2016 Ecuador Tour

PARTICIPANTS: 

Curtis BAUER is the author of poetry collections Fence Line (2004), which won the John Ciardi Poetry Prize, and The Real Cause for Your Absence (2013). He also translates poetry and prose from the Spanish: among his translations are Eros Is More, by Juan Antonio González Iglesias, Baghdad and Other Poems, by Jorge Gimeno and From Behind What Landscape, by Luis Muñoz. His poems have been translated into Spanish by José de María Romero Barea (España en dibujos) and Lorenzo Plana (Islas tierra adentro—a translation of Fence Line). He is the publisher and editor of Q Avenue Press Chapbooks and the translations editor for From the Fishouse and Waxwing Journal. He teaches Creative Writing and Comparative Literature at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas.  www.curtisbauer.net

Ana CASTILLO is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, editor, playwright, translator and independent scholar. She has contributed to periodicals and national magazines, including More and the Sunday New York Times, and edits La Tolteca, an arts and literary ‘zine. Among her titles are the novels So Far from God, The Guardians and Peel My Love like an Onion, Give It to Me, and the poetry collection I Ask the Impossible;  her novel Sapogonia was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her awards include an American Book Award for The Mixquiahuala Letters, an International Latino Book Award for Black Dove: Mamá, Mi’jo, and Me, a Carl Sandburg Award, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in fiction and poetry, and many others. She has held endowed teaching fellowships at De Paul, M.I.T, and the University of Utah, and teaches creative non-fiction at Middlebury’s Bread Loaf conference and at the American Indian Institute of the Arts, both in Santa Fe, NM.  www.anacastillo.net 

Colin CHANNER is the author of two novels, two novellas and a story cycle. He is also the editor of two anthologies of fiction and coeditor of an anthology of verse. His most recent book is the poetry collection Providential, which Eileen Myles describes as "one of the most lucid and telling poetry books of this exact time." Colin's work has appeared in literary journals such as Prairie Schooner and Harvard Review. Born in Kingston, Jamaica in the 1960s, Colin moved to New York in the 1980s, and spent two decades there. He now lives in Providence, RI, and teaches at Brown.  www.colinchanner.com

Sandra LUCKOW is a writer, producer and an award-winning filmmaker who teaches film production at Yale, Columbia and Barnard. Her first documentary, Sharp Edges, won the Louis Sudler Prize in the Performing and Creative Arts, and has aired worldwide. Belly Talkers, a cross-country road trip exploring the art of ventriloquism, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. A member of the International Documentary Association and the Directors Guild of America, she founded Ojeda Films, a company devoted to independent and personal filmmaking; she was also an associate director on ABC’s One Life to Live. The documentary That Way Madness Lies… about her brother’s paranoid schizophrenia is in post-production.

Christopher Merrill has published seven collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and translations; and six books of nonfiction, among them, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, and Self-Portrait with Dogwood. His writings have been translated into nearly forty languages; his journalism appears widely; his honors include a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French government, numerous translation awards, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial and Ingram Merrill Foundations. As director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa since 2000, Merrill has conducted cultural diplomacy missions to more than fifty countries. He served on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO from 2011-2018, and in April 2012 President Barack Obama appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities. www.christophermerrillbooks.com

ZZ PACKER is the author of the short story collection Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, a PEN/Faulkner finalist and a New York Times Notable Book. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Story, Ploughshares, Zoetrope and The Best American Short Stories 2000 and 2004 and have been read on NPR’s Selected Shorts. Her nonfiction has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, The American Prospect, Essence, O, The Believer and Salon. Named one of America’s Young Innovators by Smithsonian Magazine and one of America’s Best Young Novelists by Granta, she was, in 2010, one of The New Yorker magazine's "20 under 40" rising fiction writers. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.  ZZ Packer has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Johns Hopkins, Tulane, Vassar, San Jose State, the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas- Austin, at Stanford, and elsewhere.  

 

Happening Now

  • Congratulations to our colleagues Jennifer Croft and Aron Aji, who are among those serving as judges for the National Book Awards this year, in their case in the category of translated literature.

  • Ranjit Hoskote’s speech at the 2024 Goa Literary Festival addresses the current situation in Gaza.

  • In NY Times, Bina Shah worries about the state of Pakistani—and American—democracy.

  • “I went to [Ayodhya] to think about what it means to be an Indian and a Hindu... ”  A new essay by critic and novelist Chandrahas Choudhury.

  • In the January 2024 iteration of the French/English non-fiction site Frictions, T J Benson writes about “Riding Afrobeats Across the World.” Also new, a next installment in the bilingual series featuring work by students from Paris VIII’s Creative Writing program and the University of Iowa’s NFW program.

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