwice in Upper Silesia ... more

December, 2007 Interview with Philip E. Burnham Jr.

Born in Rochester, New York, I was soon transported to New England where I grew up and went to Groton School and Harvard College with a year at the University of Edinburgh in between. In 1962, I was accepted into the State Department and served as American Vice Consul in Marseille, France, for two years. I returned to teach history at both public and private schools and colleges in the Boston area from 1965 to 1999, with a three year break to get a Ph.D. in Medieval History from Tufts University in 1972... more

February, 2008 Interview with Natasa Durovicova

My family's shift from Czechoslovakia to Sweden was not intended to be an exile pathway. Rather, my parents decided to ask for politically asylum only after a couple of years' persistent effort to return home from Sweden (where my father was visiting faculty in Uppsala ) with something like a prospect for a semi-normal life. They finally resigned themselves to exile only in the face of substantial jail sentences awaiting both the extreme likelihood of their children being barred from entering college and of draft of my brother's age group as the USSR seemed headed for a military conflict with China on the Ussuri river... more

Interview with Glenn Sheldon

I'm still not sure I do write seriously. Well, I write critical articles, and I wrote a critical monograph, South of Our Selves: Mexico in the Poems of Williams, Kerouac, Corso, Ginsberg, Levertov and Hayden, and those certainly are serious. I'm not saying that creative work is not serious, but it's what I enjoy doing the most. Scholarship is like putting up a fence in August in 99-degree heat. Creative writing is like sipping a mojito in the shade, staring out at a weed-free garden. Also, more and more of my research-based work, at least in terms of popular culture, manifests itself in creative nonfiction, so that's a nice compromise... more

Interview with Barbara Thomas

The room I write in is spiritual. It has pale sage walls, prints of Picasso, Greek memorabilia on shelves, a hanging fern, orange cat photos in wood frames, a stuffed dog with red ears my brother won at the fair and photos of my family. It has many windows, good light and musical vibrations that change with the seasons... more

March, 2008 Interview with Julia Carlson

I was born in Winchester, Massachusetts. I have two brothers and a sister, a daughter and two grandchildren, and numerous nieces and nephews. I have a large extended international family. I did Philosophy at Boston University as an undergrad and then Linguistics at a University in France. Later on I got my Masters in Clinical Social Work from Boston University. My day job is Senior Clinician at a methadone treatment program in Boston. Very interesting work. I plan on retiring to a villa on the Sicilian coast. Somehow... more

Interview with Marc Jampole

Marc Jampole is the author of Music from Words, published in 2007 by Bellday Books, Inc. His poetry has been published in Mississippi Review, Oxford Review, Janus Head, Main Street Rag, Ellipsis, Wilderness House Review and other journals. Over the years, four of Marc’s poems have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. More than 450 articles he has written on various subjects have been published in magazines and newspapers... more

April, 2008 Interview with Luke Salisbury

I was raised on Long Island, went to prep school in Princeton, college in Florida, and have lived my adult life in New York City and Boston. The spiritual territory was upper middle class pretensions, stories of lost family glory (My mother is southern), the military traditions of the Salisburys (The men all seemed to have been wounded in wars), never enough money, and a general sense not belonging anywhere, so books, sports, imagination, friends became very important. We have to invent home. It took a while. ... more

Interview with Elaine Terranova

Elaine Terranova was named a Pew Fellow in the Arts in poetry for 2006. Her most recent book is NOT TO: New and Selected Poems. She won the Walt Whitman Award for her first book, The Cult of the Right Hand. Her other poetry collections are The Dog's Heart and Damages, and a chapbook, Toward Morning/Swimmers. Her translation of Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. In 2003 it was produced at the University of Kansas where it was praised for "its powerful simplicity and directness." ... more

May, 2008 Interview with Lisa Beatman

I grew up in New London, CT, learned to swim in the Thames River, and now live surrounded by a leafy Roslindale cemetery, with a small orange cat named Gino and a large electrician named Rick. I have worked in adult literacy my whole career, in Boston and around Latin America (except for a happy stint as a hippy tree planter in the Pacific Northwest). I'm currently running a GED program at Harriet Tubman House in the South End, incessantly nudging students to write (read, multiply, etc.) ... more

June, 2008 Interview with Eric Greinke

I was born in 1948, of second generation Americans, of German & Swedish origin. I read at an early age, (5th grade level in the 1st grade) & wrote my first poems at the age of ten. In high school, I was the literary editor of the school newspaper/literary magazine & the winner of the annual school literary contest four years in a row for my poetry... more

July, 2008 Interview with Kevin Gallagher

Born in Boston the year MLK and RFK were killed, the year of the Tet Offensive, of Prague Spring, the Catonsville nine, Mexico City student massacre, the Apollo missions and the White Album.
My best friend's grandma was Red Auerbach's secretary from 1961 til 2003 so I spent my childhood and then some going to free Celtics games mid-court. I once wrote a poem that had a line that read ... more

Interview with Harris Gardner

Credits: The Jewish Advocate; The Harvard Review; Midstream; Cool Plums; Rosebud; Fulcrum; The Aurorean; Providence Journal; Spare Change News; Endicott Review; Ibbetson Street Journal; City of Poets Anthology; Main Street Rag; Facets; Poesy; Vallum (Canada); Pemmican; The New Renaissance (forthcoming); WHL Review; I Refused to Die-A Holocaust Study by Susie Davidson; and about fifty other publication credits... more

August, 2008 No Interviews this month

September, 2008 Interview with Dzvinia Orlowsky by Alexander Motyl

Pushcart Prize recipient Dzvinia Orlowsky is the author of four poetry collections including her most recent, Convertible Night, Flurry of Stones. Her first collection, A Handful of Bees, was recently reprinted as a Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporary. Dzvinia's poetry and translations have appeared in numerous anthologies, including A Map of Hope: An International Literary Anthology; From Three Worlds: New Writing from Ukraine; and A Hundred Years of Youth: A Bilingual Anthology of 20th Century Ukrainian Poetry. Her translation from the Ukrainian of Alexander Dovzhenko's novella, The Enchanted Desna, was published by House between Water Press in 2006... more