Authors, Translators, and Visual Artists
BETHANY BESTEMAN is the intake editor of Reformed Worship and a worship coordinator and church administrator in Silver Spring, Maryland where she lives with her husband and son. Her poetry has appeared in Ekstasis, Reformed Journal, and Presence. She has a Ph.D. in English language and literature from the Catholic University of America.
ALLEN J. DAVIS of Dublin, New Hampshire, is a member of Racial Justice Rising’s Coordinating Committee and Co-Chair of the Board of Directors of the Karuna Center for Peacebuilding, which bridges political and ethnic divides around the world. He is a social justice and democracy activist and is the former executive director of the Greenfield Community College Foundation and the United Way of Franklin County as well as a dean at Miami University (OH) and Sarah Lawrence College.
JOSEPH HESS is writer living in Columbia, Missouri while attending the University of Missouri, where he studies psychological sciences and English literature. Hess holds an editorial internship at the literary journal, Boulevard, and is social media manager for two organizations in psychology and the arts. Hess writes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, and is also a percussionist.
TANYA HUNTINGTON is a bi-national writer and artist and Managing Editor of the digital magazine Literal: Latin American voices. Her most recent books are Vidas sin fronteras (Alfaguara Infantil, 2019) as an illustrator and Solastalgia (Almadía / Universidad Autónoma de Aguascalientes, 2018) as a poet. She holds a Ph.D. in Latin American literature from the University of Maryland at College Park and currently teaches at CENTRO in Mexico City. Her artwork has been exhibited both in the United States and Mexico and selected by prestigious venues such as the Bienal de Pintura Rufino Tamayo and the Bienal FEMSA. Follow her on X @TanyaHuntington, on IG @tanya_huntington or visit her website at http://www.tanyahuntington.com
MARTA LÓPEZ LUACES is a poet, writer, and translator born in Spain. She is a Professor of Latin America Literature at Montclair State University. She is the coordinator of the Bilingual Poetry Reading via Zoom. She has published seven books of poetry. Architects of the Imaginary translated by Gary Racz (Gival Press, 2022) won the Pinnacle Book Achievement award, and Small Press Distribution listed it among its recommendations for the Hispanic Heritage Month 2023. A selection of her work was translated into Romanian and Italian. She has also published three novels and a book of short stories. She translated the poetry of Robert Duncan, Dorothea Tanning, Ann Lauterbach and Peter Gizzi into Spanish.
IAN SASI MAIR has been a traveler all his life. Born in Westmoreland, Jamaica, an insatiable curiosity about the world has taken him on journeys through Europe, North Africa, South America, Central America and Asia. Trained as an architect in Miami, FL, Mair was called to pursue the life of a yogi and healer, which led him to study Chinese medicine. He has served on the board of the Yoga Society of San Francisco, an ashram devoted to the study of Sanskrit and Yoga philosophy. Between 2010 and 2018, he made numerous trips to China, living there for extended periods while teaching yoga and helping establish meditation spaces. Currently, Mair travels between the U.S. and Jamaica where he teaches yoga and practices reflexology, acupressure and reiki. He is presently working on a travelogue/memoir of his China sojourn.
TOBIAS MEINECKE is an award-winning film director and founder of the creative media company Love Child. He is one of twelve great-grandchildren of early 20th century Berlin publishing legend Hermann Klemm. Along with Eric Darton, he is the author of a semi-ficionalized account of Klemm’s life and times, the opening section of which appears in this issue. In his youth he published Comic Art, a critical magazine dedicated to the emergence of the graphic novel. Currently, in addition to numerous film and television projects, Meinecke is working on his first collection of short fiction.
NANCY MONTEMURRO was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1961. She is a poet, teacher, and translator. She was a founding member of the NUSUD Publishing Cooperative, which emerged in the late 1980s and made a great editorial contribution to new writers in the 1990s. She is part of the Torres Barthe Contemporary Art Gallery as curatorial editor. She has published in poetry: A doncella (Nusud, 1988); Craquelage (Nusud, 1994); Arcanos Mayores (Ed. del Citrino, 2011); Rumbos del viento (Ed. del Dock, 2016); Jardines en el cielo (Ed. del Dock, 2024); she is a work on a manuscript: Amar a un padre.
NURIA MORGADO is Professor of Hispanic Studies at The College of Staten Island and The Graduate Center of The City University of New York (CUNY). She has edited and co-edited several books and published numerous essays, book chapters, interviews, and book reviews both nationally and internationally. Professor Morgado is part of the Academic Committee of the Miguel Delibes Chair, founded by The Graduate Center (CUNY) and Universidad de Valladolid (Spain). Additionally, she is Full Member of the North American Academy of the Spanish Language (ANLE) and Correspondent of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE). Professor Morgado is also the co-founder of Letras Hispanas: Revista de Literatura y Cultura, the book review editor of the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, and the editor-in-chief of Boletín de la Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española (BANLE), the ANLE’s academic journal.
NELL-LYNN PERERA is a self-taught abstract artist and poet. Her artistic process originates from having chromesthesia.Perera started painting as she was compelled to do her part when the tsunami hit Japan in 2011. She calls this an epiphanic moment. She has participated in group shows in London (2019), Lisbon (2015) and New York City (2 shows both in 2015 and a 3rd show in 2017) and has won multiple awards and recognitions in international art competitions, and is currently at work on her second solo show. Of her work, Perera says: “All my life, I’ve had to believe in myself, first. I went about things quietly without seeking approval from people. Having been schooled in a convent for eleven years with many rules and with parents who were also strict, I’ve tried to liberate myself from all the conditioning that I was subjected to.”
LEONARD SCHWARTZ is the author of Actualities IV/V Comic Earth, the third book of a three-book poem, from which the poetry in this issue is excerpted. Schwartz’s other books include The New Babel: Towards a Poetics of the Mid-East Crises (University of Arkansas Press), Salamander: A Bestiary, with painter Simon Carr (Chax Press), and Benjamin Fondane: Cinepoems and Others, from NYRB Books. A link to some of Schwartz’s readings and performances can be found at https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Schwartz.php.
TOM WEINER is the married father of four and grandfather of four. He taught 3rd-6th grade for 40 years at the Campus School of Smith College and high school English in an Upward Bound Program at the University of Connecticut for 19 summers. He has written 4 books and numerous articles. He has also co-authored a children’s book. He is a life-long anti-racism activist and started a reparations committee for his hometown of Northampton, Massachusetts.
Authors and Translators of Books Reviewed
JOSÉ ANGEL ARAGUZ is the author most recently of the lyric memoir Ruin & Want (Sundress Publications) as well as the poetry collections Rotura(Black Lawrence Press) and Laesperanza espera(Valparaiso Ediciones). His poetry and prose have appeared in Prairie Schooner,Poetry International, The Acentos Review, and Oxidant | Engine, among other places. He is anAssistant Professor at Suffolk University, where heserves as Editor-in-Chief of Salamanderand is alsoa faculty member of the Solstice Low-ResidencyMFA Program. He blogs and reviews books at The Friday Influence.
WENDY CALL is co-editor of Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide and Best Literary Translations, author of the award-winning No Word for Welcome, and translator of two collections of poetry by Mexican-Zapotec poet Irma Pineda. Call serves on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA program and lives in Seattle, on Duwamish land, and in Oaxaca, Mexico, on Mixtec and Zapotec land. She and SHOOK have collaborated on the translation of Mikeas Sanchez’ How to Be a Good Savage.
PEDRO ERBER is Professor of Comparative Literature at Waseda University, Senior Research Associate at Cornell University, and Editor of ARTMargins. He is the author of Breaching the Frame: The Rise of Contemporary Art in Brazil and Japan (UC Press, 2015).
REBECCA KOSICK is a poet, translator, and co-director of the Bristol Poetry Institute at the University of Bristol (UK). She is the author of Material Poetics in Hemispheric America (Edinburgh Univ. Press) and the poetry collection Labor Day (Golias Books).
THOREAU LOVELL, originally from Fresno, California, has lived in the Bay Area since the 1980s. For the last 20 years home has been Berkeley, where he lives with his German wife, their American dogs and cat, and two multinational daughters who are now well on their way to living their own lives. He has master’s degrees in creative writing from San Francisco State University and from the School of Information Management and Systems at UC Berkeley. Currently he is the publisher and co-founder of Wet Cement Press. Previous books include Amnesia’s Diary (Ex Nihilo Press) and Wilson Wiley Variations (Wet Cement Press). The obscure mystery writer B.E. Lovell was his father.
HÉLIO OITICICA (1937–1980) was a multifaceted Brazilian artist and theorist whose practice included painting, sculpture, performance, filmmaking, and writing. Oiticica is known for his work with concrete art and as a founding member of the neoconcrete movement in 1959.
MIKEAS SÁNCHEZ is one of the most important poets of the Indigenous Americas, working in Zoque, a language spoken in southern Mexico. She is the only woman to have ever published a book of poetry in that language. Her six volumes of poetry are all bilingual Spanish-Zoque. In Chiapas, Mexico, she was awarded first place in the “Y el Bolóm dice . . .” Prize for Fiction as well as the Pat O’tan Prize for Indigenous Poetry. Sánchez is a radio producer, translator, community health promoter, and defender of Zoque lands. She lives in Ajway, Chiapas.
SHOOK is a poet, translator, and editor whose work has spanned a wide range of languages and places. Since founding Phoneme Media in 2013, Shook has edited and published translations from over thirty-five languages. Today they direct Kashkul Books, a publishing project based in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, as well as the translation-focused imprint avión at Gato Negro Ediciones in Mexico City. They reside at Newt Beach in Northern California. They and Wendy Shook collaborated on the translation of Mikeas Sanchez’ How to Be a Good Savage.
Cable Street Editors
ERIC DARTON is the author of Free City, a novel, first published in 1996 by WW. Norton and recently re-released by Dalkey Archive Press, and the New York Times bestseller Divided We Stand: A Biography of The World Trade Center (Basic Books, 1999, 2011). Other of his writings may be found at bookoftheworldcourant.net, ericdarton.net, and tupeloquarterly.com. Darton is a partner in Love Child, a Berlin-based content developer for film, television, print and online media. He co-wrote, co-produced, and appears in Bill Hayward’s award-winning feature films Asphalt, Muscle & Bone (2019) and Beauty Is No Show – Designing the Dead (forthcoming in 2024). He teaches college-level literature, writing, and urban studies, and leads Writing at the Crossroads, an ongoing interdisciplinary prose workshop. Darton is an Internal Arts International-certified instructor in foundational Ba Gua Zhang.
DANA DELIBOVI is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her new book of translations and essays—Sweet Hunter: The Complete Poems of St. Teresa of Ávila—will be published by Monkfish Book Publishing in October 2024. Her work has appeared in After the Art, Apple Valley Review, Bluestem, Cathexis, Confluence, Ezra Translations, Moria, Noon: The Journal of the Short Poem, Presence, Psaltery & Lyre, Salamander, and many other journals. She is a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee, a 2020 Best American Essays notable essayist, and a 2023 winner of the Hueston Woods haiku contest. Delibovi’s poems traveled the St. Louis Metro as part of the Poetry in Motion Series sponsored by the Poetry Society of America. She posts at X(Twitter), Bluesky, and Instagram and at https://sweethunter.org/.
HARDY GRIFFIN is a writer and translator whose novel, Broken Kismet had just won the Eyelands Book Awards grand prize and has been published in Greek from Strange Days Press. He has published writing in Fresh.ink, New Flash Fiction, Alimentum, Assisi, The Washington Post, American Letters & Commentary, and a chapter in The Gotham Guide to Writing Fiction (Bloomsbury). His translations can be found in Words Without Borders, The Istanbul Biennial, and for the award-winning EU-sponsored study Ermeniler, which documents the lives of Armenians living in contemporary Turkey. He is the founding editor of the literary magazine Novel Slices, dedicated solely to the publication of novel excerpts of all genres.
BRONWYN MILLS is the author of Beastly’s Tale (a novel) and Night of the Luna Moths (poetry); her education, an MFA from UMass, Amherst, a Ph.D. from NYU. Mentored by James Tate, Samuel Delany, Kamau Brathwaite, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o she was an Anais Nin Fellow and Fulbright Fellow (La République du Bénin, West Africa) she has lived in Paris, France, New York City, Istanbul, Turkey; Cotonou, Bénin, and Latin America and taught Caribbean literature, African literature, and writing in Istanbul, Bénin, and just outside New York City. Formerly a dance and theatre writer in New England, Bronwyn is a founding co-editor for Cable Street and a Senior Prose Editor for Tupelo Quarterly.Guest-editor for the Turkish issue of Absinthe; New European Writing (#19), her current projects include By the Spoonmaker’s Tomb, a collection of vignettes from her time in Istanbul and the newly finished Canary Club, a novel set in medieval Spain. Most recently, Agni Online has published an excerpt from Spoonmaker. She has also published work on African vodou. More of her work can be found at bronwynmills.org/. Bronwyn now lives and writes in a tiny mountain village far, far away.
CHRISTOPHER SAWYER-LAUÇANNO, whose memoir we continue to serialize, is the author of more than two dozen books including biographies of Paul Bowles, E.E. Cummings, and a group portrait of American writers in Paris 1944-1960, The Continual Pilgrimage. For Cable Street (formerly Witty Partition), he translated Salvador Dalí’s prose poem, “San Sebastien,” and several other works. Book translations include work by Paul Eluard, Rafael Alberti, Panaït Istrati, García Lorca, Isidore Ducasse (Comte de Lautreamont as well as the Mayan Books of Chilam Balam. The inaugural issue of Wet Cement Magazine has new work by the author: www.wetcementpress.com/wcpmag. Night Suite, his newest book of poems, was just published by Talisman House. Other books include, Dix méditations sur quelques mots d’Antonin Artaud, translated by Patricia Pruitt (Paris: Alyscamps, 2018), Remission (Talisman House, 2016), and Mussoorie-Montague Miscellany (Talisman House, 2014). He has written librettos for Thomas Adès (America: A Prophecy Part I), Faber Music/Warner Classics CD, 2011, and for Andrey Kasparaov (Lorca: An Operatic Cycle in Five Acts. Alyscamps, 2022). Until retiring he taught writing at MIT for over a quarter-century. He lives in Turners Falls, Massachusetts. Many of his books are on Amazon and Bookshop.org.
JAN SCHMIDT has recently had her short story “Pandora” published as finalist in SolsticeFiction Prize in 2023 summer issue. Litro Magazine published “EX-TING-GWISH-ER” online November 9, 2023. Calyx will publish “Returns Department” in their upcoming issue. Other fiction writing appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, The Wall, Tupelo Quarterly, The Long Story, IKON and New York Stories. Her short story collection “Everything I Need” was a finalist for the Eludia Award, Hidden River Arts, 2019. Her unpublished novel “Sunlight Underground” was a finalist for the Novel Slices Award, 2021. Till 2015, she held the position of Curator of the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Some of her published writing can be seen on her website http://contactprod.com/janschmidt/