Editors & Contributors for Issue 2

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Flavia Rocha

Flavia Rocha

Flávia Rocha is a Brazilian poet, translator and journalist, with an M.F.A, in Writing from Columbia University. Author of the bilingual poetry book A Casa Azul ao Meio-dia/ The Blue House Around Noon (Travessa dos Editores, Brazil, 2005). She has been an editor for Rattapallax since 2003, and has edited anthologies of Brazilian contemporary poetry for Rattapallax (U.S.), Poetry Wales (U.K.) and Papertiger (Australia). Her poems and translations have appeared in various magazines in Brazil, in the U.S. and other countries. She has been writing for the Brazilian press for 15 years, including magazines Casa Vogue, Bravo! and Wish Report. In the area of film, she founded, with her husband, Steven Richter, the Academia Internacional de Cinema (www.aicinema.com.br), a film school located in Sao Paulo, for which she developed a Creative Writing Program and directed the Communications Department. She currently lives in Portland, OR.

EDITORS

Craig Epplin

Craig Epplin is a professor and translator who lives in Portland, Oregon. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009 and currently teaches classes on Latin American literature and culture at Reed College. He is writing a book manuscript titled The Aesthetics of Late Book Culture in Latin America. He began working at Rattapallax in 2010.

Catherine Fletcher

Catherine Fletcher is a poet, an editor, and the Director of Poetry Programs at City Lore.  She has written and edited content for the website World Poetry Map, an online anthology of the poetic traditions of non-majority languages, and has produced poetry events around New York City and abroad. Fletcher has commissioned new translations of works previously untranslated into English by such poets as Maxamed Ibraahim Warsame “Hadraawi” and Cabdulqaadir Xasan Sheikh Mumin (Somali), Weldedingel (Tigrinya), Galaktion Tabidze (Georgian), and Bernardo Colipan Filgueira (Mapuche).

Idra Novey

Idra Novey’s debut collection The Next Country received the Kinereth Gensler Award from Alice James and was released in 2008. She’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America, and the PEN Translation Fund. Her recent translations include the selected poems of Brazilian writer Manoel de Barros and a novel by Emilio Lascano Tegui, On Elegance While Sleeping. She currently directs the Center for Literary Translation at Columbia University and teaches at Columbia and NYU.

Edwin Torres

Edwin Torres

Edwin Torres has collaborated with a wide range of artists, creating performances that intermingle poetry with improvisation, sound-elements and visual theater. His books include, I Hear Things People Haven’t Really Said, Fractured Humorous (Subpress), The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language (Atelos Books), In The Function Of External Circumstances (Nightboat Books) and most recently Yes Thing No Thing from Roof Books. He’s received poetry fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Foundation For Contemporary Performance Art, The Poets Fund and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. He has taught many workshops and has been widely published, his CD Holy Kid (Kill Rock Stars Records) was part of The Whitney Museum’s exhibition, The American Century Pt. II. His current invention, NORICUA, is a noh-boricua inspired non-movement which has had its non-ideologies performed in the Bronx, Berlin and Loisaida. He is co-editor of the poetry journal/DVD Rattapallax and currently lives in upstate New York.

Ram Devineni

Ram Devineni is the editor and publisher of Rattapallax and a film-maker who has had films shown at the Cairo International Film Festival, San Jose Film Festival, Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema, etc. He helped to create the Academia Internacional de Cinema in Sao Paulo, Brazil and is working on several feature films and documentaries.

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

Alan Cheuse

Alan Cheuse

Alan Cheuse is the author and/or editor of more than fifteen books. His latest novel is Song of Slaves in the Desert. He has been Rattapallax’s Fiction Editor for nearly a decade.

Benjamin Miller

Benjamin Miller holds an MFA from Columbia University, where he has taught academic and creative writing to high school and college students, and is currently a PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center, focusing on composition theory, interactive technology, and pedagogy. Ben’s poems have appeared in Pleiades, RHINO, The Greensboro Review, and elsewhere.

Lytton Smith

Lytton Smith is the author of The All-Purpose Magical Tent (Nightboat, 2009), selected for the Nightboat Prize by Terrance Hayes, and the chapbook Monster Theory (PSA, 2008), selected for a New York Chapbook Fellowship by Kevin Young. His translation of Bragi Ólafsson’s novel, The Ambassador, is forthcoming from Open Letter Fall 2010. For the past several years, he has worked with a number of poets and NYC-based poetry presses to develop publicity opportunities for contemporary poets and poetry.

CONTRIBUTORS

Amir Shahlan Amiruddin

Amir Shahlan Amiruddin was born in Malaysia and grew up in Poland, Iran, and Hong Kong. His recent work makes use of video and animation to create contemporary “wayang kulit” (shadow puppet) images. Like the wayang kulit bird he designed for Nicole Lee’s short story, these images draw their motifs from Malaysian flora and fauna, textiles, and architecture, and reflect the artist’s admiration for all God’s creations. He enjoys working with other artists in different media, and has produced illustrations for four children’s books published in Malaysia. He is currently finishing an MFA program in New Media. His work can be seen at: www.amirshahlan.com.

Simin Behbahani

Simin Bebahani was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1927. She has written 10 collections of poetry, won several human rights awards, been nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature, and—most recently—been named MTVU’s Poet Laureate. For most of her poetic career she has been known for reinventing the ghazal in the Persian language.

Fabrício Carpinejar

Fabrício Carpinejar is a poet, chronicler, journalist and university professor, the author of eighteen books, eight of them poetry collections. His book Um terno de pássaros ao sol (2000) is referenced in the 2001 Encyclopedia Britannica Book of the Year entry. The contemporaneously published Canalha! won the fifty-first Jabuti Prize/2009 from the Brazilian Book Institute in the short story and chronicle category. He recently published the first Twitter-based book in Brazil, a collection of more than 400 maxims and aphorisms. In 2010, he launched Mulher Perdigueira (Record), an impassioned defense of the jealous woman, object of immediate critical and public acclaim, and winner of the Azores Prize in the chronicle category. In May 2011, he unconventionally portrayed the domestic tendency of contemporary man in his book Borralheiro – minha viagem pela casa, his newest collection of chronicles.

Nathalie Handal

Nathalie Handal is an award-winning poet and playwright. She has lived in Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Arab world. She has read her poetry worldwide, has been featured on PBS The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, NPR Radio as well as The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Reuters, Mail & Guardian, The Jordan Times and Il Piccolo; and her work has been translated into more than fifteen languages. She is the author of numerous books including, Love and Strange Horses, winner of the 2011 Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award, and an Honorable Mention at the San Francisco Book Festival and the New England Book Festival. The New York Times says it is “a book that trembles with belonging (and longing).” She is the co-editor of the landmark anthology, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond, called a “beautiful achievement for world literature” by Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer. Handal is a Lannan Foundation Fellow, a Fundación Araguaney Fellow, recipient of the Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature 2011, and an Honored Finalist for the Gift of Freedom Award. She was listed as one of the “100 Most Powerful Arab Women 2011” in a Special Report by ArabianBusiness.com. Her new collection, Poet in Andalucía, is forthcoming Spring 2012. Shel writes the blog-column, The City and The Writer for Words without Borders magazine.

Nicole Idar

When I was a kid growing up in Kuala Lumpur I once saw a “wayang kulit,” a shadow puppet play, performed in the street. Just a white sheet strung across a darkened road, portable lamps, these incredible moving figures, people walking by and stopping to watch. That made a big impression. Since then I’ve seen shadow plays in Bangkok, Beijing, and Jogjakarta, but the thrill I felt stumbling upon a “wayang” performance in my hometown has never left me. My story “The Green Parakeet’s Tale,” about a narrator who would risk her life to see shadow puppets dance, is part of a novel-in-progress I’m working on for my MFA thesis. The artist who made the beautiful illustration for the story, Amir Shahlan Amiruddin, is a fellow Malaysian whose work reflects a similar fascination with shadow puppets, and for his collaboration I would like to say

Terima Kasih.

Johnny Lorenz

Johnny Lorenz, son of Brazilian immigrants, was born in Newark in 1972 and was raised in Miami Beach.  He received his doctorate in English from the University of Texas at Austin.  He currently lives in Brooklyn and is an associate professor at Montclair State University, New Jersey.  His poems have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, such as Massachusetts Review and Luso-American Literature.  In 2003 he was awarded a Fulbright, and his translations have appeared in Metamorphoses, Washington Square, and Bomb, as well as in Brazil: A Traveler’s Literary Companion.  He has published scholarly articles in journals such as Interventions and Brasil/Brazil.

James Ragan

James Ragan is an award winning poet, playwright, essayist, and translator and, for 25 years, served as the Director of the University of Southern California’s Professional Writing Program. He is currently a Distinguish Professor at Charles University in Prague. A native of Pittsburgh, he earned his Ph.D. in English at Ohio University (1971) and Honorary Ph.D’s from London’s Richmond University (2001) and St. Vincent College (1990). He is the author of seven books of poetry: In the Talking Hours, Womb-Weary, The Hunger Wall, Lusions, Selected Poems, Too Long a Solitude, The World Shouldering I, and co-editor of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Collected Poems: 1952-1990. Ragan’s honors include three Fulbright Professorships, wo Honorary Doctorates, the Emerson Poetry Prize, eight Pushcart Prize nominations, a Poetry Society of America Citation, the Swan Foundation Humanitarian Award, and honorary induction in the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, among others.

Golsa Yaghoobi

Golsa Yaghoobi writes “My work reflects my unique situation as an artist both estranged and operating outside of my native land. The unsettling differences between my experiences living in Iran and abroad, and my persistent attempt to reconcile these paradoxes, serve as a foundation for all of my work. In making my work I strive to reveal my voice, my body, and my transgressions. I have become a narrator, challenging the oral, spatial, and corporeal bondage that inhibits women. My personal experience in Iran laid the groundwork for my new series of paintings
and I believe this level of subjectivity lends the images a more visceral strength. The patterns and also the apparel in these series are significant to my personal experience and to the cultural, social
and religious histories of Iran. My presentation consequently crosses a fourth limitation placed upon women in society: the visual. By constructing my work outside of the environment that is the subject of its critique, it becomes representative not only of the marginalization of women in Iran, but also of a minority culture within my adopted environment, the United States.”