Poetry

May 27, 2011 Evie Shockley is the author of the new black (Wesleyan, 2011), a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006), and two chapbooks; she also co-edits jubilat. Schockley’s poetry and literary criticism have appeared in such journals and anthologies as Callaloo, The Southern Review, Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture, Harvard Review, Center: A Journal of the Literary Arts, and Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Born and raised in Nashville, she currently teaches African American literature and creative writing at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

April 5, 2011 The Libyan-born poet Khaled Mattawa has published several collections of his own poetry, including Tocqueville (2010), Amorisco (2008), Zodiac of Echoes (2003), and Ismailia Eclipse (1995) and has translated numerous volumes of contemporary Arabic poetry, including Shepherd of Solitude: Selected Poems of Amjad Nasser (2009) and Miracle Maker: Selected Poems of Fadhil Al-Azzawi (2004), in addition to co-editing the anthologies Dinarzad’s Children: An Anthology of Arab American Fiction (2004) and Post Gibran: Anthology of New Arab American Writing (1999). Mattawa, a graduate of the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, has been awarded several Pushcart Prizes and the PEN Award for Literary Translation, in addition to a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, and the Alfred Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. He is a Ford/United States Artist for 2011 and recipient of the 2010 Academy of American Poets Fellowship Prize. In recent weeks, Mattawa has been a frequent commentator on the current situation in Libya.