Cynthia L. Haven is an American literary scholar, author, critic, Slavicist, and journalist.
While at the University of Michigan, [1] she was awarded two prestigious Hopwood Awards and studied with Nobel poet Joseph Brodsky.
Her books include Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard, which the San Francisco Chronicle named one of the best books of 2018. The biography was also named a 2019 CHOICE Magazine Outstanding Academic Title. Her Czesław Miłosz: A California Life was a finalist for a Northern California Book Award. She is a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar.
Her books have been reviewed in The New York Review of Books,The Times Literary Supplement,World Literature Today,The San Francisco Chronicle,Harper's Magazine and many other publications.
Her Penguin Modern Classics anthology for the selected writings of René Girard was published in June 2023, and a short German anthology was published in 2022 with the Leipzig publisher Reclam, for its popular "Was bedeutet das alles?" series.
She has been a Milena Jesenská Journalism Fellow with the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna [2] and a visiting scholar at Stanford University's Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages while researching her book on French theorist René Girard. She was a Voegelin fellow at the Hoover Institution while working on her book on Nobel poet Joseph Brodsky and his translator, George L. Kline. She blogs at The Book Haven . She has written for a wide range of publications, including The Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times Book Review . [3] [2]
Czesław Miłosz was a Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat. He primarily wrote his poetry in Polish. Regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century, he won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. In its citation, the Swedish Academy called Miłosz a writer who "voices man's exposed condition in a world of severe conflicts".
Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky was a Russian and American poet and essayist. Born in Leningrad in the Soviet Union, Brodsky ran afoul of Soviet authorities and was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972, settling in the United States with the help of W. H. Auden and other supporters. He taught thereafter at Mount Holyoke College, and at universities including Yale, Columbia, Cambridge, and Michigan. Brodsky was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature "for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity". He was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 1991.
René Noël Théophile Girard was a French historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science whose work belongs to the tradition of philosophical anthropology. Girard was the author of nearly thirty books, with his writings spanning many academic domains. Although the reception of his work is different in each of these areas, there is a growing body of secondary literature on his work and his influence on disciplines such as literary criticism, critical theory, anthropology, theology, mythology, sociology, economics, cultural studies, and philosophy.
Tomas Venclova is a Lithuanian poet, prose writer, scholar, philologist and translator of literature. He is one of the five founding members of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group. In 1977, following his dissident activities, he was forced to emigrate and was deprived of his Soviet citizenship. Since 1980, he has taught Russian and Polish literature at Yale University. Considered a major figure in world literature, he has received many awards, including the Prize of Two Nations, and The Person of Tolerance of the Year Award from the Sugihara Foundation, among other honors.
Oscar Vladislas de Lubicz Milosz was a French language poet, playwright, novelist, essayist and representative of Lithuania at the League of Nations. His literary career began at the end of the nineteenth century during la Belle Époque and reached its high point in the mid-1920s with the books Ars Magna and Les Arcanes, in which he developed a highly personal and dense Christian cosmogony comparable to that of Dante in The Divine Comedy and John Milton in Paradise Lost. A solitary and unique twentieth-century metaphysician, his poems are visionary and often tormented. He was a distant cousin of Polish writer Czesław Miłosz, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980.
Linda Alouise Gregg was an American poet.
K. Ayyappa Paniker, sometimes spelt Ayyappa Panicker, was a Malayalam poet, literary critic, and an academic and a scholar in modern and post-modern literary theories as well as ancient Indian aesthetics and literary traditions. He was one of the pioneers of modernism in Malayalam poetry, where his seminal works like Kurukshethram (1960), is considered a turning point in Malayalam poetry. Many of Ayyappa Paniker's poems and his several essays were an important influence on later generations of Malayalam writers. His poems often reflected his deep concern for the environment with works such as Kadevide Makkale -Malayalam കാടെവിടെ മക്കളെ
Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator, known as 'one of American poetry's central spokespersons for the biosphere' and recognized as 'among the modern masters,' 'writing some of the most important poetry in the world today.' A 2019 elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, her books include numerous award-winning collections of her own poems, collections of essays, and edited and co-translated volumes of world writers from the deep past. Widely published in global newspapers and literary journals, her work has been translated into over fifteen languages.
Leonard E. Nathan, was an American poet, critic, and professor emeritus of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley where he retired in 1991.
Jessica Fisher is an American poet, translator, and critic. In 2012, she was awarded the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship in literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
American Poetry Center was founded in 1983 to bring the Spoken Word to a wide range of audiences. All programs were created, developed and implemented by Margaret Chew Barringer, under the auspices of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. For its first decade, Jerome J. Shestack, Esq. chaired the non-profit organization. In 2005, the organization legally changed its name to American INSIGHT as it prepared to reach new audiences through the latest advances in all-digital historic archival research, video production techniques, and Internet-based delivery systems.
A Treatise on Poetry is book-length poem in Polish by Nobel Prize-winning poet Czesław Miłosz on Polish literature, poetry and history from 1900 to 1949. Written in 1955 and 1956, it was first published in book form in 1957 and won that year's literary prize from Kultura. The Treatise is considered one of Miłosz's greatest works.
Frida Abramovna Vigdorova was a Soviet journalist, novelist and writer. She is mostly known for her record of the trial of poet Joseph Brodsky in 1964.
Daniel Weissbort was a poet, translator, multilingual academic and founder and editor of the literary magazine Modern Poetry in Translation. He died at the age of 78, and was buried in the Brompton Cemetery in west London.
Valentina Platonovna Polukhina was a British-Russian scholar, Emeritus Professor at Keele University, and the widow of Daniel Weissbort. She was the recipient of the A. C. Benson Medal and the Medal of Pushkin.
Clare Cavanagh is an American literary critic, a Slavist, and a translator. She is the Frances Hooper Professor in the Arts and Humanities and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Northwestern University. An acclaimed translator of contemporary Polish poetry, she is currently under contract to write the authorized biography of Czesław Miłosz. She holds a B.A from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an M.A. and PhD from Harvard University. Before coming to Northwestern University, she taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her work has been translated into Russian, Polish, Hungarian, French, Dutch, Chinese, and Japanese.
Robin Coste Lewis is an American poet, artist, and scholar. Poet Laureate Emeritus of Los Angeles, Lewis's debut poetry collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2015––the first time a poetry debut by an African-American had ever won the prize in the National Book Foundation's history, and the first time any debut had won the award since 1974. Critics called the collection "A masterpiece", "Surpassing imagination, maturity, and aesthetic dazzle", "remarkable hopefulness ... in the face of what would make most rage and/or collapse", "formally polished, emotionally raw, and wholly exquisite". Voyage of the Sable Venus was also a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, the Hurston-Wright Award, and the California Book Award. The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Buzz Feed, and Entropy Magazine all named Voyage one of the best poetry collections of the year. Flavorwire named the collection one of the 10 must-read books about art. And Literary Hub named Voyage one of the "Most Important Books of the Last Twenty Years". In 2018, MoMA commissioned both Lewis and Kevin Young to write a series of poems to accompany Robert Rauschenberg's drawings in the book Thirty-Four Illustrations of Dante's Inferno. Lewis is also the author of Inhabitants and Visitors, a chapbook published by Clockshop and the Huntington Library and Museum. Her photo-text collection, To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness, was published to great acclaim by Knopf in 2022. Awards included the PEN Award for Poetry, the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, and the California Book Award (finalist). Her fifth book, Archive of Desire, written in honor of Constantine P. Cavafy, is forthcoming by Knopf in 2025.
"On the Independence of Ukraine" is a controversial Ukrainophobic poem by Joseph Brodsky written in the early 1990s, on the occasion of the 1991 Declaration of Independence of Ukraine and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Philip Hoy is an English publisher, editor, book designer, and author. He is notably recognized as the founder of The Waywiser Press and the editor of Anthony Hecht's poems.
Irena Grudzińska-Gross is a Polish historian. After fleeing from her native Poland as a university student following the 1968 Polish political crisis, she obtained her PhD at the Columbia University and became a professor at Emory University and Boston University, as well as a resident scholar at Remarque Institute and Princeton University. A 2018 Guggenheim Fellow in Intellectual and Cultural History, she has written historical books on modern Europe, including The Scar of Revolution (1991), Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky: Fellowship of Poets (2009), and Golden Harvest (2011), the latter of which she co-wrote with her ex-husband Jan T. Gross.