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News from Nahid Rachlin
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Date Posted: April 15
Nahid Rachlin's memoir, Persian Girls, was released in paperback edition by Penguin in January, 2008.
In a story of ambition, oppression, hope, heartache, and sisterhood, Persian Girls traces Rachlin's coming of age in Iran and her domineering father-her tangled family life, and her relationship with her older sister, and unexpected soul mate, Pari. Both girls refused to accept traditional roles prescribed for them under Muslim cultural laws. They devoured forbidden books. They had secret romances. But then things quickly changed. After narrowly avoiding an unhappy match herself with a man her parents chose for her, Nahid came to America, where she found literary success. Back in Iran, however, Pari's dreams fell to pieces.
For more information about Persian Girls and upcoming readings, please visit www.nahidrachlin.com.
Nahid Rachlin will be teaching in :
PARIS WRITERS WORKSHOP, Paris, France http://www.pariswritersworkshop.org; 5-day Fiction Workshop, July 6-11, 9:00 AM-12 PM
and:
Provincetown, Mass, U.S.A
PROVINCETOWN WORK CENTER, http://www.fawc.org 5-day Fiction/Memoir Workshop, August 10-15, 1:00 PM-4:00 PM; For more, go to their website, click on summer program 2008 |
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News from Sue William Silverman
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Date Posted: April 15
The premiere of the Lifetime television movie based on Sue William Silverman's memoir, Love Sick: One Woman's Journey Through Sexual Addiction, will premiere Saturday, April 19 (check local listings). The movie stars Sally Pressman (of the series "Army Wives") and David James Elliott (of the series JAG). In conjunction with the movie, W. W. Norton has released a paperback edition of Love Sick. For more information, please visit www.suewilliamsilverman.com |
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News from Yerra Sugarman
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Date Posted: March 3
Yerra Sugarman's new collection of poems, The Bag of Broken Glass, was published on January 31, 2008, by The Sheep Meadow Press. More information about the book is available at http://yerrasugarman.blogspot.com/
Yerra Sugarman received the 2005 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for her first collection, Forms of Gone. Her honors also include a “Discovery”/The Nation Prize, a Chicago Literary Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Bogin Award and Cecil Hemley Award. Her poems, translations and articles have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Nation, ACM, Pleiades, and in French journals, among others. |
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News from Leora Skolkin-Smith
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Date posted: February 22
The new film based on Leora Skolkin-Smith's Edges, a novel edited and published by the late Grace Paley is now in film production. Both Jordan and Israel have agreed to let Triboro Pictures film inside occupied territories. The film is set in a 1963 Jerusalem before the Six Day War. Edges has been retitled The Fragile Mistress for the film, and includes additional material not appearing the published edition.
For more information please visit the film’s official website: www.fragilemistress.com |
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Congratulations to Maxim D. Shrayer
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Maxim D. Shrayer is a winner of the 2007 National Jewish Book Award in Eastern European Studies (the Ronald S. Lauder Award), as well as a runner-up for the 2007 National Jewish Book Award in Anthologies and Collections, both for his Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Dual Identity in Prose and Poetry. |
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Congratulations to Albert Russo
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Please join PEN in congratulating Albert Russo, whose recent book Shalom Tower Syndrome (Xlibris, 2007) was selected as a finalist in the Gay/Lesbian Fiction & Literature category of the National Best Books 2007 Awards. USABookNews.com announced over 140 winners and finalists of Best Books 2007 on November 1, 2007. |
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News from Carmen Firan
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Born in Utopia: An Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Romanian Poetry was
recently published by Talisman House. The anthology, edited by Carmen Firan, presents one
hundred years of poetry. The book brings together established, well-known, original, and simply interesting voices, and
provides an overview of a variety of twentieth-century Romanian poetry,
including Paul Celan, Tristan Tzara, and other avant-garde poets.
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News from Maxim D. Shrayer
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Maxim D. Shrayer's book, Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration was recently published by the Syracuse University Press. An emigration story, Waiting for America
explores the rapid expansion of identity at the cusp of a new, American
life. Told in a revelatory first-person narrative, Waiting for America
is also a vibrant love story, in which the romantic protagonist is torn
between Russian and Western women. Through his colorful Austrian and
Italian misadventures, he experiences the shock, thrill, and anonymity
of encountering Western democracies, running into European roadblocks
while shedding Soviet taboos. As he anticipates entering a new life in
America, he movingly describes the baggage that exiles bring with them,
from the inescapable family traps and ties to the sweet cargo of memory.
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Congratulations to Marilyn Hacker
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Please join PEN in congratulating Marilyn Hacker, the winner of the
2007 NPS Robert Fagles Translation Prize. Ms. Hacker's work, King of a Hundred Horsemen, is a translation of French poet Marie Etienne. It will be published by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux in 2008. The National Poetry Series
established the Robert Fagles Translation Prize in 2007. This
award will be given annually to a translator who has shown exceptional
skill in the translation of contemporary international poetry into
English.
Marilyn Hacker is the author of eleven books of poems, including Desesperanto and Essays on Departure: New and Selected Poems, and of seven published books of translations from the French, including She Says by Vénus Khoury-Ghata and Birds and Bison by Claire Malroux. Charlestown Blues by Guy Goffette was released from the University of Chicago Press this month.
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News from Allan Graubard
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Woman Bomb/Sade, a new play by Allan Graubard, will have a staged reading at the hotINK International Festival of Staged Readings, January 26, 4 p.m., 721 Broadway, Loewe Theater, NYU Tisch School for the Arts.
A woman walks into a public place and detonates a bomb. But what of words, the words we use to describe the act for those who werent there, including the writer? The bombing falls to the background, the description to the foreground -- and the act becomes a shadow stalking the words that describe it. It is this shadow, this stalking, that we offer you here in the rise of murderous suicide as a political weapon. |
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Poem in Your Pocket Day
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We invite you to participate in the sixth annual Poem in Your Pocket Day in New York City on Thursday, April 17, 2008. This year the Poetry Society of America and the New York Public Library have joined with the Mayor’s Office, the Department of Education, and the Department of Cultural Affairs, as lead partners.
New Yorkers are encouraged to carry a poem and share it with friends, family, co-workers and classmates. There will be poetry readings and workshops in New York City public schools, senior centers, out-of-school-time programs, Rikers Island and the annual open mic poetry program in Bryant Park from 11:00 a.m. until 3:00 p.m.
For more infomation, visit the PIYP website or contact Joanna Colangelo at (212) 513-9322 or via jcolangelo@culture.nyc.gov. You may also submit an event at the DCA web site. |
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SUBMIT YOUR NEWS
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Make an announcement for or about members of PEN American Center.  |
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You are invited to Splat! A Graphic Novel Symposium
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Date Posted: March 3
You are invited to Splat! A Graphic Novel Symposium, being held on Saturday, March 15, 2008. New readers, writers, artists, publishers, agents, and long-standing comics fans alike are all welcome to learn more about the fastest growing movement in publishing – and meet some of the best creators working in the medium today! The SPLAT! Symposium will also supply prospective creators with a unique opportunity to learn what it takes to be a graphic novelist. There will be three different tracks of panels, seminars, and workshops, followed by the SPLAT! Reception with Scott McCloud.
The panels will be led by a number of key writers, editors and artists from the graphic novel world including: Jim Killen, buyer Barnes & Noble; David Saylor, Editor Scholastic; Raina Telgemeier, artist, The Baby-Sitters Club; Ted Rall, creator, Attitude: The New Subversive Political Cartoonists; CB Cebulski, writer/editor, Marvel Comics; Bob Mecoy, Founder, Bob Mecoy Literary Agency; R. Sikoryak, creator, The Seduction of Mike; Brian Wood, creator, Demo, DMZ and Local; Nick Bertozzi, creator, The Salon; and Charles Brownstein, executive director, Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.
Please visit http://www.nycip.org/graphicnovelsymposium to register for this unique event, or call 212/764-7021 or email graphicnovel.nycip@gmail.com for more information.
Sponsored by the New York Center for Independent Publishing, an educational program of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, with additional support from: Nickelodeon Magazine, Yen Press,The Center for Cartoon Studies, The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, Kids Comic Con, The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, New York Comic Con, Publishers Weekly and PW Comics Week. |
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Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness
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Date Posted: March 3
Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness is being held in Washington, DC on March 20-23 in conjunction with protests marking the 5th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq. The festival calls poets to a greater role in public life and fosters a national network of activist poets, and will feature readings, workshops, panels, by poets including Jimmy Santiago Baca, Lucille Clifton, Mark Doty, Martín Espada, Sam Hamill, Galway Kinnell, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sonia Sanchez. The festival is cosponsored by DC Poets Against the War, Sol & Soul, Busboys and Poets, and the Institute for Policy Studies. Individuals interested in attending can register for the festival at www.SplitThisRock.org. Registration is only $75 before March 10, $40 for students, which includes access to all events over three days. Scholarships available. |
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Congratulations to Jeffrey Sweet
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Date posted: October 2
Jeffrey Sweet has been given the Founders' Award of the Educational Theatre Association, an award honoring his significant contributions to the growth and development of theater education, research, and practice. An anthology of nine of his plays will be published by Northwestern University Press in June 2008 under the title of The Value of Names and Other Plays; the introduction will be by Chicago Tribune critic emeritus Richard Christiansen. |
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News from Epifanio San Juan
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Date posted: October 2
E. San Juan, Jr., director of the Philippines Cultural Studies Center at Storrs, CT., published two books last month: In the Wake of Terror: Class, Race, Nation, Ethnicity in the Postmodern World (Lexington Books) and U.S. Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines (Palgrave Macmillan).
A third book, Balikbayang Mahal: Passages from Exile, will be released this month by LuLu.com via its web site www.lulu.com. The book is a multilingual collection of poems in the original English and Filipino, some of which have been translated into Russian, Chinese, Spanish, Italian, German, and French. An original essay on the Filipino diaspora, accessible in the Ezine Our Own Voice, is included. The volume can be downloaded or purchased as a printed book. |
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News from Daniela Gioseffi
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Please join PEN in congratulating Daniela Gioseffi, who has won the $1,000 John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry, 2007. Her book Blood Autumn, Autunno di sangue, new and selected poems, was reissued in hardcover with the award in an emblem on the cover by VIA Folios/ Bordighera Press at the Calandra Institute of the City University of New York, Graduate Center.
>> Visit Daniela Gioseffi's PEN Web Page
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Congratulations to Robert L. Beisner
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In April, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations awarded the Robert H. Ferrell Book Award to Robert L. Beisner for Dean Acheson: A Life in the
Cold War. In June, the Council on Foreign Relations awarded him the Arthur Ross Book Award Silver Medal for the same book.
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News from Epifanio San Juan
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Epifanio San Juan's new collection of essays, Balik-Bayang Sinta; An E. San Juan Reader, was launched on March 17 at the Ateneo de Manila University, Quezon City, Philippines. Published by the Ateneo University Press, this is San Juan's fourth book.
San Juan was visiting Professor of English and Comparative Literature for Spring 2008 at the University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines. He was also just awarded a fellowship at the W.E. B. Du Bois Center, Harvard University, for Spring 2009. |
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