Poem of the Week
Clip of the Month
Newslog
Contact and Editor Info
For general questions and matters concerning the content of the international domain on Poetry International Web, please contact the Poetry International Web Foundation:
Poetry International Web Foundation
info@poetryinternational.org
Eendrachtsplein 4
3012 LA Rotterdam
phone +31 10 28 22 777
fax +31 10 444 43 05
Please note that we do not accept unsolicited poetry submissions. For questions regarding a specific national domain on Poetry International Web, please contact the relevant editor. See below for biographies and email addresses of editors of currently active domains. If you have a general query or questions about an inactive national domain, please email info@poetryinternational.org.
Poetry International Web Foundation
info@poetryinternational.org
Eendrachtsplein 4
3012 LA Rotterdam
phone +31 10 28 22 777
fax +31 10 444 43 05
Please note that we do not accept unsolicited poetry submissions. For questions regarding a specific national domain on Poetry International Web, please contact the relevant editor. See below for biographies and email addresses of editors of currently active domains. If you have a general query or questions about an inactive national domain, please email info@poetryinternational.org.
Central Staff
Madea le Noble (Project Manager) was born in Vlaardingen, Netherlands in 1971. She graduated as a translator of Japanese and French at the Maastricht School of Higher Professional Education for Translation and Interpretation in 1994, having spent six months living in Tokyo as an exchange student of Japanese at the Edo Cultural Center in 1991. In 1997 she received her Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics at Groningen University.
Before entering the cultural sector, she worked for three years as a purchase co-ordinator at a Japanese multinational electronics company. She then moved on to e-commerce, but lost her purchasing job after six months when the dot-com bubble burst and then decided that commerce was not for her. Via a sequence of culture-related jobs, she made her way to Poetry International Web, after having left Archis, an architecture and visual-culture magazine.
Jan Willem Hemert (Webmaster) was born in Delft, Netherlands in 1963. He studied political science, has played in several experimental rock and post-punk bands and has worked and works as a freelance web-designer, graphic designer and sound engineer.
Sarah Ream (Central Editor) was born in Lincolnshire in England in 1981, and grew up in the UK, the USA, France and Canada. She studied undergraduate English Language and Literature followed by a Masters in Creative Writing (Poetry) at the University of Edinburgh, winning the university’s Grierson Verse Prize in 2005. After graduating, she worked for a publishing house in Edinburgh, first as a publicity assistant and then as an editor. She has also worked as a bookseller and a freelance arts and restaurant critic. Her poems and articles have appeared in various publications, including the Guardian website and V, an anthology of international writing from Edinburgh. In 2008 she moved to Amsterdam, where she works as a freelance editor of English-language poetry, fiction and non-fiction.
Contacting Domain Editors
AUSTRALIA
australia@poetryinternational.org
Michael Brennan was born in Sydney, Australia in 1973. He graduated from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Arts (First Class Honours & University Medal) in 1996 and completed a Doctorate of Philosophy there in 2001, undertaking a comparative literary analysis of the function of negativity in poetic language and ontology as presented in nineteenth-century French Symbolism and contemporary Australian poetry. He has taught courses in creative writing, poetics and literary theory at the University of Technology, Sydney, and Australian literature at the University of Sydney. Brennan edited Absence & Negativity in Australian Literature (1999), co-edited Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets (2000) and published The Imageless World (2003), Language habits (2006) and Sky was sky (with Tokyo-based installation artist Akiko Muto; translated by Yasuhiro Yotsumoto, 2007). His first collection of poetry, The Imageless World (Salt Publishing, 2003) was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry, won the Mary Gilmore Award, and was described in the Australian Book Review as “an astonishingly beautiful work. In years to come, it will surely be seen as one of the most important debuts of this generation of poets”. In 2006, Brennan undertook residencies in Berlin and Paris thanks to the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarships, the Literature Board of the Australian Council for the Arts, and the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. He is a lecturer in the Faculty of Policy Studies, Chuo University, Tokyo, and director of the small independent publisher, Vagabond Press. His second full-length collection of poetry, Unanimous Night, is forthcoming from Salt Publishing (UK).
BELGIUM
belgium@poetryinternational.org
Tom van de Voorde was born in 1974 in Ghent, Belgium. He studied Dutch Language and Literature, Literary Theory and Art History at the University of Ghent. He has worked as an editor for the literary magazine Yang and as a programmer for the literary organisation, Het Beschrijf, and he has written about poetry for several magazines and newspapers. In recent years he has been translating the poetry of Wallace Stevens and Michael Palmer. He currently works in Antwerp at the Flemish Literature Fund, an organisation that promotes literature from Flanders, the Northern part of Belgium, abroad.
COLOMBIA
colombia@poetryinternational.org
Fernando Rendón was born in Medellín, Antioquia (Colombia), in 1951. His debut work Contrahistoria (1986), a visionary idea of the future in complete opposition to the realities of apocalyptic excess in his country, was published in the 1980s. He has written the poetry collections Bajo otros soles (1989), Canción en los Campos de Marte (1992), Los motivos del salmón (1998), and La cuestión radiante (2005).
Rendón founded the poetry magazine Prometeo in 1982. In 1991, he and a team of three poets founded the the International Poetry Festival of Medellín. So far around 747 writers from 131 countries in all five continents have participated. The Stockholm-based Right Livelihood Award awarded the 2006 Alternative Nobel Prize to the International Poetry Festival of Medellín, “in recognition of its courage and hope in times of despair”.
INDIA
india@poetryinternational.org
Arundhathi Subramaniam was born in 1967. She is a poet, dance critic and a regular freelance arts journalist, and is in charge of an interactive arts forum at Mumbai’s National Centre for the Performing Arts. As a poet, she has been published in several journals including the PEN All India journal, Poiesis, The Brown Critique and Kavya Bharati, as well as the poetry pages of The Independent, and has read her work at several forums. She is also on the committee of the Poetry Circle of Mumbai. As ajournalist, she has written extensively for leading publications in the country, such as The Times of India and The Hindu, and now writes for several culture portals on the web. She also heads a forum called ‘Chauraha’ that promotes dialogue betweeen practitioners of various artistic disciplines.
INDONESIA
Hasif Amini was born in 1970. He studied economics at the University of Indonesia but quit midway and became a freelance translator and editor. Now he works as literary curator at Komunitas Salihara, a cultural center in Jakarta. He is also poetry editor of the Sunday edition of the leading Indonesian daily newspaper Kompas.
IRAN
iran@poetryinternational.org
Sam Vaseghi was born in 1967 in Teheran, and spent his early childhood in Teheran and Stuttgart (Germany). In 1973 he returned with his parents to Rasht (Iran), where he lived until 1983. During this time, he lived through the late dictatorship period of the Shah, the revolution of 1979 and the first years of the Iran–Iraq war. In 1983 he returned to Germany and completed a bachelor’s degree in German in 1987, and in 2000 finished studies in Engineering and Biological Sciences at the University of Stuttgart.
During this period he was also taught classical composition by the renowned German composer Werner Müller and studied singing with French-American singer Fréderique Barbier at the Stuttgart Music Academy, where he specialised in classical composition and the techniques of sprechgesang.
In the years 1992 to 2000, over the course of several stays in Paris, Buenos Aires and Montreal, he began to intensify his literary work in Farsi, Spanish, English and French. During this time he translated the poetry of Iranian masters into German, Spanish and English, and also translated German and Spanish poetry into Farsi. He also wrote his own poetry in Farsi and German, as well as his first novels in German.
In 1998 he travelled for the final time to Iran, immediately leaving the country due to socio-political pressure, and returned to Germany. Since then he has been an active member of the Iranian Writer’s Association (in exile), Kanune Nevisandegane Iran, as well as of the Iranian PEN Center (in exile). Since 2003 he has been involved with Iranian Exile Writers and the Foundation of the Archives of Iranian Writers in Exile and the Iranian Burnt Books Foundation. Both organisations operate under the patronship of the Else-Lasker Schüler Society Foundation.
Sam Vaseghi is founder and executive editor of Iran Open Publishing Group, one the most reputed publishing houses of Iranian and Afghan writing.
IRELAND
ireland@poetryinternational.org
Patrick Cotter was born in Cork in 1963 and was educated at UCC. His poems can be found in such journals as Poetry Durham, Oxford Poetry, The Salmon, The Shop and Poetry Ireland Review. He has published several chapbooks of his poems, including The Mysogynist’s Blue Nightmare (Raven Arts Press), A Socialist’s Dozen (Three Spires Press) and The True Story of Aoife and Lir’s Children & other poems (Three Spires Press). His work has appeared in the anthologies Separate Islands: Contemporary British and Irish poetry (Quarry, Ontario), Irish Poetry Now (Wolfhound), Jumping off Shadows – Some Contemporary Irish Poets (Cork University Press), The Irish Eros (Gill & Macmillan), The Backyards of Heaven (Newfoundland), Something Beginning with P (O’Brien Press) and in The Great Book of Ireland. His translations of the Estonian poet Andres Ehin are collected in the book Moosebeetle Swallow (Southword Editions) and his play, Beauty and the Stalker, was produced at the Granary Theatre, Cork in 2000. In 1984 he was shortlisted for a Hennessey Award and in 1988 he was runner-up in the Patrick Kavanagh award. He currently directs the Munster Literature Centre.
ISRAEL
israel@poetryinternational.org
Lisa Katz was born in New York in 1949. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan (BA) and the City College of NY (MA, Creative Writing), and wrote her doctoral thesis − on the power of women in the poetry of Sylvia Plath − at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where she has lived (due to an accident of the heart) since 1983, raising two bilingual children, a journalist and a human-rights researcher.
Reconstruction, a book of her poetry translated into Hebrew, was published by the veteran Israeli press Am Oved in 2008; also in 2008, she was awarded the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize and a Ledig House International Writers Residency. She is the translator of Look There: poems of Agi Mishol (Graywolf Press) and of the forthcoming Approaching You in English, a bilingual edition of poetry by Admiel Kosman (Zephyr Press). She has taught literature, translation and creative writing at Hebrew University, leads a poetry workshop at the Poetry Place in Jerusalem, and writes book reviews for the English edition of the Israeli paper Haaretz, where she works as a translator. Selections from her poetry, translation, and scholarship may be read at http://pluto.huji.ac.il/~lisakatz/index.html.
JAPAN
japan@poetryinternational.org
Yasuhiro Yotsumoto was born in Osaka, Japan on in 1959. His first collection of poetry, A Laughing Bug, appeared in 1991. Since then six collections of his poetry have been published, including Golden Hour (2004), Starboard of My Wife (2006) and Conversation Poems: Poetry vs Living (co-authored with Masayo Koike, 2005). Two book-length translations of his poems were published in Romania and Serbia with the title of Samurai in Manhattan. Yotsumoto has won several prizes, such as the Hagiwara Sakutaro Award in Japan, and has participated in poetry festivals around the world. In addition to poetry, Yasuhiro writes essays, book reviews, and short stories for the Japanese media. He is also a street photographer; his work was shown in a one-man exhibition and recently used on the cover of Poetry Review magazine in London.
After living for eight years in the United States, he now lives in Munich, Germany with his family. For more information, visit his website: http://homepage.mac.com/yyotsumoto/Personal4.html.
THE NETHERLANDS
netherlands@poetryinternational.org
Thomas Möhlmann (website: www.thomasmohlmann.nl) was born in 1975 and lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. As the poetry specialist at the Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature (www.nlpvf.nl) he strives to ensure that quality translations of Dutch poetry are printed, distributed, read, performed and enjoyed throughout the world. He is also chief editor of the Dutch poetry magazine Awater (www.poezieclub.nl) and editor of the literary websites www.literairnederland.nl and www.lyrikline.org, the poetry show series Vadem and several poetry anthologies. His first collection of poems, De vloeibare jongen (The Liquid Boy; Prometheus, Amsterdam, 2005) was shortlisted for the C. Buddingh’ Prize for new Dutch language poetry in 2006 and was awarded the Lucy B. & C.W. van der Hoogt Prize in 2007.
PORTUGAL
portugal@poetryinternational.org
A native of Washington DC, former PIW-Portugal editor and current PIW-Portugal translator Richard Zenith has lived as an adult in Colombia, Brazil, France, and – since 1987 – in Lisbon, Portugal, where he works as a freelance writer, translator, and researcher in the Fernando Pessoa archives. His Fernando Pessoa & Co. – Selected Poems (Grove Press, 1998) won the 1999 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and was followed, in 2001, by The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (Grove). In 2001 he also published a new translation of Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (Penguin), which won the 2002 Calouste Gulbenkian Translation Prize (in the UK). His Education by Stone: Selected Poems of João Cabral de Melo Neto (Archipelago) won the 2006 translation award from the Academy of American Poets. Zenith has rendered a number of other Portuguese and Brazilian poets into English, as well as novels by Portugal’s António Lobo Antunes and Angola’s José Luandino Vieira. His own poetry appears in American literary reviews, and in Portugal he has published short stories, including a collection titled Terceiras Pessoas (2003).
The new Portuguese editor, Luis Miguel Queirós, was born in 1962 in Oporto, Portugal and took his degree in International Relations. He is a journalist and literary critic for the daily newspaper, Público. In 1991 he published As Imagens Dominantes, a book of poems. He is the editor of Vingt et un Poètes pour un Vingtième Siècle Portugais, which was published in France by L’Escampette (Bordeaux, 1994).
SOUTH AFRICA
southafrica@poetryinternational.org
Liesl Jobson is a writer, photographer and musician. Born in Durban in 1966, she graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand with a BMus in 1991 and an MA (Writing) with Distinction in 2007.
Her poetry and prose have appeared in numerous South African and international journals including Chimurenga, New Coin, New Contrast, The Southern Review, Mississippi Review, Sleeping Fish, The Rambler and anthologies: Twist (Oshun, 2006), Open (Oshun, 2008), African Compass, (New Africa Books, 2005), Letters to the World (Red Hen Press, 2007) and White Ink (Demeter Press, 2007).
In 2005 she won the POWA Women’s Writing Poetry Competition, and her collection of prose poems and flash fiction, 100 Papers, received the Ernst van Heerden Creative Writing Award. It is due out from Botsotso Press in June 2008.
In 2007 she received a Pushcart Anthology Special Mention and was awarded a Community Publishing Project grant from the National Library of South Africa’s Centre for her poetry manuscript, View from an Escalator.
She is the Johannesburg editor of the South African literary website, BOOK SA, and is managing editor of the multi-media journal, Mad Hatters’ Review. She plays bassoon and contrabassoon when the stars align and the reeds are good.
UNITED KINGDOM
uk@poetryinternational.org
The Poetry Society is the editor of the UK domain of Poetry International Web. Judith Palmer joined the Poetry Society as its new director in January 2009. Her background is as a writer, broadcaster, and arts events programmer. After starting off her career in publishing, she went on to work on the literature programme at London’s South Bank Centre, where she worked on the UK’s Poetry International festival; organised many international writers tours for the Arts Council and independent tours including Cowboy Poets from the American West. In 2002 she was a judge on the Commonwealth Writers Prize. She has written extensively about art and literature for newspapers and magazines, including The Independent, Guardian, Sunday Telegraph, Dazed & Confused, RealTime, Art Monthly and New Statesman; and is a regular presenter of poetry programmes for the BBC. She was Public Programme Manager at The Women’s Library, London Metropolitan University (2007–8) and was Senior Research Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University (2006–7). With a longstanding interest in interdisciplinary and collaborative arts, she has organised events for international art-science agency The Arts Catalyst and created projects for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. She has published many essays exploring our cultural relationship with the natural world, in books such as Zero Gravity: a cultural user’s guide (2005), A Record of Fear (2006), Earth, Air, Sky & Water (2006), Freianlage (2008) and Lorna Graves (2008). Her book Private Views: Artists Working Today (2004) examines the working lives of poets alongside artists of other disciplines.
USA
www.poetryfoundation.org
The PIW USA issues are edited by the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, publishers of the monthly Poetry magazine. Founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry is the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world. Monroe’s “Open Door” policy, set forth in Volume I of the magazine, remains the most succinct statement of Poetry’s mission: to print the best poetry written today, in whatever style, genre or approach. The magazine established its reputation early by publishing the first important poems of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg and other now-classic authors. In succeeding decades it has presented – often for the first time – works by virtually every major contemporary poet.
ZIMBABWE
zimbabwe@poetryinternational.org
Irene Staunton is a Zimbabwean publisher. She was co-founder, in 1988, of Baobab Books, which specialised in Zimbabwean fiction, history and children books.
Baobab published a number of prize-winning novelists including Shimmer Chinodya, Chenjerai Hove, Alexander Kanengoni, Charles Mungoshi and Yvonne Vera as well as several collections of poetry, including one by the performance poet, Chirikure Chirikure.
Leaving Baobab in 1999, she and her husband, Murray McCartney, established Weaver Press (www.weaverpresszimbabwe.com). They have continued to develop a fiction list working with Zimbabwean writers, and a non-fiction list with an exclusive focus on Zimbabwe.
Irene also researched, compiled, and edited Mothers of the Revolution, which recounts the war experiences of thirty rural Zimbabwean women, and Children in our Midst, Voices of Farmworkers Children, and has recently edited Children Crossing Borders, the stories of migrant children in the region. She has also worked with Zimbabwe Women Writers on a collection of interviews with women ex-combatants, Women of Resilience, and co-edited with Chiedza Musengez A Tragedy of Lives: Women in Prison in Zimbabwe.
She has been the editor of the Zimbabwe domain of Poetry International since 2003.
Madea le Noble (Project Manager) was born in Vlaardingen, Netherlands in 1971. She graduated as a translator of Japanese and French at the Maastricht School of Higher Professional Education for Translation and Interpretation in 1994, having spent six months living in Tokyo as an exchange student of Japanese at the Edo Cultural Center in 1991. In 1997 she received her Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics at Groningen University.
Before entering the cultural sector, she worked for three years as a purchase co-ordinator at a Japanese multinational electronics company. She then moved on to e-commerce, but lost her purchasing job after six months when the dot-com bubble burst and then decided that commerce was not for her. Via a sequence of culture-related jobs, she made her way to Poetry International Web, after having left Archis, an architecture and visual-culture magazine.
Jan Willem Hemert (Webmaster) was born in Delft, Netherlands in 1963. He studied political science, has played in several experimental rock and post-punk bands and has worked and works as a freelance web-designer, graphic designer and sound engineer.
Sarah Ream (Central Editor) was born in Lincolnshire in England in 1981, and grew up in the UK, the USA, France and Canada. She studied undergraduate English Language and Literature followed by a Masters in Creative Writing (Poetry) at the University of Edinburgh, winning the university’s Grierson Verse Prize in 2005. After graduating, she worked for a publishing house in Edinburgh, first as a publicity assistant and then as an editor. She has also worked as a bookseller and a freelance arts and restaurant critic. Her poems and articles have appeared in various publications, including the Guardian website and V, an anthology of international writing from Edinburgh. In 2008 she moved to Amsterdam, where she works as a freelance editor of English-language poetry, fiction and non-fiction.
Contacting Domain Editors
AUSTRALIA
australia@poetryinternational.org
Michael Brennan was born in Sydney, Australia in 1973. He graduated from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Arts (First Class Honours & University Medal) in 1996 and completed a Doctorate of Philosophy there in 2001, undertaking a comparative literary analysis of the function of negativity in poetic language and ontology as presented in nineteenth-century French Symbolism and contemporary Australian poetry. He has taught courses in creative writing, poetics and literary theory at the University of Technology, Sydney, and Australian literature at the University of Sydney. Brennan edited Absence & Negativity in Australian Literature (1999), co-edited Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets (2000) and published The Imageless World (2003), Language habits (2006) and Sky was sky (with Tokyo-based installation artist Akiko Muto; translated by Yasuhiro Yotsumoto, 2007). His first collection of poetry, The Imageless World (Salt Publishing, 2003) was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry, won the Mary Gilmore Award, and was described in the Australian Book Review as “an astonishingly beautiful work. In years to come, it will surely be seen as one of the most important debuts of this generation of poets”. In 2006, Brennan undertook residencies in Berlin and Paris thanks to the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarships, the Literature Board of the Australian Council for the Arts, and the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. He is a lecturer in the Faculty of Policy Studies, Chuo University, Tokyo, and director of the small independent publisher, Vagabond Press. His second full-length collection of poetry, Unanimous Night, is forthcoming from Salt Publishing (UK).
BELGIUM
belgium@poetryinternational.org
Tom van de Voorde was born in 1974 in Ghent, Belgium. He studied Dutch Language and Literature, Literary Theory and Art History at the University of Ghent. He has worked as an editor for the literary magazine Yang and as a programmer for the literary organisation, Het Beschrijf, and he has written about poetry for several magazines and newspapers. In recent years he has been translating the poetry of Wallace Stevens and Michael Palmer. He currently works in Antwerp at the Flemish Literature Fund, an organisation that promotes literature from Flanders, the Northern part of Belgium, abroad.
COLOMBIA
colombia@poetryinternational.org
Fernando Rendón was born in Medellín, Antioquia (Colombia), in 1951. His debut work Contrahistoria (1986), a visionary idea of the future in complete opposition to the realities of apocalyptic excess in his country, was published in the 1980s. He has written the poetry collections Bajo otros soles (1989), Canción en los Campos de Marte (1992), Los motivos del salmón (1998), and La cuestión radiante (2005).
Rendón founded the poetry magazine Prometeo in 1982. In 1991, he and a team of three poets founded the the International Poetry Festival of Medellín. So far around 747 writers from 131 countries in all five continents have participated. The Stockholm-based Right Livelihood Award awarded the 2006 Alternative Nobel Prize to the International Poetry Festival of Medellín, “in recognition of its courage and hope in times of despair”.
INDIA
india@poetryinternational.org
Arundhathi Subramaniam was born in 1967. She is a poet, dance critic and a regular freelance arts journalist, and is in charge of an interactive arts forum at Mumbai’s National Centre for the Performing Arts. As a poet, she has been published in several journals including the PEN All India journal, Poiesis, The Brown Critique and Kavya Bharati, as well as the poetry pages of The Independent, and has read her work at several forums. She is also on the committee of the Poetry Circle of Mumbai. As ajournalist, she has written extensively for leading publications in the country, such as The Times of India and The Hindu, and now writes for several culture portals on the web. She also heads a forum called ‘Chauraha’ that promotes dialogue betweeen practitioners of various artistic disciplines.
INDONESIA
Hasif Amini was born in 1970. He studied economics at the University of Indonesia but quit midway and became a freelance translator and editor. Now he works as literary curator at Komunitas Salihara, a cultural center in Jakarta. He is also poetry editor of the Sunday edition of the leading Indonesian daily newspaper Kompas.
IRAN
iran@poetryinternational.org
Sam Vaseghi was born in 1967 in Teheran, and spent his early childhood in Teheran and Stuttgart (Germany). In 1973 he returned with his parents to Rasht (Iran), where he lived until 1983. During this time, he lived through the late dictatorship period of the Shah, the revolution of 1979 and the first years of the Iran–Iraq war. In 1983 he returned to Germany and completed a bachelor’s degree in German in 1987, and in 2000 finished studies in Engineering and Biological Sciences at the University of Stuttgart.
During this period he was also taught classical composition by the renowned German composer Werner Müller and studied singing with French-American singer Fréderique Barbier at the Stuttgart Music Academy, where he specialised in classical composition and the techniques of sprechgesang.
In the years 1992 to 2000, over the course of several stays in Paris, Buenos Aires and Montreal, he began to intensify his literary work in Farsi, Spanish, English and French. During this time he translated the poetry of Iranian masters into German, Spanish and English, and also translated German and Spanish poetry into Farsi. He also wrote his own poetry in Farsi and German, as well as his first novels in German.
In 1998 he travelled for the final time to Iran, immediately leaving the country due to socio-political pressure, and returned to Germany. Since then he has been an active member of the Iranian Writer’s Association (in exile), Kanune Nevisandegane Iran, as well as of the Iranian PEN Center (in exile). Since 2003 he has been involved with Iranian Exile Writers and the Foundation of the Archives of Iranian Writers in Exile and the Iranian Burnt Books Foundation. Both organisations operate under the patronship of the Else-Lasker Schüler Society Foundation.
Sam Vaseghi is founder and executive editor of Iran Open Publishing Group, one the most reputed publishing houses of Iranian and Afghan writing.
IRELAND
ireland@poetryinternational.org
Patrick Cotter was born in Cork in 1963 and was educated at UCC. His poems can be found in such journals as Poetry Durham, Oxford Poetry, The Salmon, The Shop and Poetry Ireland Review. He has published several chapbooks of his poems, including The Mysogynist’s Blue Nightmare (Raven Arts Press), A Socialist’s Dozen (Three Spires Press) and The True Story of Aoife and Lir’s Children & other poems (Three Spires Press). His work has appeared in the anthologies Separate Islands: Contemporary British and Irish poetry (Quarry, Ontario), Irish Poetry Now (Wolfhound), Jumping off Shadows – Some Contemporary Irish Poets (Cork University Press), The Irish Eros (Gill & Macmillan), The Backyards of Heaven (Newfoundland), Something Beginning with P (O’Brien Press) and in The Great Book of Ireland. His translations of the Estonian poet Andres Ehin are collected in the book Moosebeetle Swallow (Southword Editions) and his play, Beauty and the Stalker, was produced at the Granary Theatre, Cork in 2000. In 1984 he was shortlisted for a Hennessey Award and in 1988 he was runner-up in the Patrick Kavanagh award. He currently directs the Munster Literature Centre.
ISRAEL
israel@poetryinternational.org
Lisa Katz was born in New York in 1949. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan (BA) and the City College of NY (MA, Creative Writing), and wrote her doctoral thesis − on the power of women in the poetry of Sylvia Plath − at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where she has lived (due to an accident of the heart) since 1983, raising two bilingual children, a journalist and a human-rights researcher.
Reconstruction, a book of her poetry translated into Hebrew, was published by the veteran Israeli press Am Oved in 2008; also in 2008, she was awarded the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize and a Ledig House International Writers Residency. She is the translator of Look There: poems of Agi Mishol (Graywolf Press) and of the forthcoming Approaching You in English, a bilingual edition of poetry by Admiel Kosman (Zephyr Press). She has taught literature, translation and creative writing at Hebrew University, leads a poetry workshop at the Poetry Place in Jerusalem, and writes book reviews for the English edition of the Israeli paper Haaretz, where she works as a translator. Selections from her poetry, translation, and scholarship may be read at http://pluto.huji.ac.il/~lisakatz/index.html.
JAPAN
japan@poetryinternational.org
Yasuhiro Yotsumoto was born in Osaka, Japan on in 1959. His first collection of poetry, A Laughing Bug, appeared in 1991. Since then six collections of his poetry have been published, including Golden Hour (2004), Starboard of My Wife (2006) and Conversation Poems: Poetry vs Living (co-authored with Masayo Koike, 2005). Two book-length translations of his poems were published in Romania and Serbia with the title of Samurai in Manhattan. Yotsumoto has won several prizes, such as the Hagiwara Sakutaro Award in Japan, and has participated in poetry festivals around the world. In addition to poetry, Yasuhiro writes essays, book reviews, and short stories for the Japanese media. He is also a street photographer; his work was shown in a one-man exhibition and recently used on the cover of Poetry Review magazine in London.
After living for eight years in the United States, he now lives in Munich, Germany with his family. For more information, visit his website: http://homepage.mac.com/yyotsumoto/Personal4.html.
THE NETHERLANDS
netherlands@poetryinternational.org
Thomas Möhlmann (website: www.thomasmohlmann.nl) was born in 1975 and lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. As the poetry specialist at the Foundation for the Production and Translation of Dutch Literature (www.nlpvf.nl) he strives to ensure that quality translations of Dutch poetry are printed, distributed, read, performed and enjoyed throughout the world. He is also chief editor of the Dutch poetry magazine Awater (www.poezieclub.nl) and editor of the literary websites www.literairnederland.nl and www.lyrikline.org, the poetry show series Vadem and several poetry anthologies. His first collection of poems, De vloeibare jongen (The Liquid Boy; Prometheus, Amsterdam, 2005) was shortlisted for the C. Buddingh’ Prize for new Dutch language poetry in 2006 and was awarded the Lucy B. & C.W. van der Hoogt Prize in 2007.
PORTUGAL
portugal@poetryinternational.org
A native of Washington DC, former PIW-Portugal editor and current PIW-Portugal translator Richard Zenith has lived as an adult in Colombia, Brazil, France, and – since 1987 – in Lisbon, Portugal, where he works as a freelance writer, translator, and researcher in the Fernando Pessoa archives. His Fernando Pessoa & Co. – Selected Poems (Grove Press, 1998) won the 1999 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and was followed, in 2001, by The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (Grove). In 2001 he also published a new translation of Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (Penguin), which won the 2002 Calouste Gulbenkian Translation Prize (in the UK). His Education by Stone: Selected Poems of João Cabral de Melo Neto (Archipelago) won the 2006 translation award from the Academy of American Poets. Zenith has rendered a number of other Portuguese and Brazilian poets into English, as well as novels by Portugal’s António Lobo Antunes and Angola’s José Luandino Vieira. His own poetry appears in American literary reviews, and in Portugal he has published short stories, including a collection titled Terceiras Pessoas (2003).
The new Portuguese editor, Luis Miguel Queirós, was born in 1962 in Oporto, Portugal and took his degree in International Relations. He is a journalist and literary critic for the daily newspaper, Público. In 1991 he published As Imagens Dominantes, a book of poems. He is the editor of Vingt et un Poètes pour un Vingtième Siècle Portugais, which was published in France by L’Escampette (Bordeaux, 1994).
SOUTH AFRICA
southafrica@poetryinternational.org
Liesl Jobson is a writer, photographer and musician. Born in Durban in 1966, she graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand with a BMus in 1991 and an MA (Writing) with Distinction in 2007.
Her poetry and prose have appeared in numerous South African and international journals including Chimurenga, New Coin, New Contrast, The Southern Review, Mississippi Review, Sleeping Fish, The Rambler and anthologies: Twist (Oshun, 2006), Open (Oshun, 2008), African Compass, (New Africa Books, 2005), Letters to the World (Red Hen Press, 2007) and White Ink (Demeter Press, 2007).
In 2005 she won the POWA Women’s Writing Poetry Competition, and her collection of prose poems and flash fiction, 100 Papers, received the Ernst van Heerden Creative Writing Award. It is due out from Botsotso Press in June 2008.
In 2007 she received a Pushcart Anthology Special Mention and was awarded a Community Publishing Project grant from the National Library of South Africa’s Centre for her poetry manuscript, View from an Escalator.
She is the Johannesburg editor of the South African literary website, BOOK SA, and is managing editor of the multi-media journal, Mad Hatters’ Review. She plays bassoon and contrabassoon when the stars align and the reeds are good.
UNITED KINGDOM
uk@poetryinternational.org
The Poetry Society is the editor of the UK domain of Poetry International Web. Judith Palmer joined the Poetry Society as its new director in January 2009. Her background is as a writer, broadcaster, and arts events programmer. After starting off her career in publishing, she went on to work on the literature programme at London’s South Bank Centre, where she worked on the UK’s Poetry International festival; organised many international writers tours for the Arts Council and independent tours including Cowboy Poets from the American West. In 2002 she was a judge on the Commonwealth Writers Prize. She has written extensively about art and literature for newspapers and magazines, including The Independent, Guardian, Sunday Telegraph, Dazed & Confused, RealTime, Art Monthly and New Statesman; and is a regular presenter of poetry programmes for the BBC. She was Public Programme Manager at The Women’s Library, London Metropolitan University (2007–8) and was Senior Research Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University (2006–7). With a longstanding interest in interdisciplinary and collaborative arts, she has organised events for international art-science agency The Arts Catalyst and created projects for the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. She has published many essays exploring our cultural relationship with the natural world, in books such as Zero Gravity: a cultural user’s guide (2005), A Record of Fear (2006), Earth, Air, Sky & Water (2006), Freianlage (2008) and Lorna Graves (2008). Her book Private Views: Artists Working Today (2004) examines the working lives of poets alongside artists of other disciplines.
USA
www.poetryfoundation.org
The PIW USA issues are edited by the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, publishers of the monthly Poetry magazine. Founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry is the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world. Monroe’s “Open Door” policy, set forth in Volume I of the magazine, remains the most succinct statement of Poetry’s mission: to print the best poetry written today, in whatever style, genre or approach. The magazine established its reputation early by publishing the first important poems of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg and other now-classic authors. In succeeding decades it has presented – often for the first time – works by virtually every major contemporary poet.
ZIMBABWE
zimbabwe@poetryinternational.org
Irene Staunton is a Zimbabwean publisher. She was co-founder, in 1988, of Baobab Books, which specialised in Zimbabwean fiction, history and children books.
Baobab published a number of prize-winning novelists including Shimmer Chinodya, Chenjerai Hove, Alexander Kanengoni, Charles Mungoshi and Yvonne Vera as well as several collections of poetry, including one by the performance poet, Chirikure Chirikure.
Leaving Baobab in 1999, she and her husband, Murray McCartney, established Weaver Press (www.weaverpresszimbabwe.com). They have continued to develop a fiction list working with Zimbabwean writers, and a non-fiction list with an exclusive focus on Zimbabwe.
Irene also researched, compiled, and edited Mothers of the Revolution, which recounts the war experiences of thirty rural Zimbabwean women, and Children in our Midst, Voices of Farmworkers Children, and has recently edited Children Crossing Borders, the stories of migrant children in the region. She has also worked with Zimbabwe Women Writers on a collection of interviews with women ex-combatants, Women of Resilience, and co-edited with Chiedza Musengez A Tragedy of Lives: Women in Prison in Zimbabwe.
She has been the editor of the Zimbabwe domain of Poetry International since 2003.