Editorial Statement

Gregory Wolfe, Becoming the Other

Fiction

Paula Huston, Pilgrimage

Gina Ochsner, Cure

Poetry

Adélia Prado, Buried Treasure
Domus
Divine Wrath

Miguel de Unamuno, The Cathedral of Barcelona
Poetic Creed

Les Murray, Rugby Wheels
Hesiod on Bushfire

Svetlana Bodrunova, They went on and on...

Cintio Vitier, The Earth
You Enter that Light
Greater Solitude

Pēters Brūveris, Three Small Elegies, on Leaving Gotland
Don't beckon yet!...

Ionatan Pirosca, Yes, a nameless quietness...

Davide Rondoni, Apocalypse Love
Visions of My Children
Oriana Fallaci in New York

Visual Arts

Rachel Hostetter Smith, The Thread that Weaves Life Together: Crossing Boundaries with the Charis Exhibition

Barry Krammes, Emmanuel Garibay, Daniel García, Roger Feldman, Neighbors, Strangers, Family, Friends: Four Artists Reflect on Charis

William Dyrness, Dancing to Strange Music: Diversity and Faith in the Visual Arts

Interview

Susan VanZanten, A Conversation with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Confessions

Susanne Antonetta, Hosts

Book Review

Peggy Rosenthal, Kazim Ali's The Fortieth Day, Anna Kamieńska's Astonishment, Adélia Prado's The Alphabet in the Park, Dahlia Ravikovitch's Hovering at a Low Altitude, Tomas Tranströmer's The Great Enigma

Susanne Antonetta is the author of Body Toxic (Counterpoint), a New York Times Notable Book and American Book Award winner, and A Mind Apart (Tarcher), winner of the NAMI/Ken Johnson Award. She has contributed to the New York Times, Washington Post, Orion, Seneca Review, and other publications. She lives in Bellingham, Washington.

Svetlana Bodrunova was born in Gomel, Belarus, in 1981 and has lived in Saint Petersburg since 1994. Her poetry, translations, and writing on the sociology of literature have appeared in magazines in Russia, Europe, and the US, including The Jacket, Cardinal Points, andInterpoezia, as well as in anthologies in Russia, Serbia, and the US. Her work has been translated into six languages. She is also the founder of Poesii.net (“There Is No Poetry”), an organization that publishes first books by young poets through Helicon Plus of Saint Petersburg.

Peters Bruveris was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1957. He is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently The Landscape of Language and Behind Glass. He has also written books for children, librettos, and film scripts, and has translated poetry from Turkish, Azerbaijani, the Crimean Tatar language, Russian, German, and Prussian. His poetry has been translated into Lithuanian, Russian, Swedish, German, Slovenian, Ukrainian, and English. His many awards include the Award in Literature from the Baltic Assembly and the Latvian National Prize for Best Book.

Inara Cedrins is an artist, writer and translator of Latvian descent. She received her BA in writing from Columbia College in Chicago and her MA in Arts Administration at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the editor of Contemporary Latvian Poetry (Iowa), an anthology of work written while Latvia was under Soviet occupation. She is currently working on a new anthology of Baltic writing.

William Dyrness is professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. His two most recent books are Sense of the Soul: Art and the Visual in Christian Worship (Cascade) and Primer on Christian Worship (Eerdmans). He is currently doing research on interfaith aesthetics.

Leslie Harkema is a doctoral student and Presidential Teaching Fellow in Hispanic language and literature at Boston University. Her translation of Unamuno’s long poem “Salamanca” appeared in Literary Imagination in the spring of 2009, and her scholarly work has been published in Revista Hispánica Moderna (Columbia).

Paula Huston wrote literary fiction for many years before turning to spiritual writing. Her books include a novel, Daughters of Song (Random House), The Holy Way: Practices for a Simple Life (Loyala), By Way of Grace: Moving from Faithfulness to Holiness (Loyala), andForgiveness: Following Jesus into Radical Loving (Paraclete). Her essays and articles have appeared in America, Christian Century, and Geez. A former university literature teacher, she is also a Camaldolese Benedictine oblate.

Andreea Luncan has a BA in English and Romanian literature and an MA in English and American cultural studies from the West University of Timisoara, Romania. She currently works as a teacher and translator in Timisoara and has published poems in various magazines and anthologies.

Les Murray’s awards include the T.S. Eliot Award and the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. His many collections include Subhuman Redneck Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), The Biplane Houses (Macmillan; Carcanet), and the forthcoming Taller When Prone (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). He has also written two verse novels, The Boys Who Stole the Funeraland Fredy Neptune (both from Carcanet).

Gina Ochsner lives in Keizer, Oregon, and divides her time between writing and teaching in the low-residency MFA program at Seattle Pacific University. Her stories have appeared inGlimmer Train, Tin House, Saint Petersburg Review, and The New Yorker. She is the author of the short story collections The Necessary Grace to Fall (Georgia) and People I Wanted to Be and the novel, The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight (both from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Gregory M. Pell is associate professor of Italian at Hofstra University. His critical articles on poetry treat writers such as Dante, Ruffilli, Luzi, Tobino, and Montale; on cinema, filmmakers such as Mihaileanu, Kore-Eda, Rubini, Marra, Melliti, Benigni, and Garrone. His recent research focuses on novelist Vitaliano Trevisan and poet Davide Rondoni, on whom he has a monograph-in-progress tentatively entitled “Quiddity and Movement in Davide Rondoni.”

Ionatan Pirosca was born in 1958 in Braila, Romania. He is a member of the Romanian Writers Association and the author of eight collections of poetry in Romanian. His honors include the prestigious Ioan Alexandru Award. In 2001 he founded Cuvinte la Schimb (“Words Exchange”), an on-line literary circle for young Romanian poets. His website is www.ionatanpirosca.net.

Adélia Prado is one of the foremost poets of Brazil, praised both in literary circles and the mainstream media. The author of six books of poetry and six of prose, Prado was praised byVeja (Brazil’s Newsweek) as “a writer of rare brilliance and invincible simplicity.” The Alphabet in the Park: Selected Poems of Adélia Prado, translated by Ellen Doré Watson, was published by Wesleyan in 1990.

Jo-Ann Van Reeuwyk is director of the art education program and co-chair of the art department at Calvin College. Her work in fiber has been part of numerous exhibitions nationally. In addition to the Charis exhibition, most recent are a solo sabbatical exhibition at Calvin College called Sanctuary: Hallowed Space, Holy Place and a solo exhibition with artist residency at Forest Hills Fine Arts Center in Michigan.

F.D. Reeve’s recent work includes the story collection North River (Azul), the poetry collections The Toy Soldier (Bayeux Arts) and The Puzzle Master and Other Poems (New York Quarterly), and The Blue Cat Walks the Earth (Smokestack), a collection of poems with a CD of jazz by Don Davis and Joe Deleault. He and his wife, the novelist Laura Stevenson, live in Vermont.

Davide Rondoni lives and works in Bologna, Italy, where he founded the Center for Contemporary Poetry and edits the literary review clanDestino. He has published several collections of poems and a short story collection in Italian. The three poems published here are part of a new collection published in Italian by Mondadori Press. His book The Bar of Time(Guanda) received the Montale Prize. He has also translated Rimbaud, Péguy, Dickinson, and Baudelaire.

Peggy Rosenthal has a doctorate in literature and writes widely on the spirituality of poetry and the arts. Her books include Praying through Poetry: Hope for Violent Times (Saint Anthony Messenger) and The Poets’ Jesus (Oxford). Forthcoming is Reclaiming Beauty for the Good of the World: Muslim and Christian Creativity as Moral Force (Fons Vitae), co-authored with her husband George Dardess.

Luci Shaw is a poet, essayist, teacher, and lecturer. Her most recent books are What the Light Was Like (Wordfarm), Accompanied by Angels: Poems of the Incarnation (Eerdmans), and Breath for the Bones: Essays on Art, Imagination, and Spirit (Thomas Nelson). She is writer-in-residence at Regent College in Vancouver, Canada.

Rachel Hostetter Smith holds the Gilkison Family Chair in Art History at Taylor University. Previously a member of the graduate faculty of the School of Comparative Arts at Ohio University, she writes on a wide range of topics in the arts, literature, and film. She is the curator and project director of the exhibit Charis: Boundary Crossings.

Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (1864–1936) was a prominent professor, philosopher, poet, essayist, and novelist in Spain from the end of the nineteenth century to the Spanish Civil War. His extensive oeuvre includes the philosophical works On the Tragic Sense of Life andThe Agony of Christianity; the novels Peace in War, Mist, and Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr; and the long ekphrastic poem The Christ of Velázquez.

Susan VanZanten is professor of English and director of the Center for Scholarship and Faculty Development at Seattle Pacific University. Her most recent book is Truth and Reconciliation: The Confessional Mode in South African Literature (Heinemann).

Cintio Vitier (1921–2009) is a major figure in Cuban letters, and an internationally acclaimed poet, critic, anthologist, and editor. His literary career emerged within the legendary Orígenes group that formed around José Lezama Lima in the late 1940s. With his wife, poet Fina García Marruz, Vitier converted to Catholicism as an adult; the two helped host the historic visit of Pope John Paul II to Cuba. His awards include Cuba’s National Literature Prize and Mexico’s Juan Rulfo Prize.

Jeanne Murray Walker’s latest book of poetry is New Tracks, Night Falling (Eerdmans). She is a professor of English at the University of Delaware and serves as a mentor in the low-residency MFA program at Seattle Pacific University. Her work is featured in Best American Poetry 2009.

Ellen Doré Watson serves as director of the Poetry Center at Smith College and poetry and translation editor of the Massachusetts Review. A poet as well as a translator, she teaches in the Drew University low-residency MFA program. A fifth book of her own poems, Dogged Hearts, will be released in 2010 from Tupelo Press. She is also at work on a new collection of translations of Adélia Prado’s work.

Kathleen Weaver is a poet, anthologist, and translator from Spanish. Her most recent work is the biography Peruvian Rebel: The World of Magda Portal, with Selected Poems (Penn State). Her translations include the books Where the Island Sleeps Like a Wing by Nancy Morejón (Black Scholar) and Nicaraguan Sketches by Julio Cortázar (Norton). She is preparing an anthology of Cuban poets in translation, “O Tropics!” Her own poems have appeared inZYZZYVA.

The International Issue includes poetry in translation from Russian, Latvian, Romanian, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. We asked the translators who contributed work to the issue about how they see their art: What’s the value of reading poetry in translation? That is, if we’re not really hearing the sounds and rhythms of the poet’s original language, what are we getting out of it?

Read the interview here.