Tiferet Journal Advisory Board
In 1976, Coleman Barks began translating the poems of Jelaluddin Rumi, a thirteenth-century Sufi mystic and poet as famous in the Islamic world as Shakespeare is in the West. Today, Coleman Barks is the principal translator bringing Rumi’s poems into contemporary English. To date, he has published sixteen volumes of Rumi’s poetry, including The Glance: Songs of Soul-Meeting (1999) and The Essential Rumi (1995). A poet in his own right, a publisher, and teacher of contemporary American poetry, he taught for thirty-four years at the University of Georgia, Athens, where he was namedPoet and Professor Emeritus of English. Currently, he collaborates in performances with musicians, including members of the Paul Winter Consort. His work was featured in two PBS series with Bill Moyers, The Language of Life (1995) and The Sounds of Poetry (1999). Born in Tennessee in 1937, Coleman Barks lives in Athens, Georgia.
Martin J. Blaser has been the Addison B. Scoville Professor of Medicine and director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University and at the Nashville Veterans Affairs Medical Center since 1989. He has worked at the Rockefeller University, the University of Colorado, the Denver Veterans Administration Medical Center, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and St. Paul's Hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He received a B.A. with honors in economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1969 and an M.D. from New York University in 1973. He holds several patents and is a member of numerous professional societies and editorial boards. He has written more than 300 articles and edited several.
Diane Bonavist has been pursuing the transcendent since she can remember. Her historical fiction is concerned with the relationships between people and their chosen deities. She is a writing guide, a Reiki master, and a practitioner of Siddha Yoga, a spiritual path in which the goddess Matrika -- the sacred power behind every sound, every letter—is worshipped. Diane lives on Cape Cod where she is at work on her fourth novel.
Elizabeth Cox has completed three novels: Familiar Ground , The Ragged Way People Fall Out Of Love and Night Talk. Night Talk won the Lillian Smith Award given by the Southern Regional Council. This award chooses books that raise the social consciousness and promote harmony between the races. Her collection of short stories, Bargains in the Real World, was published in March, 2001. One of these stories, "The Third of July," was read at Symphony Space in NYC, performed by Joan Allen.Cox taught creative writing at Duke University for seventeen years, where she was Professor of the Practice of Writing. She has taught as Lecturer in the graduate writing programs at the University of Michigan, Tufts University, Boston University, and in the undergraduate program at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Last year she taught at MIT in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, and was chosen as the Jack Kerouac Writer-in Residence at UMass-Lowell. She is also core faculty in the Low Residency Graduate Writers Program at Bennington College.
C. Michael Curtis is senior editor and edits virtually all Atlantic fiction, the Letters to the Editor, and other pieces. He also screens book-length first serial submissions and most unsolicited stories, which number some 12,000 manuscripts annually. Under his direction The Atlantic Monthly's fiction is nominated for a National Magazine Award virtually every year; in 1988 The Atlantic won this prestigious prize. Year after year short stories from the magazine are chosen for inclusion in the important annual prize collections. Curtis himself was the editor of American Stories: Fiction From The Atlantic Monthly. 1990. A second volume came out the following year, and 1992 saw the publication of Contemporary New England Stories. A companion volume, Contemporary West Coast Stories, was published in the fall of 1993. A fifth collection, entitled God: Stories, will be published in December, 1998, by Houghton Mifflin. His own essays, articles, reviews, and poems have been published in The Atlantic, The New Republic, National Review, and Sport, among other periodicals. Curtis is also renowned for his teaching: he has taught creative writing, ethics, grammar, and other subjects for more than thirty years at Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Tufts, Boston University, Bennington, and elsewhere.
Roxanna Font is Poetry Editor of Bellevue Literary Review. She holds a BA from the University of Michigan and an MFA from New York University. She has been awarded writing residencies from the Hedgebrook Writers' Retreat and The Djerassi Resident Artists Program. Formerly the Editor-in-Chief of Washington Square and the Associate Publisher of the small publisher Limelight Editions, she currently resides in San Francisco, where she is the Associate Editor of The Commonwealth Club of California. She has an extensive background in the dramatic arts--including acting, directing and dramaturgy--and is the former Assistant to the Artistic Director of the Spanish Theatre Repertory in New York.
Gray Jacobik’s book, The Double Task, University of Massachusetts Press (1998), received The Juniper Prize and was nominated for The James Laughlin Award and The Poet’s Prize. The Surface of Last Scattering, published by Texas Review Press (1999), was selected by X. J. Kennedy as the winner of the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize. Brave Disguises won the AWP Poetry Series Award for 2001 (University of Pittsburgh Press 2002). She is a distinguished professor of literature at Eastern Connecticut State University.
Thomas E. Kennedy's books include seven volumes of fiction, an essay collection, four of literary criticism and several anthologies. His most recent novel -- the 2nd in his Copenhagen Quartet -- appeared in fall 2003, entitled Bluett's Blue Hours; the other three volumes in the Quartet are Kerrigan's Copenhagen, A Love Story (2002), Greene's Summer (2004), and Breathwaite's Fall (in progress, scheduled for 2005 publication). His book of essays on writing, Realism and Other Illusions, appeared in 2002 from Wordcraft of Oregon. His stories, essays, poems, travel pieces, interviews, reviews and translations from the Danish appear regularly in American and European periodicals and anthologies and have won several prizes, including the O Henry, Pushcart, Angoff, Gulf Coast and European. He has published widely on the work of Andre Dubus, including a book-length study of Dubus's short fiction. Kennedy lives in Copenhagen.
Marjorie Keyishian Born in Brooklyn, Marjorie Deiter Keyishian has published poetry, fiction, and articles in a wide variety of journals, including Fiction, The Literary Review, The English Record, New York Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, and The New York Times, among many others. Her books include Stephen King, A Young Person’s Biography of the Popular Author. For eleven years she served as editor of the The New Jersey Journal of Poets and is now Contributing Editor to The Literary Review. She teaches courses in poetry and fiction at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey.
Jerome Lowenstein is a Professor of Medicine at NYU School of Medicine, Director (and founder)of the Humanistic Aspects of Medical Education program at NYU School of Medicine, Co-director of the Patient Narrative course for First Year medical students, Editor for non-fiction of the Bellevue Literary Review, a writer (science, essays, and fiction), and a member of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism (Reconstructionist).
Kermit Moyer is the author of Tumbling, a collection of stories (University of Illinois Press) and Professor of Literature at American University in Washington, DC, where he currently directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing. His short stories have appeared in such periodicals as The Georgia Review, The Sewanee Review, The Crescent Review, The Southern Review, and The Hudson Review.
Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, is Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of the Bellevue Literary Review. She is the author of Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue, (Beacon Press, 2003). Her writings have been selected for Best American Essays, Best American Science Writing, and the Missouri Review Editor’s Prize. Ofri is an editor ofthe award-winning textbook, The Bellevue Guide to Outpatient Medicine. She divides her time between seeing patients at Bellevue, teaching, editing, and writing.
James Odell is founding editor of Parabola Magazine – among his many other accomplishments.
Peter Selgin's stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Glimmer Train Stories, Missouri Review, The Literary Review, South Dakota Review, Madison Review, Alkali Flats, Oasis, Salon.com, Chicago Sun-Times, Newsday Sunday Magazine and elsewhere. His children¹s book, S.S. Gigantic Across the Atlantic, was a Scholastic Book Club selection and won the Lemme Award for best children¹s book, 2000. He is a co-author of Writing Fiction: a Practical Guide by New York¹s Acclaimed Writing Workshop (Bloomsbury): Essays By Instructors at Gotham Writer¹s Workshop, where he teaches the Master Class in fiction.
J.P. Seaton is Professor of Chinese at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The first of his several books of Chinese poetry in translation, The Wine of Endless Life: Taoist Drinking Songs from the Yuan Dynasty, (Ardis, 1978, White Pine, 1985,1991) is celebrating its twentieth year in print. His most recent is I Don't Bow to Buddhas: Selected Poems of Yuan Mei (Copper canyon, 1997). His work has been recently anthologized in A Book of Luminous Things, edited by Czeslaw Milosz, in the Norton Anthology World Poetry, and in The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry, edited by J.D. McClatchy. His translation of selected chapters of the Chuang Tzu, with the poet Sam Hamill, appeared in May of 1998 from Shambhala. He collaborated with Ursula K. LeGuin on her version of the Tao Te Ching.
David Steinmetz, a soul therapist, is an Integrated Kabbalistic Healer, a Family Constellations and Soul Memory Discovery facilitator, David is a member and a past Chair of the Board of Directors of ALEPH: The Alliance for Jewish Renewal. He had an earlier career in the diamond business where he served as the President of Diamex, Inc. and as the Chair of the Diamond Dealers Club Gemmological Committee.
Daniel Tobin’s poems have appeared in Stand, Poetry, The American Scholar, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, Double Take, The Tampa Review, Poetry Ireland Review, and many other journals. Among his awards are the The Discovery/The Nation Award, The Robert Penn Warren Award, a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Robert Frost Fellowship. A book of poems, Where the World is Made, was co-winner of the 1998 Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize. A second book of poems, Double Life, is forthcoming from the Louisiana State University Press (2004). The University Press of Kentucky published is book of criticism, Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, and The Notre Dame University Press will publish The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, which he has edited (2004). He work has been anthologized in Hammer and Blaze, The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets, and The Norton Introduction to Poetry. He is presently Chair of the Writing, Literature, and Publishing Department at Emerson College in Boston.
Ronna Wineberg is married with three children and lives in New York City. She earned a B.A. with distinction from the University of Michigan, a J.D. from the University of Denver College of Law, and was an associate editor of The Denver Law Journal. She has been the John Atherton Scholar in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the recipient of fellowships to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Ragdale Foundation, and her short story collection was a finalist for the 2000 Willa Cather Fiction Prize. She is Fiction Editor of The Bellevue Literary Review. Her fiction has appeared in American Way, Colorado Review, South Dakota Review, Midstream, Writers Forum, Crone's Nest, Colorado Daily, and in an anthology, A Tennessee Landscape, People and Places. One of her stories won a prize in the Denver Women's Press Club Short Story Contest. She was a member of the editorial team of Daughters, when it was published by American Girl, and her essays appeared there. An essay on the 9/11 attack appeared in River Oak Review. She teaches writing at New York University, has taught creative writing at the University School of Nashville Evening Classes for Adults, and is past President of the Board of Directors of the Tennessee Writers Alliance. Recent recognition (as of April 2002) includes a story named a finalist and receiving an Honorable Mention in the Moment Magazine-Karuma Foundation Short Story Contest. Also, in the past few months her stories have been taken by Berkeley Fiction Review, So To Speak, Sou'wester, Writers Forum, Controlled Burn, Whiskey Island, and Licking River Review.