The William Joiner Center for the Study of War and
Social Consequences
Ph. 617.287.5850
Fax 617.287.5755
Faculty Bios
| Anne
Loyer |
|||
Brian Turner
earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and lived abroad in South
Korea for a year before serving for seven years in the US Army. He was
an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq beginning November 2003,
with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Prior
to that, he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999-2000 with the
10th Mountain Division. His first collection of poetry (Here, Bullet)
was published by Alice James Books in 2005 and released in the UK by
Bloodaxe Books in 2007.
His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Georgia Review,
Virginia Quarterly Review, Crab Orchard Review, Poetry Daily, and other
journals (as well as in the Academy Award nominated documentary film
Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience). Turner has
appeared on National Public Radio, the BBC, The Newshour with Jim
Lehrer, and Weekend America, among others. He has received a 2007 NEA
Literature Fellowship in Poetry and a 2006 Literary Fellowship from the
Lannan Foundation. He currently lives in California.
Taylor Stoehr teaches English at UMass Boston. As literary executor for the estate of Paul Goodman, he has edited many volumes of his writings, as well as various books of literary and cultural history. His poems and translations have appeared in numerous magazines, and he has published two books of translations – Ask the Wolf, poems of François Villon, and I Hear My Gate Slam, Chinese poets from the T’ang Dynasty.
In 1994 Stoehr helped establish the Changing Lives Through Literature program for probationers of the Dorchester District Court in Boston, and he was given the President’s Award for Public Service in 2008 for his ongoing work in that endeavor.
Sam Hamill is the author of more
than forty books, including fifteen volumes of original poetry, four
collections of literary essays, and some of the most distinguished
translations of ancient Chinese and Japanese classics of the last
half-century. He co-founded, and for thirty-two years was editor at,
Copper Canyon Press. He taught in prisons for fourteen years and has
worked extensively with battered women and children. An outspoken
political pacifist, in 2003, he founded Poets Against War, compiling
the largest single-theme poetry anthology in history. He has been
awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the
Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Mellon Fund,
and the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission; other honors include the
Stanley Lindberg Lifetime Achievement Award for Editing, the Washington
Poetsí Association Lifetime Achievement in Poetry Award, two
Washington Governorís Arts Awards, a Western States Book Award,
a PEN-Oakland Anti-censorship Award, a PEN Center/USA Freedom to
Write/1st Amendment Award, and the CondecoraciÛn de la
Universidad de Carabobo in Valencia, Venezuela.
Demetria Martínez is an
author, activist, lecturer and columnist. Her collected essays,
Confessions of a Berlitz-Tape Chicana
(Univ. of Oklahoma Press) is now
out. Her books include the widely translated novel, Mother Tongue
(Ballantine), winner of a Western States Book Award for Fiction,
and
two books of poetry, Breathing
Between the Lines and The
Devil’s
Workshop (Univ. of Arizona Press). (Martínez reads a
sampling of
poems from Breathing Between the Lines on her new CD, with music by
Devon Hall.) She writes a column for the National Catholic Reporter, an
independent progressive newsweekly.
Mother Tongue is based in part upon Martínez's 1988 trial for conspiracy against the U.S. government in connection with transporting Salvadoran refugees into the country, a charge that with others carried a 25 year prison sentence. A religion reporter at the time covering the faith-based Sanctuary Movement, she was found not guilty on First Amendment grounds.
Born in Albuquerque, NM in 1960, where she now resides, Martínez earned her BA from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. In New Mexico, she is active with Enlace Comunitario, an immigrants’ rights group that serves Spanish-speaking victims of domestic violence.
Bruce Weigl was born in Lorain,
Ohio. He is a 1973 graduate of Oberlin College and is currently a
Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities at Lorain County
Community College. He is the author of 13 books of poetry and a
book-length memoir, and is also the editor of several anthologies and a
translator of poetry from Vietnamese and Romanian. Weigl's poems,
translations, essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in
publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Nation,
and Harpers. His poems have been widely anthologized in The Best
American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Paul Fussell's
Anthology of Modern War Literature. Weigl's poetry has been translated
into Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanes, Romanian, Slovenian, Bulgarian,
Servian, French, and Spanish. He has won numerous awards, including the
Northern Ohio Live Award for Literature and a National Endowment for
the Arts Poetry Grant.
Martha Collins is the author of
Blue Front, a book-length poem
based on a lynching her father witnessed
when he was five years old. Blue
Front won an Anisfield-Wolf Book
Award, and was chosen as one of "25 Books to Remember from 2006" by the
New York Public Library.
Collins' chapbook, Sheer (Barnwood, 2008), is her most recent publication. She has also published four collections of poems, two books of co-translations from the Vietnamese, and an earlier chapbook of poems.
Her other awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation, as well as three Pushcart Prizes, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, and a Lannan residency grant.
A selection of poems from Blue Front won the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize in 2005; other selections from the book appeared in Kenyon Review and Ploughshares.
Collins founded the Creative Writing Program at UMass-Boston, and for ten years was Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. She is currently editor-at-large for FIELD magazine and one of the editors of the Oberlin College Press.
Lloyd
Schwartz is Frederick S. Troy Professor of English at the University of
Massachusetts Boston, Classical Music Editor of The Boston Phoenix, and
a regular commentator for NPR's Fresh Air. His most recent book of
poems is Cairo Traffic (University of Chicago Press) and he is
co-editor of the new Library of America volume Elizabeth Bishop: Poems,
Prose, and Letters. His poems, articles, and reviews have appeared in
The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, The New Republic, The Paris
Review, The Pushcart Prize, and The Best American Poetry. In 1994, he
was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.
Lady
Borton
Lady Borton has received two honorary degrees for her forty years of
work with all sides both during and after the American War in Viet Nam.
She is the author of Sensing the
Enemy: An American Among the Boat People of Viet Nam (1984); After Sorrow: An American Among the
Vietnamese (1995, 1996); and Ho
Chi Minh: A Journey (2007, 2008).
Lady has translated three book-length Vietnamese memoirs into English as well as a number of folk tales for children. All these books have been published in Ha Noi. She and Huu Ngoc are co-editors of two dozen bi-lingual booklets on Vietnamese culture. They are finishing up two books on Ha Noi for the city’s 1,000th anniversary as a capital in 2010.
Lady was the foreign editor of The Defiant Muse: Vietnamese Feminist Poems From Antiquity to the Present (2007, 2008), the first bi-lingual anthology of poetry from ancient to modern times to come from Viet Nam itself. She was co-translator of many of the poems and wrote the introduction. Lady has also been a regular commentator for National Public Radio’s Sunday Morning Edition, a weekly op. ed. newspaper columnist, and is the author of two children’s picture books. She lives in Ha Noi.
Called “the Latino poet of his
generation” and “the Pablo Neruda of North American authors,”
Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He has
published sixteen books in all as a poet, editor, essayist and
translator, including two collections of poems last year: Crucifixion
in the Plaza de Armas (Smokestack, 2008), released in England,
and La
Tumba de Buenaventura Roig (Terranova, 2008), a bilingual
edition
published in Puerto Rico. The
Republic of Poetry, a collection of poems
published by Norton in 2006, received the Paterson Award for Sustained
Literary Achievement and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Another
collection, Imagine the Angels of
Bread (Norton, 1996), won an American
Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle
Award. Other books of poetry include Alabanza:
New and Selected
Poems (Norton, 2003), A
Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen
(Norton, 2000), City of Coughing and
Dead Radiators (Norton, 1993), and
Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s
Hands (Curbstone, 1990). He has
received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Robert Creeley
Award, the Antonia Pantoja Award, the Charity Randall Citation, the
Paterson Poetry Prize, the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, the
National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, the Premio
Fronterizo, two NEA Fellowships, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and a
Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. His poems have appeared in the The
New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Harper’s, The Nation and
The Best American Poetry. He has also published a collection of
essays, Zapata’s Disciple (South
End, 1998); edited two anthologies,
Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the
Political Imagination from Curbstone
Press (Curbstone, 1994) and El
Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina
Poetry (University of Massachusetts, 1997); and released an
audiobook
of poetry called Now the Dead will
Dance the Mambo (Leapfrog, 2004).
His work has been translated into ten languages. A former tenant
lawyer, Espada is now a professor in the Department of English at the
University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he teaches creative writing
and the work of Pablo Neruda.
Fred
Marchant (1946-) is the author of three books of poetry, including Full
Moon Boat, (Graywolf Press). He is also the co-translator (with
Nguyen
Ba Chung) of From a Corner of My Yard,
poetry by the Vietnamese poet
Tran Dang Khoa. He is Professor of English and the Director of the
Creative Writing Program, and Co-director of The Poetry Center at
Suffolk University in Boston. He is also a longtime teaching affiliate
of The William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social
Consequences at UMass-Boston. In 1970 Marchant became one of the first
officers ever to be honorably discharged as a conscientious objector
from the United States Marine Corps. Recently he has edited Another
World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, 1937-1947.
This
collection of poems. to be published by Graywolf Press in April 2008,
focuses on Stafford's time as a conscientious objector in Civilian
Public Service camps during World War II. Fred Marchant's new
collection of his own poetry, The
Looking House, is forthcoming in
Junde 2009.
Dragan
Dragojlović was born in Pilica, near Bajina Bašta, Serbia. Having
comleted secondary education, he graduated and obtained his master’s
degree in Economy at Belgrade University. He is now a Director of the
Ivo Andrić Foundation in Belgrade.
The following books of Dragojlović’s
poetry have been published: The
House on the Selestial Clock
(1974); Failed Encounters (1976);
War’s Third Person (1978);
Abodes (1983); The Tree of
the Invisible Year (1986); The
Other Side of
Heaven (1986); A Calendar of
Dreams (1987, bibliophile edition); Sun
Above Sumarice (1987); Celestial
Serbia (1990); The Book of
Love (1992,
reprinted 1995); Death’s Homeland (1994);
Invoking God (1995-97, four
edition); Beyond the Seventh Hill (1997);
Selected Poems (1997); An
Astral Gates (1998); The Oral
History of Oblivion (2001); The
Voices of
the Distance (2005); Selected
Poems (2006); The Book of
Love and other
poems of Love, 2008 and The
Traces of our Life, 2008.
Doug
Anderson is a poet, fiction writer, and memoirist. His memoir about
Vietnam and the nineteen sixties will be published by W.W. Norton in
the spring of 2009, and his new book of poems, Cry Wolf is forthcoming
from Azul Editions. He has published two previous prize winning books,
The Moon Reflected Fire, and Blues for Unemployed Secret Police. He is
at work on a novel about human trafficking.
Afaa
Michael Weaver
Afaa
Michael Weaver (Michael S. Weaver), poet, playwright, short fiction
writer, and translator, is the author of ten collections of poetry.
Born in Baltimore, he grew up in neighborhoods depicted in The Wire,
the widely acclaimed HBO series. Weaver has received NEA, Pew, and
Pennsylvania Arts Council fellowships. In 2002, he taught at National
Taiwan University and Taipei National University of the Arts as a
Fulbright scholar. In playwriting, he has received the PDI Award from
ETA Theater in Chicago. From 1996 until 2000, he served as Editor of
Obsidian III, the journal of black creative writing based at North
Carolina State University. In April 2005, he received a gold friendship
medal from the Chinese Writers Association in Beijing. Weaver teaches
at Simmons College where he is also director of the Zora Neale Hurston
Literary Center and chairman of the Simmons International Chinese
Poetry Conference. His collections of poetry include Talisman (Tia
Chucha/Northwestern U, 2000) and The Ten Lights of God. (Bucknell U
Press, 2000). His tenth collection, The Plum Flower Dance, poems 1985
to 2005 was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in
November, 2008, coinciding with his appearance on the cover of Poets
& Writers magazine.
Nahid Rachlin
Nahid
Rachlin, born in Iran, came to the United States to attend college and
stayed. Among her publications are a memoir, PERSIAN GIRLS (Penguin),
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
work has been published in Portuguese, Dutch, Farsi, and Arabic. Her
individual short stories have appeared in more than fifty magazines,
including The Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Redbook,
Shenandoah, and New Letters, as well as being widely anthologized.
Nahid Rachlin has received the Bennet Cerf Award, PEN Syndicated
Fiction Project Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant.
Currently she teaches at the New School University and the Unterberg
Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y. She is an associate fellow at Yale.
Anne Loyer
Anne
Loyer is an emerging film director, whose first short won the “Indie
Soul” Special Recognition award at the Boston International Film
Festival. She has been involved in visual storytelling throughout her
career: from her two-dimensional fine art work, to narrative
animations, to public art projects and performances that included her
audio and video collages based on participants’ stories. She recently
served as art director for the Academic Media Studio at Wesleyan
University, where she produced award winning video and interactive web
sites for educational use in the classroom and museum setting. Last
year, she was a visiting artist at Montserrat College of Art, where she
started the Odysseus Project, an ongoing dialogue between veterans,
artists and artist-veterans. Her work has been supported by grants from
the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Jane’s Trust, and a fellowship at
the National Academy of Design.
Michael Romanyshyn
Michael Romanyshyn was a member of the Bread and Puppet Theater company for 17 years http://www.breadandpuppet.org. He is currently on leave as director of the Temple Stream Theater in Temple, Maine and is living with his family in Somerville. He is the music director of the Allstar Refjudzi Band, a group of Czech and refugee musicians from different parts of the world working at the Archa Theater in Prague http://www.archatheatre.cz/en/menu/programme/26052009day.html http://www.indiesmg.cz/alba/333/spas/
Ban Al-Mahfodh
Ban
Al-Mahfodh is the Research Coordinator at the William Joiner Center for
the Study of War and Social Consequences. Ms. Al-Madfodh received her
B.A. from the University of Basra in 1997, majoring in English Language
and Literature with a minor in translation in Arabic and French. She
also received her M.A. in Applied Linguistics from the University of
Basra, Iraq, in 2000. Most recently, she received an additional M.A.
from Brandeis where she studied at the Heller School for Social Policy
and Management. Her work at the Heller School focused on issues such as
Advanced Study in Sustainable International Development, Conflict
Theory, Coexistence Strategies, Art and Peacebuilding, and Development
and Conflict. Her master’s thesis, “YIELA: A Youth Business
Entrepreneurship Model in Iraqi City Slums as a Sustainable Instrument
of Peace within the Conflict Situation”, drew on her work in Iraq. Ms.
Al-Madfodh’s work experience before coming to the Center includes an
internship in Youth and Philanthropy for the Near East Foundation in
New York and work as project manager for Save the Children in Basra
from 2003-2005.