A Cross Cultural Poetics: A Rail Reading curated by Leonard Schwartz

Né au Tchad en 1959, Nimrod Bena est poète, romancier, essayiste et éditeur (éditions Le Manteau & la Lyre). Il a publié à ce jour plus d’une trentaine d’ouvrages dont Les jambes d’Alice, Le bal des princes, La nouvelle chose française, Rosa Parks, Non à la discrimination raciale, L’or des rivières, Babel, Babylone, Petit éloge de la lumière nature, etc.), qui ont été couronnés entre autres par le Prix de la Vocation, le Prix Benjamin Fondane, le Prix Édouard Glissant, le Prix Ahmadou Kourouma, le Prix Max Jacob, le Prix Pierrette Micheloud, le Prix Guillaume Apollinaire. Parmi ses derniers ouvrages, on compte Petit éloge de la lumière nature, poèmes (Obsidiane/Le Manteau & la Lyre, 2020) et Le temps liquide, récits, (Gallimard, coll. « Continents noirs », 2021).

Michel Delville is a poet, musician and essayist born in Liège, Belgium, in 1969. He teaches literature and comparative literature at the University of Liège, where he directs the Interdisciplinary Center for Applied Poetics. He is the author or editor of some twenty books pertaining to contemporary poetics. His books of poetry include Le troisième corps (Le Fram, 2005), which was translated into English as Third Body by Gian Lombardo (Quale Press, 2009) and Entre la poire et le fromage (2014), which was translated into English by Gian Lombardo as Anything & Everything (2017). His recent publications include The Edinburgh Companion to the Prose Poem (2021), Beginnings of the Prose Poem (2021), both of which were co-edited with Mary Ann Caws.

Poet Genya Turovskaya was born in Kyiv, Ukraine, and grew up in New York City. She is the author of The Breathing Body of This Thought (Black Square Editions) as well as numerous chapbooks. Her poetry and translations have appeared in numerous publications including A Public Space, Chicago Review, Fence, Octopus, Paris Review, and PEN Poetry, among others. She is the translator of Aleksandr Skidan’s Red Shifting and co-translator of Elena Fanailova’s The Russian Version (both from Ugly Duckling Presse) which won an award for best translated poetry from The University of Rochester. She has received a Fund for Poetry Grant, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Montana Artist Refuge Fellowship, a Witter Bynner Translation Residency at Santa Fe Art Institute, and a Whiting Award.

Poet, essayist, fiction writer, playwright, art critic, translator, Serbian-born Nina Zivancevic has published 17 books of poetry. She has also written four books of short stories, two novels and a book of essays on Milosh Crnjanski (her doctoral thesis) published in Paris, New York and Belgrade. The recipient of numerous literary awards, a former assistant and secretary to Allen Ginsberg, she has also edited and participated in numerous anthologies of contemporary world poetry. As an editor and correspondent she has contributed to publications including NY Arts Magazine, Modern Painters, American Book Review, East Village Eye, and Republique de lettres. She has lectured and taught at universities in the US and Europe. She lives and works in Paris.

Leonard Schwartz is the author of numerous books of poetry, including, most recently, Actualities I: Transparent, to the Stone, Actualities II: Two Burned Hotels, and Actualities III: Comic Earth (2021, 2022, 2023 Goats & Compasses), Heavy Sublimation (Talisman House) and Salamander: A Bestiary (Chax Press), with painter Simon Carr. His work in poetics The New Babel: Toward a Poetics of the Mid-East Crises (University of Arkansas Press), is inclusive of poetry, essays, and interviews. Other titles include If (Talisman House), At Element, A Message Back and Other Furors (Chax Press), and The Library of Seven Readings (Ugly Duckling Presse). He also edited and co-translated Benjamin Fondane’s Cine-Poems and Other, with New York Review Books.