WOLFSWORD PRESS ADVISORY BOARD



Wolfsword Press would like to express its appreciation to the Advisory Board of Wolfsword Press for their support:

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Timothy Allen
Timothy Allen was born in Tonbridge in the South East of England in 1971. At 22, after graduating from Leeds University with a BSc Zoology he left the UK and spent 3 years traveling around Indonesia where his interest in photography began. In recent years, the focus of his work has turned to the planet's remaining tribal societies and he currently devotes his time to documenting the diversity of humanity's cultural heritage. Timothy’s photographs have appeared in most of the world’s prominent editorial publications and his work has been included in countless books and exhibitions. Amongst his commendations, he has received 6 Picture Editors' Guild Awards including the title of Arts Photographer of the Year presented to him by British Prime Minister, Tony Blair. More recently he was the recipient of the 'One Planet, Many Lives' award in Travel Photographer of the Year for his work with the indigenous cultures of the Himalayas. Timothy writes a weekly blog for the BBC documenting his work with indigenous societies around the world for the documentary Human Planet.
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Nicholas Christopher
Nicholas Christopher was born and raised in New York City. He was educated at Harvard College, where he studied with Robert Lowell and Anthony Hecht. Afterward, he traveled and lived in Europe. He became a regular contributor to the New Yorker in his early twenties, and began publishing his work in other leading magazines, both in the United States and abroad, including Esquire, the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, the Nation, and the Paris Review. He is the author of fourteen books and has appeared in numerous anthologies, including the Norton Anthology of Poetry, the Paris Review 50th Anniversary Anthology, the Best American Poetry, Poet's Choice, the Everyman's Library Poems of New York and Conversation Pieces, the Norton Anthology of Love, the Faber Book of Movie Verse, and the Grand Street Reader. He has edited two major anthologies himself, Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets (Anchor, 1989) and Walk on the Wild Side: Urban American Poetry Since 1975 (Scribner, 1994) and has translated Martial and Catullus and several modern Greek poets, including George Seferis and Yannis Ritsos. Nicholas has taught at Yale, Barnard College, and New York University, and is now a Professor on the permanent faculty of the Writing Division of the School of the Arts at Columbia University. He lives in New York City with his wife, Constance Christopher, and continues to travel widely, most frequently to Venice, the Hawaiian island of Kauai, and the Grenadines.
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Jim Grimsley
Jim Grimsley is a playwright and novelist who was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina in 1955. He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Jim's first novel Winter Birds was published by Algonquin Books in the United States in 1994. The novel won the 1995 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Prix Charles Brisset, given by the French Academy of Physicians. Jim's second novel, Dream Boy, was published by Algonquin in September, 1995, and won the 1996 Award for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Literature from the American Library Association; the novel was also one of five finalists for the Lambda Literary Award. Jim has written eleven full-length and four one-act plays. He has been playwright-in-residence at 7Stages Theatre of Atlanta since 1986 and was playwright in residence at About Face Theatre of Chicago from 2000-2004. In 1988 he was awarded the George Oppenheimer Award for Best New American Playwright for his play Mr. Universe. He was also awarded the first-ever Bryan Prize for Drama, presented by the Fellowship of Southern Writers for distinguished achievement in playwriting, in 1993.

Jim was a 1997 winner of the Lila Wallace/Reader’s Digest Writers Award. His first fantasy novel,
Kirith Kirin, was published by Meisha Merlin Press in June, 2000 and won the Lambda Literary Award in the Science Fiction/Horror category. He has since published two subsequent science fiction novels set in the same universe. He is a member of PEN, Dramatists Guild, Alternate ROOTS, and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America. He has twice been a finalist for the Rome Prize in Literature. In 2005, he won an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his work as a playwright and novelist. In 2006 he, along with Dorothy Allison, was one of the inaugural winners of the Mid-Career Author’s Award from the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival.

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Richard Hoffman
Richard Hoffman’s memoir
Half the House was awarded the Boston Athenaeum Readers' Prize in 1996 and was recently reissued by New Rivers Press. He is also the author of two collections of poems, Without Paradise (2002), and Gold Star Road (2007), winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize. Hoffman’s prose and verse have appeared in journals including Agni, Ascent, Chautauqua Journal, Cimarron Review, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, Janus Head: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, The Louisville Review, Marlboro Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Poetry, River Teeth, Shenandoah, and Witness, as well as in numerous anthologies. He has twice been a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellow in fiction and in 2004 was awarded the Charles Angoff Prize from The Literary Review for his essay “Pictures of Boyhood” which is included as Afterword in the new edition of Half the House. He is currently Writer-in-Residence in the Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College in Boston. A collection of his short stories, Interference, is forthcoming this Fall.
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Andrew Hudgins
Andrew Hudgins has published six books of poetry Ecstatic in the Poison (2003), Babylon in a Jar (1998), The Glass Hammer (1995), The Never-Ending (1991), After the Lost War (1988), and Saints and Stranger (1985).  Ecstatic in the Poison was published by The Overlook Press/Sewanee Writers’ Series in 2003.  His new book, Shut Up, You’re Fine!: Troubling Poems for Troubled Children, will be published by Overlook in 2009, with illustrations by Barry Moser.  Hudgins is also the author of a collection of literary essays, The Glass Anvil, published by the University of Michigan Press in 1997, and editor of The Selected Poems of James Agee, published by the Library of America in 2008.  Saints and Strangers was one of three finalists for the 1985 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; After the Lost War received the Poets’ Prize in 1989, and The Never-Ending was one of five finalists for the National Book Award in 1991.
 
 
He is currently Humanities Distinguished Professor in English at Ohio State.  Prior to coming to Ohio State, Hudgins taught at the University of Cincinnati from 1985 to 200, and in 1999 he was named Distinguished Research Professor.  In 1996, he served as the Coal Royalty Professor of English at the University of Alabama. In 1999 and 2000 he was a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.  He has also taught at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Ropewalk Writers’ Conference, the West Chester Writers’ Conference, and the Indiana Writers’ Conference.
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Roy Kesey
Roy Kesey is the author of three books: a novella called Nothing in the World (Dzanc Books), a story collection called All Over (Dzanc Books), and a historical travel guide to Nanjing (Atomic Press.) His work has appeared in more than sixty magazines, and in several anthologies including Best American Short Stories, The Robert Olen Butler Prize Anthology and New Sudden Fiction. He currently lives in Syracuse with his wife and children.
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Mike Magnuson
Mike Magnuson is forty-five years old and a writer, author of four books:
The Right Man for the Job: a novel (HarperCollins, 1997); The Fire Gospels: a novel (HarperCollins, 1998); Lummox: The Evolution of a Man (HarperCollins, 2002): and Heft on Wheels: A Field Guide to Doing a 180 (Harmony, 2004). He’s also written articles and stories for Bicycling and Backpacker and Esquire and GQ other publications. Lately, he’s trying his hand at screenwriting.

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Pascale Petit
Pascale Petit has published four poetry collections including The Huntress and The Zoo Father, which were both shortlisted for the UK’s T.S. Eliot Prize and were books of the year in The Times Literary Supplement. Her latest is The Treekeeper’s Tale (2008) and forthcoming in autumn 2009 The Thorn Necklace: Forty poems after Frida Kahlo (illustrated), all from Seren.

The Poetry Book Society and Arts Council named her as one of the Next Generation Poets in 2004. She has won numerous writing awards, including two from Arts Council England to complete
The Treekeeper’s Tale and travel to Nepal and China, and has been shortlisted for a Forward Prize. A bilingual edition of The Zoo Father is published in Mexico and her poems are translated into many languages. In 2008 she took part in the Yellow Mountain Poetry Festival in China and the British Council’s New Silk Route project in Kazakhstan. She originally trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art, has worked as editor of Poetry London 1989–2005 and is now a trustee. She is the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Middlesex University and tutors for Oxford University, The Poetry School and Tate Modern.
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Altaf Qadri
Altaf Qadri is a trained computer engineer but decided to switch career and took up photography as a profession. Grew up amid mass uprising against Indian rule and witnessed many important events and incidents as a teenager. One evening Indian Border Security Force personnel raided his neighborhood after rebels attacked their patrol. He was coming from a mosque and that was the first time when he was used as a human shield by the armed forces. Fortunately there was no more fire from the rebels and he was let go when his uncle came to his rescue after four hours of detention at gun point. But the next morning he was sent to New Delhi where his sister lived. After being presented a camera by a friend, Altaf began to shoot everything and anything and soon he realized that the camera can become a witness along with him. He came back after some several months of self-exile and began his first assignment as a freelancer. Later he joined a local newspaper in the year 2001. He contributed to European Pressphoto Agency wire services from May 2003 to May 2008 from the Indian side of Kashmir.

Altaf has been covering the Kashmir conflict extensively for several years now. He feels his pictures should make people aware of the grass root situation of Kashmir and tell stories on how life there affects its own people. His photographs and stories from events in Kashmir have appeared all around the globe including Time, The Guardian, New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Washington Post and The Times among others. His work has been exhibited at many places like, National Geographic Headquarters in Washington, Los Angeles, New Mexico, Cambodia, Houston, New York, Beijing, Paris, New Delhi and Mumbai. He has won numerous awards and recognitions, among them
Winner of International Reportage Award 2008 by International Journalism Festival, Italy; Third prize for “Best Published Story” by National Press Photographers Association of America, 2008; and Winner of the All Roads Photography Program by National Geographic Society for the year 2007.
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Nahid Rachlin
Nahid Rachlin’s publications include a memoir, Persian Girls (Penguin), four novels, Jumping Over Fire (City Lights), Foreigner (W.W. Norton), Married to a Stranger (E.P.Dutton), The Heart's Desire (City Lights), and a collection of short stories, Veils (City Lights). While a student, she held a Doubleday-Columbia fellowship and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship (Stanford). The grants and awards she has received include the Bennet Cerf Award, PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. She teaches at the New School University and Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y.

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Maureen Seaton
Maureen Seaton is the author of six poetry collections, including Cave of the Yellow Volkswagen and Furious Cooking. Her newest book, Sex Talks to Girls: a Memoir, was released in 2008 by University of Wisconsin Press. Maureen is the recipient of the Lambda Award, the Audre Lorde Award, the Iowa Prize for Poetry, an NEA fellowship, and the Pushcart Prize. She is associate professor of English at the University of Miami, where she teaches poetry and literary collage.



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Saradha Soobrayen
Saradha Soobrayen is a literary facilitator and Poetry Editor of Chroma: A LGBT Literary Journal. She received an Eric Gregory Award in 2004 for her work. Her poems are published in Wasafiri, Poetry Review, and in the anthology This Little Stretch of Life (HearingEye), I am twenty people! (Enitharmon), New Writing 15 (Granta/The British Council 2007), New Poetries IV, (Carcanet) and the 2007 Oxford Poets Anthology (Carcanet).
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Donna Spector
Donna Spector’ is a playwright as well as a poet. Her play Golden Ladder (Women Playwrights: The Best Plays of 2002) was produced Off Broadway in 2002, as was her first play, Another Paradise, in 1986. Her plays have also appeared Off Off Broadway, regionally and in Canada, Ireland and Greece. A member of Dramatists Guild and Poets & Writers, she received two N.E.H. grants to study in Greece and production grants from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and the New York Council for the Arts. Winner of the Masters Poetry Series and a finalist for the National Poetry Book Award, May Swenson Poetry Award, Snake Nation Press Poetry Award, Akron Poetry Prize and the Paumanok Poetry Award, she has had poems, plays, stories, scenes and monologues published in many literary magazines and anthologies—including Sycamore Review, Notre Dame Review, Poet & Critic, Poet Lore, The Paterson Literary Review, The Bellingham Review, South Florida Poetry Review, Gaia, Emily Dickinson Award Anthology, Blue Unicorn, Greensboro Review, Soujourn (Univ. of Texas, Dallas)—and a program of her poems was aired on PoeticA (Australian Broadcasting Company, in Sydney/Melbourne) in 2004. She has taught world literature, French, drama and creative writing in high schools and colleges. Her literary agent is Carolyn French at Fifi Oscard Agency. www.donnaspector.net
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Melissa Springer
From the dungeons of a New York City dominatrix to up-close encounters with rattlesnakes, Melissa Springer taught herself to create images. While she excels technically in her field, boasting the title of “master printer,” Springer has no formal training, relying instead on instinct and trial-and-error. Her relationship with the camera is one of mutual dependency; photography has allowed her into alternate worlds, and in turn she has used the camera to reveal her vision of these worlds.

Raised in Mobile, Alabama, Springer has spent her life in the Deep South. Starting as a darkroom manager at
Southern Living Magazine, she learned the techniques of a skillful printer as well as the art of commercial photography. In 1989 she left the magazine, rented a one-room studio, and became a full-time freelance artist. During her freelance career Springer has focused much of her efforts on documentary photography, tackling issues that include children with AIDS, women in prison, snake handlers, and homelessness. In addition, she has cultivated her skills as a portrait and commercial photographer.

Springer has published several books, taught seminars at the International Center of Photography, appeared on CNN and Lifetime Television, and has had work appear in dozens of publications, including including
The New York Times, The Village Voice, Elle, and Harper’s Bazaar. Collectors of her work include Richard Gere, Jody Foster, Marcia Ann Gillespie, and Nancy Woodhull.

Melissa Springer lives in Birmingham, Alabama, and has two children, Taylor and Paul.

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Irene Zabytko
Irene Zabytko was born and raised in the Ukrainian Village section of Chicago. Her first book, The Sky Unwashed, a novel about Chornobyl surviviors was selected as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Book, A Book Sense '76 Pick Selection, and a New England Booksellers Association Discovery title. She is currently producing, writing and co-directing a documentary based on the novel Life in the Dead Zone, and has completed a related film short, Epiphany at Chornobyl. 
 
Her second book, the short story collection
When Luba Leaves Home is based on the Ukrainian community in her Chicago neighborhood. One of the stories, “Obligation,” won the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, and was read on National Public Radio’s “The Sound of Writing.” 
 
She has also held numerous fellowships which include The Ragdale Foundation, The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, The Edna St. Vincent Millay Colony, and The Alden B. Dow Creativity Center.  In 2008, she will be a writer-in-residence at the Mesa Refuge in Point Reyes, California, where she will be writing a companion book of essays about documentary filming in Chornobyl.
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Zoriah
Zoriah is an award-winning photojournalist whose work has been featured in some of the world’s most prestigious galleries, museums and publications. Zoriah's clients have included The BBC, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, ABC News, NPR, Focus and many others. With a background in Disaster Management and Humanitarian Aid, Zoriah specializes in documenting human crises in developing countries. His vitae not only lists photographic achievements and study, but also the in-depth training and experience necessary for working under extreme conditions in some of the world's harshest environments.