Oliver Strand is a visiting lecturer in Studio Foundation at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and Wood Shop Coordinator at Harvard University’s Dept. of Art, Film, and Visual Studies. He received an MFA from Brown University, where he received the Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop Prize for Innovative Writing. His poetry has appeared in Entropy, The Fanzine, Poor Claudia, Burning House Press, and the Spoon River Poetry Review.
Cheryl Clark Vermeulen received an M. F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop after a decade of experience in organizations focused on social change. Author of chapbooks This Paper Lantern and Dead-Eye Spring, she has published poems and translations in the journals The Bombay Gin, Transom, Small Po[r]tions, Drunken Boat, Caketrain, Jubilat, Sixth Finch, Third Coast, Solstice Literary Magazine, TWO LINES Online, DIAGRAM, EOAGH, Split Rock Review, among others, as well as the anthology Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico. She is an Assistant Professor in Liberal Arts at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where she initiated a Creative Writing Minor. She is also the Poetry Editor for the literary magazine Pangyrus. She was a finalist recipient for a Massachusetts Cultural Council’s Artist Fellowship. Originally from Illinois, she has lived in Jamaica Plain for twenty years, now with her husband, twin sons, and several pets. She loves, more than anything, to laugh.
A conversation about Spanish poet Federico García Lorca
Professor Maurer writes about Spanish poetry from Garcilaso to the so-called Generación del 27. Three of his major research interests are biography, textual criticism, and poetry’s relations with music and painting. His most recent book with Andrew A. Anderson, Federico Garcia Lorca en Nueva York y La Habana: Cartas y recuerdos (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2013).
Prof. Maurer is the editor of García Lorca’s Collected Poems and Selected Verse; his lectures (Conferencias); his early prose (Prosa inédita de juventud), and editor, with Andrew A. Anderson, of García Lorca’s complete letters (Epistolario completo). His translated books include Lorca’s Deep Song and Other Prose, In Search of Duende, and A Season in Granada, a collection of letters between Lorca and Salvador Dalí (Sebastian’s Arrows published by Swan Isle Press), The Art of Worldly Wisdom by Baltasar Gracián, an anthology of Gracián’s other writings (A Pocket Mirror for Heroes) and works by Juan Ramón Jiménez (The Complete Perfectionist: A Poetics of Work) (Spanish translation fall 2016, Madrid, Fundamentos). His biography of American painter and writer Walter Inglis Anderson won the 2003 Eudora Welty Award and the Non Fiction Prize of the Mississippi Academy of Arts and Letters.
He recently edited “Streets and Dreams,” a digital humanities project mapping Lorca’s movements in New York (1929-30) and co-curated, with Andres Soria Olmedo, the exhibition “Back Tomorrow: Lorca, Poet in New York” at the New York Public Library. Maurer is a Miembro Correspondiente of the Real Academia Española.
“Jardín deshecho: Lorca y el amor”, an exhibition of manuscripts, photos, letters and drawings related to love–the central theme of Lorca’s poetry and theater–will be at the Centro Federico García Lorca, Granada until January 6, 2020.
Donald Wellman has nine books of English-language poetry to his credit. He translates from several languages, German and French as well as Spanish. He is the English language translator of Antonio Gamoneda, Emilio Prados, and Roberto Echavarren. From German he has translated Yvan Goll’s Neila’s Evening Song: Last Poems of Yvan Goll; from French, Blaise Cendrars, The Prose of the Transsiberian and Little Joan of France. His academic expertise is in modern and contemporary poetry and poetics. His research and scholarship has concentrated on the works of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson and on figures associated with Black Mountain College and with emerging avant-gardes (conceptual poetry and language-centered poetry). Additionally, he has written on transnational literature, including the literature and culture of the Caribbean. A study of translation practice, Albiach / Celan / Reading Across Languages is available from Annex, 2017. His Expressivity in Modern Poetry is newly released from Fairleigh Dickinson UP, March 2019. Editing O.ARS, 1981-1993. Among the Neighbors, The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo is forthcoming.
His book of poetry include Fields (1995),a selection of twenty years previous work. In addition to a range of lyrics, Fields addresses themes related to childhood and youth in New Hampshire and Maine. It includes a “libretto” dedicated to labor history during the period of industrialization and establishment of the mills. An ethnographic bent characterizes much of his work, Baroque Threads and Prolog Pages were shaped from materials in the notebooks that were kept while living in Costa Rica, Mexico, and Spain. A North Atlantic Wall is drawn from pilgrimage experiences in Spain and Morocco, where he pursued portions of the Camino de Santiago and then continued to follow trails used by Albigensian refugees fleeing through the Pyrenees, at the conclusion of a 20-year crusade initiated by Pope Innocent III to eliminate Catharism. This soul journey concludes on the peaks of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco. Working with a close ethnographic focus on the rural poor, Cranberry Island Series is a collection addressing life in the Gulf of Maine. Essays are interleaved with a sampling of poetry dating from as early as the mid1970s, including poems of mourning for lost companions. Roman Exercises and Essay Poems were released in the last three years. These works are long serial poems, mixing prose and verse composition.
Wellman was born in Nashua, NH. He also identifies with Cranberry Island, Maine, his mother’s home. He graduated from Stuttgart American High School in Germany and the University of New Hampshire. After military service in Germany, he earned a Doctor of Arts from the University of Oregon. He now lives in Weare New Hampshire. He has two loving and precocious children, each an accomplished scholar and creative talent. He has just returned from residence in Madrid and visits to Istanbul and Morocco. The profile would seem to be that of a wanderer, but he identifies deeply with each of the places that have shaped his life.
Links
Unfortunately there was a mixup with the station and James and I could not do the show. I am hoping that James will accept to be my guest sometime in the not too distant future.
James Cook signifies and represents in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He educates and administers. He fathers-forth but presents change. He husbands. He did his student-teaching at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School. He is currently the principal of Gloucester High School. He taught English for eighteen years in between. He has been the co-editor of the literary magazine Polis, and his work has appeared in Wards of the Wards, Let the Bucket Down, Jacket2, Process, Gaff, and Underutilized Species.
Works:
antonioochoa.org 