Bios

 

Tom Bradley. Various of the five novels which comprise Tom Bradley's Sam Edwine Pentateuch have been nominated for The Editor's Book Award and The New York University Bobst Prize, and one was a finalist in The AWP Award Series in the Novel. His short fiction has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. One or two stories were translated and published in Japanese, or so he's been told.

By invitation, he has contributed to Inking Through the Soul, an anthology of authors' reflections on their craft, to be published by Tarcher/ Putnam in September, 2001.

Tom's stories and essays appear in McSweeney's, Salon.com, FrontPage, Jack Magazine, Exquisite Corpse, RealPoetik, LitKit, milk, Ralph, Two Girls, Eyeshot, Tower of Babel, Oyster Boy, Melic Review, Spoken War, Unlikely Stories, Blue Moon, and Heresiarch, the mighty journal of anti-theology out of Belfast.

Excerpts and reviews of Tom's books, links to his online work, plus a couple hours of recorded readings, are posted at his website--
http://literati.net/Bradley.

   

 
Ronnie Burk is the author of seven titles of surrealist poetry including Mandragora, Indios Verdes, Pandemonium and Man-of-War. His writing is included in recent issues of Orpheus Grid, Heaven Bone, Magnus, Blue Feathers, as well as in Andrei Codrescu's Thus Spake the Corpse (Black Sparrow Press). He lives in San Francisco.
   
  Andy Clausen. His new book 40th Century Man, Selected Verse: 1996-1996 is available from Autonomedia. PO Box 568; Williamsburgh Station, Brooklyn, NY 11211-0568.
   
  Allen Hibbard has recently lived in Cairo and Damascus. Now he lives in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. He wrote a book on Paul Bowles' short stories (Twayne, 1993) and edited Conversations with William S. Burroughs (University Press of Mississippi, 2000). His reviews, stories, essays and translations have appeared in Sulfur, Grand Street, The Cimarron Review, Nexus, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Digest of Middle East Studies, Rain Taxi, and elsewhere. Currently he is working on a biography of Alfred Chester tentatively titled Sad Angel.
   
 

Ernie Hilbert recently completed a doctorate in English Language and Literature at Oxford University, where he earlier completed a Master's Degree in Advanced Research Methods in English Literature and founded the Oxford Quarterly. He hopes to publish his doctoral thesis, Dark Earth, Dark Heavens: British Apocalyptic Writing in the First World War and its Aftermath with Yale University Press this year.

While Chief Editor at the Oxford Quarterly, he published the current Poet Laureate of Britain and many Pulitzer Prize-winners, including David Mamet and Adrienne Rich; he also recruited Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney and novelist Iris Murdoch for the magazine's advisory board. He later worked as an acquisitions editor for the Beat and punk culture magazine Long Shot founded in 1982 by Danny Shot and Allen Ginsberg.

A widely published poet and critic, his work has appeared recently in American Writing, The Boston Review, LIT, The American Scholar, and William and Mary Review. He serves on the Board of Advisors for NowCulture.com, and he is currently the poetry editor for Random House's online literary magazine Bold Type.

   
  RhondaK, a devoted disciple of Oscar Wilde's excesses, is often accused of being intimidating but blames it on others people's failure to honor Wilde's teachings, such as, "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it." When not working as Co-editor of NakedPoetry.com, she labors as a librarian and often wakes up with impressions of books temporarily scarring her flesh. The last book she slept with was Radzinsky's The Rasputin File. She is very, very promiscuous with literature. See http://www.sybil.org/rhondak for a bibliography of other work.
   
 

Michael Largo has published three novels: Southern Comfort ("Largo's writing manifests relentless and unremitting nerve,"Publishers Weekly," 9/99); Lies Within: ("Brilliant dialogue, convincing characters...echoes of Flannery O'Connor and Eudora Welty," Library Journal, 3/99); and his newest, Welcome to Miami (see Amazon.com for ordering information).

He's also grateful to have had his short fiction appear recently in the following: Spark-Online, Eclectica, Melic Review, Trout Magazine, Pif Magazine, The Best of Pif Offline, Exodus, Conflicting Spectrums, Poet's Cut, Bonfire, Duct-Tape Press, Morpo Review, Burn, Pulp Fiction, Mocha Memoirs, Yellow Dog Magazine, Isi Bongo, Big Bridge, Nuketown, Bloody Muse, Indite Circle, Forbidden Panda, New Earth Review, Manx Fiction, Conspire, 2RiverView, Solas, Wings, StickyKeys, Pauper, Shank, Writer's Choice, Harpweaver, Ashtray Angels, Plaintext, Creativity Magazine, Unlikely Stories, PocolPress Anthology: Unusual Circumstances, and others.

 
  Robert La Vigne
   

 

 

 

 

 

Louise Landes Levi: I was born on the day Staffenburg attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler. I have never understood the capitalist/corporate structure & have, for most my adult life existed external to it. I grew up in a Joint family, there were a lot of Polish, Czechoslovakian, Rumanian, French & even African people in the household. My parents' house was near the first United Nations. A lot of diplomats & their 'corps' would end up at my parent's house. My mother was generous w. strangers. She suffered a mental illness which made her hate me. I was often beaten & did not know what a 'real' mother was . I never had anyone to talk to. A parapsychologist told me that when I was born my mother rejected me so I decided to die through starvation. I didn't die because my 'fast' was interpreted as an illness. It was called Celiac & I was called the Banana Baby because all I cld. eat was BANANAS.

My father did not intervene in my mother's treatment of me. He read books & collected them & knew a lot about art & about flowers. He sold fabric w. flower & other designs I was very sick & spent a lot of time in bed looking at the ceiling. I found a mountain there & looked at it w. great concentration. At five my mother dropped me on my head & I missed a year of school. All this contributed to my strange state. I started writing poetry very early on & saw light coming fr. the letters when I tried to learn the alphabet. After that I got involved w. writing poetry. My first anthology at the age of 8 disappeared. It was written w. red & blue crayon on grey paper. Luckily I had committed some of my work to memory & I still can remember it on certain occasions.

   
  David Meltzer Author of (some say) too many books of poetry. The most recent collection is Arrows: Selected Poetry 1957-1992 [Black Sparrow Press, 1995]. During the 60s wrote erotica, actually devoted 1969 to writing 10 books which I classify as agit-smut. Orf was reprinted by Masquerade Books, 1993; The Agency Trilogy was reprinted by Richard Kasak Books, 1994; Under, a new fiction was published by Rhinoceros Books, 1995. Have edited many theme-driven anthologies; the most current are Reading Jazz (Mercury House, 1995) and a companion volume, Writing Jazz (published by Mercury House in 1999). Teach in the graduate Poetics and undergraduate Humanities programs at New College of California. Keep waiting for the guys from Publishers Clearing House to keep their promise to knock on my door (don't have a bell) and make me a millionaire.
   
 

Imola Nagy. I born in Transylvania, in 1966.
I've studied mathematics at the college and philosophy at the university and graduated in 1991.
I wrote my thesis about Pascal and Kierkegaard, being interested in their leap into the paradox.
I've translated excerpts from philosophical works from Hungarian into Romanian. (Dilthey, Hobbes) and from Romanian into Hungarian (Eliade, Cioran). Some of the translations were published as well as smaller literary works by me.

I live in New York since 1992 and work as an interpreter/translator. I wrote articles, poems and translated Peter Lamborn Wilson's Pirate Utopias into Hungarian, which was published in Budapest/Hungary in 1997. I started in 1998 a desert-travel log-series in Morocco and later in the Southwestern American deserts. As an ongoing project, I'm translating Rumi, 13th century Persian mystic into Hungarian. A major Transylvanian publishing house is interested in printing a book out of it.

   

 

Valery Oisteanu is a writer and artist with international flavor. Born in Russia (1943) and educated in Romania. He adopted Dada and Surrealism as a philosophy of art and life. Emigrating to New York City in 1972, he has been writing in English for the past 28 years.
He is the author of 10 books of poetry, a book of short fiction and a book of essays in progress.

As a collagist he was featured in John Digby's "Collage Handbook" published by Thames & Hudson. He has exhibited in New York and abroad. His work is in many international permanent collections. He often illustrates his writings with Surrealist collages.

As a performer VO is well known to downtown NYC audiences, performing every season with the exception of the summer, when he goes on tour abroad. He is always well received in theaters and clubs specializing in poetry and music where he presents original Zen Dada performances in his unmistakable style "Jazzoetry."

As a photographer he specializes in portraits of famous literatis and artists such as Borges, Bowles, Ionesco, Paz, Warhol, Raushenberg, etc. As a video documentarian he wrote produced and filmed a five part documentary for European TV called "Rhythms and Rituals in Bali."

   

 
Miriam Sagan's most recent book of poetry is Inadvertent Alter (La Alameda). She is also the author of Dirty Laundry: 100 Days in a Zen Monastery with Robert Winson (New World). She is the editor of the e-zine Santa Fe Poetry Broadside.
   
  Mike Sentance. He hasn’t written anything, and only reads in the bathroom. But he runs Radio Clambake. His website is http://listen.to/nazznomad/.
   
  Andrew Shelley. Born 1962 in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, UK. Has done various jobs including reading English at Cambridge, doing a Ph.D on Beckett at Oxford. Abandoned academia in 1993 to write poetry. Currently drafting a fourth (unpublished) collection of poems. Publications include Peaceworks (The Many Press, 1996) and Requiem Tree, forthcoming from Spectacular Diseases. Has lived and worked in Greece, Turkey and Italy.
   
  Sam Silva, a poet-writer, has been a columnist for Spring Lake News for approximately 10 yrs. He has published a total of ten chapbooks and numerous audio tapes with five legitimate small press markets. He's published no fewer than 150 poems in a variety of literary and other magazines including Samisdat, St. Andrew's Review, Poetry Motel, Boulliabaise, The E.C.U. Rebel, Paranasus, Sow's Ear, Dog River Review, Thirteen Magazine, Brouhaha, Pembroke Magazine, Sandhill's Review, Third Lung Review, Synesthesia, and many others. Sam has been nominated a total of seven times for the Pushcart Award by three separate literary markets. He's a recipient of Emerging Artist Grant and Mini Grant from the Arts Council of Fay. He is a regularly featured guest on the WFSS Literary program A Time to Listen. In addition to publishing poetry, he has published numerous essays and short fiction, and is currently a regular contributor and political essayist to the alternative central Florida publication Impact. Many of Sam's books are available through Barnsandnoble.com, or check out http://www.readsamsilva.com/. You may reach Sam at samsilva54@nc.rr.com.
   
  Mike Topp is an aristocratic rebel whose high-spirited life has captured the imagination of Europe. He attended Harrow and Cambridge, where he was a good student and a great athlete. A deformed foot has only increased his determination to excel.
   

 


Portrait by Ira Cohen

Roberto Valenza is well known as a poet around the world. Wherever he has lived he has helped in keeping the oral and printed tradition of poetry alive. Stationed in Seattle for the last 15 years he is a co-founder of "Red Sky Poetry Theatre" plus long running Artistic Festivals and performance spaces. He has been published in many small press mags and chapbooks.

Currently he is having a large book of his work published, "Poems and Songs of an American Tibetan" Here is a part of the intro by Ira Cohen. "Valenza, Akasha agent & charter member of the Kathmandu Starstreams Gang, is a poet who specializes in the real deal. No armchair Buddhist, he has devoted himself to working through the Dharma first hand, body and soul.

A poet of the crazy wisdom school, a solo streetman. His Rock & Roll Hell's Kitchen rhetoric underlies his deep understanding of the spiritual path & makes these poems ring like Quasimodo's bells in the long night's dreaming."

You may reach Roberto at robertovalenza@hotmail.com.

   

 Robert LaVigne's portrait of John Weiners
John Wieners was born in Milton, Mass. in 1934 and received his A.B. from Boston College in 1954. He studied at Black Mountain College under Charles Olson and Robert Duncan from 1955 to 1956. He returned to Boston where he brought out three issues of a literary magazine, Measure, over the next several years. From 1958 to 1960 he lived in San Francisco and was an active participant in the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance movement. He returned to Boston in 1960, and divided his time between there and New York City, over the next five years. In 1965 he enrolled in the Graduate Program of the State University of New York at Buffalo, and worked as a teaching fellow. He has worked as an actor and stage manage at the Poet's Theater, Cambridge, and has had three of his plays performed at the Judson Poet's Theater, N.Y. Since 1970 he has lived and worked in Boston, where he has been active in publishing and education cooperatives, political action committees, and the gay liberation movement. (Bio excerpted from John Wieners' Selected Poems 1958-1984 from Black Sparrow Press).
   
  Suzi Winson is a very busy woman. She publishes Fish Drum Magazine and assorted poetry and fringe art books, produces short films, does a clown act on the streets of Paris, writes for politicians, CEO's, and comediennes, runs a small business here and there, and swings on a flying trapeze. She's having a good time.
   

 
Nina Zivancevic is a poet, fiction writer and a scholar-translator who resides between New York and Paris. But her main home remains the hidden "house of language", as Heidegger would have it. Andrei Codrescu said of her "Among us bilingual guerrillas, she is the chief flame-maker."Charles Simic claims that she is "one of the most interesting and original poets in Eastern Europe" who taught herself a highly idiomatic American by writing original poetry in it.

"More or Less Urgent" is available through New Rivers Press, 420 N 5th St. Apt. 910, Minn. 55401