Bradford Morrow | |
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Born | Baltimore, Maryland, U.S. | April 8, 1951
Occupation | Novelist |
Education | University of Colorado Boulder (BA) |
Literary movement | Postmodern |
Notable works | The Prague Sonata, The Forgers, Trinity Fields, Giovanni's Gift |
Website | |
bradfordmorrow |
Bradford Morrow (born April 8, 1951) is an American novelist, editor, essayist, poet, and children's book writer. Professor of literature and Bard Center Fellow at Bard College, he is the founding editor of Conjunctions literary magazine.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, on April 8, 1951, Morrow grew up in Littleton, Colorado, and, "after a decade of vagabonding from Honduras to France, Italy to England", settled in New York City, where he remains. [1] In 1966, he was selected by the Colorado Medical Association to serve with a small number of other teenage volunteers as a medical assistant with the Amigos de las Americas program, giving inoculations and working with health-care professionals in poor, very rural areas in Honduras. The following year, 1967–1968, Morrow was a foreign exchange student under the auspices of the American Field Service, completing his final year of high school at a Liceo Scientifico in Cuneo, Italy. After completing his B.A. in English Literature at the University of Colorado Boulder, 1969–1972, where he graduated summa cum laude with a Phi Beta Kappa, he received a Danforth Fellowship to continue graduate studies in English and comparative literature at Yale University. Upon leaving Yale, Morrow moved first to Ithaca, New York, where he began research on a full-scale bibliography of Wyndham Lewis, consulting the archives at Cornell University, and then to Santa Barbara, California, where he met John Martin, of Black Sparrow Press, who would publish the bibliography in 1978.
The literary biannual journal Conjunctions was conceived in late 1980 as "Morrow sat in Beat poet Kenneth Rexroth's library in Santa Barbara, California. The two friends had the idea to assemble a Festschrift for James Laughlin, the beloved editor of New Directions." After being published by David R. Godine (1985–1987) and Collier Books/Scribner (1988–1989), the journal was picked up by Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, which remains the journal's publisher. [2]
Morrow became Rexroth's literary executor in 1982, and has edited and introduced a number of the poet's books, including The Selected Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (1984), Classics Revisited (1986), World Outside the Window: Selected Essays of Kenneth Rexroth (1987), More Classics Revisited (1989), and with Sam Hamill coedited The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth (2002).
He has taught at Princeton, Brown, and Columbia Universities, as well as the Naropa Institute. Since 1990 he has been a professor of literature and Bard Center Fellow at Bard College.
The Review of Contemporary Fiction [3] published a "Bradford Morrow issue" in 2000, which included essays by Sven Birkerts, [4] Forrest Gander, [5] Patrick McGrath, [6] Robert Creeley, Joanna Scott, Brian Evenson, William T. Vollmann, Maureen Howard and others.
From the judges’ citation: “We were astonished to discover that Bradford Morrow has not already won this award, after 25 years of editing almost by himself one of our most distinctive and valuable literary magazines. We saw this year as a chance to correct that oversight. The range of writers he publishes (and often discovers) is a sort of who's who of 20th/21st century serious writing, and he's found a way to keep reinventing it. The fiction, poetry, criticism, drama, and art is sometimes described as 'experimental,' but we would also say innovative, daring, indispensable, and beautiful. Our best writers manifestly trust Bradford Morrow with their most ambitious work, and we can think of no higher praise for a literary magazine, or its editor.” [10]
Kenneth Patchen was an American poet and novelist. He experimented with different forms of writing and incorporated painting, drawing, and jazz music into his works, which have been compared with those of William Blake and Walt Whitman. Patchen's biographer wrote that he "developed in his fabulous fables, love poems, and picture poems a deep yet modern mythology that conveys a sense of compassionate wonder amidst the world's violence." Along with his friend and peer Kenneth Rexroth, he was a central influence on the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat Generation.
Kenneth Charles Marion Rexroth was an American poet, translator, and critical essayist. He is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement. Although he did not consider himself to be a Beat poet, and disliked the association, he was dubbed the "Father of the Beats" by Time magazine. Largely self-educated, Rexroth learned several languages and translated poems from Chinese, French, Spanish, and Japanese.
Muriel Rukeyser was an American poet, essayist, biographer, and political activist. She wrote poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism. Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her "exact generation".
Joseph Ward Moore was an American science fiction writer. According to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, "he contributed only infrequently to the field, [but] each of his books became something of a classic."
Conjunctions is a biannual American literary journal founded in 1981 by Bradford Morrow, who continues to edit the journal. In 1991, Bard College became the journal's publisher. Morrow received the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing in 2007. Conjunctions has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Whiting Foundation Prize for Literary Magazines, and work from its pages is frequently honored with prizes such as the Pushcart Prize, the O. Henry Award, and the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers.
Forrest Gander is an American poet, translator, essayist, and novelist. The A.K. Seaver Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts & Comparative Literature at Brown University, Gander won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2019 for Be With and is chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Eileen Tabios is a Filipino-American poet, fiction writer, conceptual/visual artist, editor, anthologist, critic, and publisher.
John Yau is an American poet and critic who lives in New York City. He received his B.A. from Bard College in 1972 and his M.F.A. from Brooklyn College in 1978. He has published over 50 books of poetry, artists' books, fiction, and art criticism.
Tom Clark was an American poet, editor and biographer.
Guernica / A Magazine of Art and Politics is an American online magazine that publishes art, photography, fiction, and poetry, along with nonfiction such as letters, investigative pieces, and opinion pieces on international affairs and U.S. domestic policy. It also publishes interviews and profiles of artists, writers, musicians, and political figures.
Eliot Weinberger is an American writer, essayist, editor, and translator. He is primarily known for his essays and political articles, the former characterized by their wide-ranging subjects and experimental style, verging on a kind of documentary prose poetry, and the latter highly critical of American politics and foreign policy. His work regularly appears in translation and has been published in more than thirty languages.
Paul Hoover is an American poet and editor born in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
AGNI is an American literary magazine founded in 1972 that publishes poetry, fiction, essays, reviews, interviews, and artwork twice a year in print and weekly online from its home at Boston University. Its coeditors are Sven Birkerts and William Pierce.
The Gettysburg Review is a quarterly literary magazine featuring short stories, poetry, essays and reviews. Work appearing in the magazine often is reprinted in "best-of" anthologies and receives awards.
A Public Space is a nonprofit triquarterly English-language literary magazine based in Brooklyn, New York. First published in April 2006, A Public Space publishes fiction, poetry, essays and art. The magazine's Focus portfolios have examined the writing of a different country each issue, covering the literature of Japan, Russia, and Peru in Issues 1-3.
Peter Constantine is a British and American literary translator who has translated literary works from German, Russian, French, Modern Greek, Ancient Greek, Italian, Albanian, Dutch, and Slovene.
Theodore Russell Weiss was an American poet, and literary magazine editor.
The PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing given by the PEN America is awarded biennially to "a magazine editor whose high literary standards and taste have, throughout his or her career, contributed significantly to the excellence of the publication he or she edits." It was established in 1993.
Elizabeth Bartlett was an American poet and writer noted for her lyrical and symbolic poetry, creation of the new twelve-tone form of poetry, founder of the international non-profit organization Literary Olympics, Inc., and known as an author of fiction, essays, reviews, translations, and as an editor.
Askold Melnyczuk is an American writer whose publications include novels, essays, poems, memoir, and translations. Among his works are the novels What Is Told, Ambassador of the Dead, House of Widows and Excerpt from Smedley's Secret Guide to World Literature. His work has been translated into German, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. Melnyczuk also founded the journal AGNI and Arrowsmith Press (2006).