Quincy Troupe

Poet, performer, and editor Quincy Troupe was born July 22, 1939, in St Louis, Missouri. His books of poetry include Transcircularities: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2002); Choruses: Poems (1999); Avalanche: Poems (1996); Weather Reports: New and Selected Poems (1991); Skulls along the River (1984); Snake-Back Solos: Selected Poems 1969-1977 (1979), which received an American Book Award; and Embryo Poems, 1967-1971 (1974). He is also the author of Miles: The Autobiography (1989), which received an American Book Award; James Baldwin: The Legacy (1989); and the memoir, Miles and Me: A Memoir of Miles Davis (2000). Troupe edited the anthology Giant Talk: An Anthology of Third World Writing (1975) and is a founding editor of Confrontation: A Journal of Third World Literature and American Rag and the founding Editorial Director of Code. In 1991, he received the Peabody Award for co-producing and writing the radio show The Miles Davis Radio Project. Among his honors and awards are fellowships from the National Foundation for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. He has taught at the University of California--San Diego, and Columbia University. He was the first official poet laureate of the state of California. Troupe lives with his wife, Margaret, and son Porter, in La Jolla, CA.

Li-Young Lee

Li-Young Lee was born in 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents. His father had been a personal physician to Mao Zedong while in China, and relocated the family to Indonesia, where he helped found Gamaliel University. In 1959, the Lee family fled the country to escape anti-Chinese sentiment and after a five-year trek through Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, they settled in the United States in 1964. Lee attended the Universities of Pittsburgh and Arizona, and the State University of New York at Brockport. He has taught at several universities, including Northwestern and the University of Iowa. He is the author of Behind My Eyes (Norton, 2008); Book of My Nights (2001), which won the 2002 William Carlos Williams Award; The City in Which I Love You (1991), which was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and Rose (1986), which won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award. His other work includes Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee (Edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, BOA Editions, 2006), a collection of twelve interviews with Lee at various stages of his artistic development; and The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (Simon and Schuster, 1995), a memoir which received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.

Valzhnya Mort

Valzhyna Mort, born in Minsk, Belarus (former Soviet Union), in 1981, made her American debut in 2008 with a poetry collection Factory of Tears (Copper Canyon Press), cotranslated by the husband-and-wife team of Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright and Pultizer Prize—winning poet Franz Wright. Library Journal described Mort's vision as "visceral, wistful, bittersweet, and dark." The New Yorker writes, "Mort strives to be an envoy for her native country, writing with almost alarming vociferousness about the struggle to establish a clear identity for Belarus and its language." Midwest Book Review calls Factory of Tears "a one-of-a-kind work of passion and insight." Mort's English translations of Eastern-European poets can be discovered in "New European Poets" anthology (Graywolf Press, 2008). Her own collection has been translated into Swedish and German. Mort received the Crystal of Vilenica award in Slovenia in 2005 and the Burda Poetry Prize in Germany in 2008. She has been a resident poet at Literarisches Colloquium in Berlin, Germany, and has received a fellowshiip at Gaude Polonia, Warsaw, Poland. Valzhyna is famed for her remarkable reading performances, which display a talent not normally associated withn one so young. She has also been the youngest person to be on the cover of Poets and Writers. Valzhyna writes in Belarusian at a time when efforts are being made to reestablish the traditional language, after governmental attempts to absorb it into the Russian language have been relinquished. She reads her poems aloud in both Belarusian and English. In addition to poetry readings, Valzyhyna speaks brilliantly on The Politics of Language and The Poetry of Revolution. Currently, she lives in Washington DC.

Elizabeth Bradfield

INTERVIEWS/ARTICLES "Welcome to Broadsided Press" by Jennifer Garfield in Prick of the Spindle, June 2008 Octavian Blaga's blog, February 6, 2008 MiPOesias Women of the Web, September 2007 Salka, July 2007 (English translation) Alaska Professional Communicators, December 2006 Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of Interpretive Work (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2008). She grew up in Tacoma, Washington, lived for a time on Cape Cod and in Alaska, and is currently perched in California, where she is a Wallace Stegner fellow in poetry at Stanford University. Elizabeth holds an MFA from the University of Alaska Anchorage, and has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference and the Vermont Studio Center. Her poetry has been published in such journals as The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Field, and is forthcoming in The Believer and Orion. She has completed a second book of poems about Arctic and Antarctic exploration, titled Approaching Ice that will be published in late 2009. Liz has taught creative writing at primary and secondary schools, universities, and in non-academic settings. In addition to leading a literary life, Liz works as a naturalist and web designer (www.pelagicdesign.com). Her work in both fields fuels her understanding and awareness of poetry as a means of interpreting the world. She is founder and editor of Broadsided (www.broadsidedpress.org).

Ekiwah Adler-Belendez

Ekiwah began writing poems and stories at the age of ten. He sent his writing to the Institute of Culture of Morelos (ICM), and upon reading Ekiwah's poems, the director of the Institute immediately offered to publish them. In June 2000 Soy (I Am) was published. Ekiwah was twelve-years-old. He presented the newly published book to a numerous audience at the Jardín Borda in Cuernavaca and became an immediate literary sensation. At fourteen, Palabras Inagotables (Never-ending Words), was published, and at sixteen, Weaver. The latter books were also presented at the Jardín Borda of Cuernavaca, causing Elena Poniatowska, one of Mexico's finest writers and journalists, to hail Ekiwah as "A young Prometheus chained." Ekiwah was awarded an Honorable Mention for the contest Premio Nacional de la Juventud, (National Prize for the Youth), by the Governor of the State of Morelos. He was twice granted a six-month scholarship by the FONCA (the National Institute for Support of the Arts)—an unusual occurrence as scholarships are not granted to persons his age. Ekiwah has since written and acted in three plays and has begun writing prose. Ekiwah, which means Warrior in the language of the Purepecha, is an appropriate appellation. He has been battling cerebral palsy since birth—born ten weeks early and weighing less than two pounds. Ekiwah writes, "I cannot walk by myself, yet in my poems I not only walk, but give myself license to have eight legs and experience movement. When I read a poem, on an ephemeral level I go to the places the poet describes." His warrior nature also allows him this wisdom: "I don't feel my cerebral palsy is a battle I have to win. I don't battle more or less than anyone else—my cerebral palsy is simply there. For me the connection of my name with my struggle has to do with the fact that I fought in my birth to live." Ekiwah's literary career continues to blossom. He is speaking and reading his poems at universities, high schools, and conferences in Mexico and the US. He has an extraordinary ability to relate to his audience, heart to heart. At a shared reading with poet Mary Oliver in Provincetown, Massachusetts, Oliver introduced Ekiwah stating that although his is indeed a powerful story, the poems themselves stand alone with a clear and distinct—and soulful—power of their own.