phati'tude Literary Magazine Vol. 3, No. 3 by The IAAS

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INTRODUCING

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Amanda Ostrove and Eric Barbera

a publication of The Intercultural Alliance of Artists & Scholars, Inc.(IAAS) a New York nonprofit organization

Featuring essays by Naomi Shihab Nye, Karen Beatty, Nan Hunt

Gabrielle David Editor-in-Chief Jennifer-Crystal Johnson Associate Editor

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Jon Sands Karen Chau Rebecca Kaye Editors Amanda Ostrove Eric Barbera Editorial Interns Lorraine Miller Nuzzo Art Director

LEARNING ABOUT DIFFERENT LITERATURES Featuring essays by Lisa Suhair Majaj, Ranen Omer-Sherman, Zohra Saed & Sahar Muradi, Bassam K. Frangieh, Morris Dickstein

Featuring essays by Joseph S. Walker, Wendy T. House, Himanshu Suri

Ryan Seslow Graphic Artist

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Michelle Aragón Director, Marketing Communications

BOARD OF DIRECTORS Gabrielle David, Chair Angela Sternreich, Secretary Lynn Korsman, Treasurer Shirley Bradley LeFlore Stephanie Agosto Michelle Aragón Advisory Board Kenneth Campbell Robert Coburn

A DECADE OF ECHOES: A LITERARY RESPONSE Samuel Evans

INTERVIEWS: Ammiel Alcalay, D.H. Melhem, Hayan Charara, Karen Alkalay-Gut, Zohra Saed

Andrew P. Jackson (Sekou Molefi Baako) Special Advisor for the IAAS Board

phati’tude Literary Magazine is published quarterly (Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall), ISSN: 1091-1480; ISBN-13: 978-1466303133; ISBN-10: 1466303131. Copyright © 2011 by The Intercultural Alliance of Artists & Scholars, Inc. (IAAS). All rights reserved. Printed and bound in the U.S.A. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical without permission in writing from the Publisher. The views expressed by authors do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors of phati’tude Literary Magazine, the Board of Directors of the IAAS, donors or sponsors. Single issue: US$18; Annual subscriptions: US$65; Int’l-Canadian: US$75; Institutional US$110. We offer special discounts for classes and groups. The Publisher cannot guarantee delivery unless notification of change of address is received. Visit our website at www.phatitude.org. Manuscripts with SASE, letters to the editor and all other correspondence to phati’tude Literary Magazine, P.O. Box 4378, Grand Central Station, New York, NY 101634378; or email editor@phatitude.org. Cover Art: Linda Puiatti (see p. 280).

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EDITOR’S NOTE THIS & THAT TOM ENGLEHARDT Osama bin Laden’s American Legacy ANDREW J. BACEVICH Post-9/11 War Fever NICK FONDA Joe Kerr’s Blog BOOK REVIEWS THE FINAL WORD Susanne Slavick CONTRIBUTORS COVER ART Linda Puiatti

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AMANDA OSTROVE & ERIC BARBERA INTRODUCING BRIDGING THE CULTURAL DIVIDE

SEPTEMBER 11, 2001: Presenting the Facts

SAMUEL EVANS A Decade of Echoes: A Literary Response to 9/11

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ARTIST AS WITNESS LINDA PUIATTI 16 3 Days After September 11th LOIS V. WALKER 25 September 11, 2001: An Artistic Retrospective GEORGE HARKINS 160 A Visual Record of September 11, 2001 & Its Aftermath COLIN D. HALLORAN 224 A Soldier’s View of the Afghanistan War JESÚS PAPOLETO MELÉNDEZ 9-11, my memory

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INTERVIEWS FIVE WRITERS SHARE THEIR LOVE FOR LITERATURE IN THE CONTEXT OF 9/11 AMANDA OSTROVE & GABRIELLE DAVID 50 Ammiel Alcalay: Illuminating Cultural Identities in Literature that Bridge the Cultural Divide ERIC BARBERA & KAREN CHAU 53 D.H. Melhem: Speaking Heart to Heart: Using Immigrant Literature to Impact Our Communities and World Movements ERIC BARBERA & KAREN CHAU 54 Hayan Charara: Seeking Truths Through Poetry to Inform and Inspire as a Tool for Peace AMANDA OSTROVE & GABRIELLE DAVID 57 Karen-Alkalay-Gut: Insight into Human Understanding: An Israeli Writer’s Reflection on Literature GABRIELLE DAVID 58 Zora Saed: Recognizing Unique Voices in Afghan American Literature

ESSAYS A R T I C L E S 86

FIRST IMPRESSIONS NAOMI SHIHAB NYE To Any Would-Be Terrorists KAREN BEATTY Anything Can Happen Day — September 11, 2001 NAN HUNT Fighting With The Dark

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BRIDGING THE CULTURAL DIVIDE: Learning About Different Literatures REBECCA KAYE: INTRODUCTION 121 LISA SUHAIR MAJAJ The Hyphenated Author: Emerging Genre of ‘Arab-American Literature’ Poses Questions of Definition, Ethnicity and Art 122 RANEN OMER-SHERMAN Jewish & Muslim Hybridity in Recent Israeli Short Fiction V O L. 3 N O. 3

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ZOHRA SAED & SAHAR MURADI Exploring the Genesis of Afghan American Literature BASSAM K. FRANGIEH Modern Arabic Poetry: Vision & Reality MORRIS DICKSTEIN Ghost Stories: The New Wave of Jewish Writing

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BRIDGING THE CULTURAL DIVIDE: Sharing Stories That Connect LEILA DIAB A Question of Identity: A Story behind a Story; A Palestinian Woman’s Rite of Passage DAVID LISBONA Falling Asleep on the Watch NADIA MAIWANDI The Afghan-American Response JUDY LABENSOHN 49 Bethlehem Road LAW OF RETURN

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LASTING IMPRESSIONS JOSEPH S. WALKER Disaster Girl WENDY T. HOUSE One HIMANSHU SURI Post 9/11 All Over Again: The Hate-Mongers Who Bombarded the Internet After Osama bin Laden’s Death

FEATUREDVISUALARTIST 259

ERNEST WILLIAMSON, III 44 “Impulse of Brilliance” 98 “Opening the Door” 260 “Stunned Idealist”

SHORT STORIES 153 255 157 177

LYNNE BRONSTEIN Blumah ADDY EVENSON Dogcatcher SAHAR MURADI Colombo HARLEY L. SACHS The Legacy

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BRIDGING THE CULTURAL DIVIDE REMEMBERING SEPTEMBER 11TH

PROSE POETRY

ELMAZ ABINADER 191 Sixty Minutes ADA A. AHARONI 194 Arab Israeli Student on T.V. SALADIN AHMED 197 Libra in Times of War

SHONDA BUCHANAN 207 Honest (9/11/01)

AMMIEL ALCALAY 105 Etched Like A Scar

PENNY CAGAN 101 September Eleventh

JEFFREY ALFIER 204 The Coelacanth (Osama bin Laden)

MICHAEL CAMPAGNOLI 109 It Happened All The Time

KAREN ALKALAY-GUT 261 What The New Colossus Saw

FERN G. Z. CARR 102 Hell in New York — Sept. 11, 2001

OLIVIA ARIETI 231 Ground Zero

MARC CARVER 252 Eleven I’s

QAIS ARSALA 200 The Horns of the Tiger

HAYAN CHARARA 233 Usage

GARY BECK 99 Before 9/11

MBIZO CHIRASHA 198 Golgotha episode 911

FRANCIS BLESSINGTON 111 The Spell

LUCILLE CLIFTON 264 we are running BARBARA CROOKER 202 After September 11 STEPHEN DUNN 232 To a Terrorist

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ROD FARMER 187 A Single Species LINDA NEMEC FOSTER 119 9-11-01 KENNY FRIES 241 The Burden of Memory MARILYN HACKER 112 Respite in a Minor Key ATAR HADARI 239 Homage to Gilad Shalit JAMES HARMS 209 Tomorrow, We’ll Dance in America SAMUEL HAZO 247 The Origins of Western Love

LAURIE KUNTZ 246 On Visiting the Jewish Heritage Museum with my Mother LISA SUHAIR MAJAJ 245 No 245 Peace B. W. MAYER 205 Manhattan In Memoriam

DIMA HILAL 188 ghaflah — the sin of forgetfulness

D. H. MELHEM 115 September 11, 2001, World Trade Center, Aftermath

ARNOLD J. ISBISTER 249 In The Moment

PHILIP METRES 263 Those Holes Were His Eyes

SHARON KESSLER 108 Even Our Trees Fight

LENARD D. MOORE 251 Consider the Wound SAHAR MURADI 193 Grasping JEAN NORDHAUS 196 On the Beach at Herzliya CLAIRE ORTALDA 262 Communion SHANN PALMER 100 On the Hundred and First Floor

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BRIDGING THE CULTURAL DIVIDE REMEMBERING SEPTEMBER 11TH

WALT PETERSON 185 Shanksville, November, Flight 93 RICHARD PFLUM 103 The Towers of Silence KENNETH POBO 228 9/11: Lavender Memoriam SUSAN ROSENBERG 195 Watching TV August-September 2004 RUTH SABATH ROSENTHAL 203 Into the Light: Safe Haven, 1944 204 From Two Sons of Abraham ZOHRA SAED 189 The Secret Lives of Misspelled Cities PATRICIA ROTH SCHWARTZ 110 Snowing in Afghanistan: December 2001

LESTER SMITH 106 Nine by Eleven RONNY SOMECK 184 30 Seconds to Storm the Tit 184 That J. J. STEINFELD 229 Ten Decades of Excavations Afterward 230 A Detailed Map of Eternity PATTI TANA 113 We Breathed You In

KHALIDA SETHI 199 The disruption of lives begins with a single bang

LARRY D. THOMAS 244 Wounded Knee

PURVI SHAH 253 Signs there is a hole in Manhattan

KEVIN VAUGHN 250 September 11, 2006

TOM SHEEHAN 104 Now I Face You

NEIL WEISBROD 114 One Face of Man INGRID WENDT 201 Words of Our Time ANDRENA ZAWINSKI 206 Trying to Raise the Dead SEREE COHEN ZOHAR 107 Manhattan Morning

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“Being here in New York, I experienced first-hand the tragedy of September 11th. While I personally did not lose anyone from this event, it had an effect on everyone living in New York City . . .”

ACKS OF SEPTEMBER 1 1 , 200 1 reshaped the TT HE A 11 2001 TTA ATT face of the nation and the course of history — not just here in the United States, but around the globe — forever. With the tenth anniversary of the attacks this

Gabrielle David, founder and editor of phati’tude Literary Magazine, is a writer and multimedia artist who has worked as a desktop publisher, photographer, visual artist, video editor and musician.

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September, I am very proud to present “Bridging the Cultural Divide: Remembering September 11th,” which I believe to be the finest issue we have produced to date. It is certainly the largest issue we’ve ever done, featuring 60 poets, 5 major interviews, 2 features, 4 artists, 15 essays, and 4 short stories from writers around the world of diverse cultural backgrounds. This issue has been in the making since the attacks on September 11, 2001. We had just finished creating a nonprofit organization for phati’tude Literary Magazine, were in the process of getting support from local politicians and funders, and in the midst of preparing a trip to Oklahoma to present the long-awaited “Indian Summer” issue to the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas and the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers conference that

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October. By September 12th, the promise of financial support was tenuous at best as New York City officials and private foundations were scrambling to help the numerous people and organizations in need. Being here in New York, I experienced first-hand the tragedy of September 11th. While I personally did not lose anyone from this event, it had an effect on everyone living in New York City: the smell of the smoldering ruins, the Twin Towers missing from the New York skyline, the police and military presence, and the tentativeness and newly-discovered vulnerability that New Yorkers felt that no outsider could ever feel in exactly the same way. It was a physical and psychic cost that forever changed how we lived, how we travelled, and what we think about when we look at our children. New York City would never be the same again. As others have observed, the widespread public soul-searching of writers in the days and weeks after the attacks became an important gauge of the public position of the writer in the contemporary world. Why was it that writers were called upon to explain or offer insights into the events? In what way would they be able to offer accounts any more illuminating than one’s own experience of 9/11? And how could the writer offer any more than what was offered by the endless reportage and documentaries of the day? What readers seemed to look to writers for, in the aftermath of September 11th, was a unifying narrative to make sense of their own chaotic responses to the events. This was the impetus behind my wanting to document this event through literature, and thus, “AWAKENINGS, Bridging the Cultural Divide, In the Aftermath of September 11, 2001, Writers and Activists Speak Out” was born. The idea was to bring Arab, Arab American, Jewish, Israeli and Afghan writers together in one is-

sue for an open discussion about what happened on September 11th and what continues to happen on a daily basis in the Middle East. While I experienced some difficulties — some Arabs and Jews did not want to be in the same issue with each other, and problems finding Afghan writers for inclusion in the issue — overall, the open submission call went extremely well. As a result, I met some really wonderful people. In the Arab American community I discovered writers such as Nathalie Handal, Elmaz Abinadar, Leila Diab, D.H. Melhem, Mohja Kahf, Hayan Charara, Lisa Suhair Majaj, Naomi Shihab Nye, Munir Akash, Khaled Mattawa, and Elie Chalala, founder and editor of Al Jadid, an Arab American literary publication. I hooked up with Israeli writers Karen Alkalay-Gut, Yair Mazor, Ronny Someck, David Lisbona and the late, great Ami Isseroff (who passed away this year), founder and director of MidEastWeb, a cross-cultural website that opened dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians. Jewish American writers such as Ammiel Alcalay, Morris Dickstein, Myra Sklarew, Barbara Goldberg, and Jean Nordhaus were extremely helpful and insightful. The original cover, “Solitude,” a painting by Lois Walker captured the essence of 9/11. Overall, the issue promised to be groundbreaking, but little did I know when putting it together that we would not be able to publish it. By November 2001, people were fighting over funding in New York City. Organizations located in Lower Manhattan near the World Trade Center were given higher priority, as were people who lost loved ones or were directly affected by the event, including businesses that were left in shambles. Besides facing a highly competitive field, as a brand new nonprofit organization, we simply did not have the resources and the know-how to wheel and deal in this environment. This was compounded by the reality that

funders were pulling away from publishing, and, as funding opportunities grew scarce (beginning in the late 1990s), many literary magazines ceased to exist due to lack of funds. But I always hung on to the “almost” completed manuscript of the AWAKENINGS’ issue, with the hopes that someday I would be able to do something with it. Since then, the publishing arena has evolved into a digital world. Bringing back phati’tude Literary Magazine as a print-on-demand publication provided us the flexibility to do what we love to do while reestablishing ourselves in the market, earning income and acquiring funding, which we began to do in 2010. With each September 11th anniversary, I always thought about publishing the AWAKENINGS issue. Will it be the second anniversary? The fifth? The eighth? With the tenth anniversary of September 11th coming up, I knew that this was the right time to revisit and publish the issue, but where to begin? The original manuscript was worked on shortly after the attacks, so while the immediacy of the writing worked then, it no longer worked now. When I flipped through it, I realized that there were a lot of things that we didn’t know and the content reflected the speculation, anger and political commentary of its time. I had also departed from phati’tude’s then standard format by dividing the magazine into sections that presented the world before 9/11, during 9/11, a cursory discussion about war in general, Afghanistan and the future. Also, the issue itself was well over 300 pages and needed to be pared down. I didn’t quite know how to go about this and realized I needed a fresh perspective, so I looked for interns to help shepherd the project along. The interns, who were children when the attacks occurred, would have an entirely different take on September 11th and I thought their out-

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look would be useful in resurrecting this project. So I selected interns Amanda Ostrove and Eric Barbera, who were instructed to read the old manuscript and then provide an assessment of what we should do next. Deconstructing the existing issue, figuring out what pieces would work and which of the original writers to contact and then find, was the first step. As I met with Amanda and Eric throughout the summer and listened to their ideas, the issue slowly came to fruition. In the midst of this, they asked me if we could have an open call submission for new material: it was already July, and we wanted to have this in time for September 11th. I told them it was insane to do so, first, because of the time frame, and second, most writers, many of whom also teach, would be on summer break. Despite these obstacles we sent out the open call, and even though it doubled my workload, in the end, I’m glad we did. Many of the writers I mentioned earlier are in this issue, as well as new writers I’ve never heard of. While the emphasis was to present writers of Arab American, Arab, Israeli, Jewish American and Afghan American descent, the issue reflects a truly multicultural presentation. When I first announced the open submission call, my dear friend and mentor, D.H. Melhem, questioned the use of “Awakenings” for the new issue — we had already been awakened when 9/11 happened and had already moved forward. Her point confirmed our suspicions so the name of this issue was modified to “Bridging the Cultural Divide: Remembering September 11th.” We took some of the sections from the old issue and used them in the new issue, such as “Bridging the Cultural Divide” and “First Impressions.” Since we are commemorating the tenth anniversary of the attacks, we added “Lasting Impressions” to compliment “First Impressions” and

added “Artist As Witness” to highlight 9/11 artwork and photography. We also did something we've never done before. As a matter of policy, we do not publish dead writers. When we went through the original manuscript, a number of writers had passed away, including June Jordan, Dahlia Ravikovitch, Mahmoud Darwish, Dennis Brutus and Lucille Clifton. The last poem in the original manuscript was Ms. Clifton's poem "we are running." Interns Amanda and Eric convinced me to ask permission to run the poem, because of its simplicity and the meaning it evokes. Admittedly, it was not too difficult to twist my arm, since Ms. Clifton was an early supporter of phati'tude Literary Magazine and published in our first issue back in 1997. And so, we are honored to have her poem for inclusion in this very special issue. As the tenth anniversary of September 11th approached, it was amazing to look back and see how the political landscape had changed: the power-grab of the Patriot Act, the U.S. war with Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s capture and subsequent death; our ongoing military presence in both Iraq and Afghanistan; the election of an African American President with ties to Africa and the Muslim community; and the recent assassination of Osama bin Laden. While certainly some of these and other issues were raised in this publication, unlike the original manuscript, which was overtly political, we decided to steer away from that. In the end, I believe the act of writing is political in of itself, and the ideas and concepts would shine through from what each writer has presented in this issue. Ten years after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, the tangled questions of how art responds to catastrophe have only intensified as memorials multiply, major films are re-

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leased, and books are published that move past commemorating the event. For me, what I found most compelling was the literature, but I don’t think it should be categorized as “9/11 literature,” because it’s so much more. Rather than speculate about 9/11 literature, what “Bridging the Cultural Divide” does is asks how Arab American, Arab, Jewish, Israeli and Afghan writers and their literatures evolved under the circumstance of September 11th? The writers accomplish this through interviews, essays, stories and poetry. While much of the work in this publication talks specifically about September 11th, I do not believe that a “9/11 literature” exists, per se. The term “9/11 literature” has been tossed about since the event, and although the idea of it seems straightforward, I personally find the term confusing. While it ought to mean literature that directly addresses 9/11, there aren’t many books that would qualify under that definition. Since 2001, there has been a desperate effort to get one’s hands around it, to see if fiction or even poetry could address the event’s emotional and political effects; 9/11 literature has not yet evolved into a specific genre, nor do I think it should or ever will. In the history of American catastrophes, there have been many occasions when the imaginative act of literature was necessary to comprehend the reality of an event that would otherwise remain obscured. But 9/11 was different: the media coverage of the event was of an unprecedented scale and intimacy because on that day, we all watched the buildings and the bodies fall. Poetry and fiction that takes on a subject as public and iconic as the attacks of 9/11, while well-meaning, can easily devolve into cliché and hysterical jingoism, even from our most accomplished poets and writers. The average American did not

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know anyone directly affected by the attacks, and pales in comparison to the geopolitical reorientation and massive bloodletting in Iraq and Afghanistan, which may account for the lack of literature written specifically about 9/11. If anything, 9/11 became a catalyst for putting Arab American and Afghan American writers into the spotlight, primarily because this event has played prominently in their lives. Islam and the Middle East has never exerted the same influence on western self-perceptions; they have remained empty abstractions, often filled by self-appointed defenders of western civilization in order to identify alien and dangerous “others,” and in that regard, Arab and Afghan American literatures should be more widely read. For Israeli writers, the Palestinian conflict looms large in much of their work, forming a backdrop to the existing situation between the Arabs and Israelis. Jewish American literature, seen by many as an old immigrant literature

that has mainstreamed into American literature, continues to examine dilemmas of identity, ongoing assimilation and cultural rediscovery. Certainly, these groups of writers are linked to 9/11 and are historically connected to one another. This is what I hope we achieved in this issue, to present these connections and the “bridging” of cultures — a term used often by many of the writers presented herein. I don't think it's necessary for art to scream 9/11 for the sake of 9/11. However, I do think literary works that square the breadth of history with the breath of individual human life is tangible and important, whether it's specifically about 9/11 or not. And I suspect that as we move further away from 9/11, future literature about 9/ 11 will continue to focus on individual lives that investigate the relationship between “big’” and “little” forces, and the long and rich literary tradition of exploring the experience of trauma in its full human dimensions.

With the canon perpetually being contested and redefined, American literature has grown into a national tapestry which continues to encompass all writers of different cultures that contribute to the American experience. If anything, I hope the events of September 11th have compelled people to become world readers, to go global, to consider both ancient and modern stories, to question all certainties and embrace what they don’t know. I believe this is the best way to memorialize September 11th, which is what we attempt to do in “Bridging the Cultural Divide.” See excerpts of Gabrielle David’s original Editors’ Note from 2001 on www.phatitude.org. Special thanks to our interns, Amanda Ostrove and Eric Barbera for their hard work on this project; phati’tude editors Rebecca Kaye and Karen Chau for hours of reading, proofing and editing; and Associate Editor, Jen Johnson and Marketing Director Michelle Aragón for their invaluable input in helping to bring this issue to fruition.

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HEN YOU THINK OF THE “PERFECT” SUMMER, what flashes through your mind? Bikinis, beaches, beers? When you’re a driven English major, your mind strays from these things and finds itself focusing more on books, books, and books. When we got calls from Gabrielle David to let us know we would be the editorial interns for the September 11th anniversary issue of phati’tude Literary Magazine, we weren’t exactly sure what we had signed up for. When the towers had fallen, we were mere elementary school children – hardly old enough to comprehend the vast and immutable implications of the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. In discussing our personal experiences of that day, we found our narratives fragmented and disjointed. However, several vivid images were common to us — and perhaps thousands of other then-schoolchildren – parents crying, teachers trying to stay calm in the face of mortal uncertainty, planes repeatedly hitting the towers on our television screens. Perhaps being too young to fully grasp the magnitude of September 11th at the time is what drew us to this project; this was the ideal opportunity to delve into something that, although very much a part of us, still felt somewhat alien. In a way, this issue allowed us to reach back into the past and examine and rearrange it in a way to better understand it. Not only the attacks and their ramifications, but also ourselves. The amazing scope of literary expression, we think, is a fantastic way to do this; it affords us the unique opportunity to explore September 11th from a variety of perspectives, none of them identical to our own. The process of reading other peoples’ accounts allowed us to see how the attacks affected people from different backgrounds and affiliations. Through literature, we could really see the attacks in a global light. We took care to organize the magazine narratively; combining so many different cultural pieces and viewpoints was an arduous task but also a necessary one. We believe this issue provides objective and compelling literary insight into September 11th as well as the events’ farreaching, global consequences. In many ways, September 11th marked a defining rift: there were pre-9/11 identities and post-9/11 identities, pre-9/11 policies and post-9/11 policies. Understanding its impact can only lead us to better understand ourselves. The attacks may have permanently scarred us, but scars represent healing and survival as much as they evidence trauma. In the words of Lebanese artist and poet Khalil Gibran: “Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self. Therefore, trust the physician and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility.” In recognizing the tenth year anniversary of September 11th, we can only gain more insight and understanding, not only into the effects and aftermath of this traumatic event, but also into the nation, into our communities, our identities, and ultimately, ourselves. If shared trauma and pain is the panacea against misunderstanding, we hope you stay thirsty.

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Presenting the Facts On September 11, 2001, at 8:46 a.m. on a clear Tuesday morning, an American Airlines Boeing 767 loaded with 20,000 gallons of jet fuel crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. What initially appeared to be a freak accident, 18 minutes after the first plane hit, a second Boeing 767– United Airlines Flight 175 — appeared out of the sky and sliced into the south tower of the World Trade Center. America was under attack. As millions watched the events unfolding in New York, at 9:37 a.m. American Airlines Flight 77 circled over downtown Washington, D.C., and slammed into the west side of the Pentagon military headquarters. Jet fuel from the Boeing 757 caused a devastating inferno that led to the structural collapse of a portion of the giant concrete building. Meanwhile, a fourth California-bound plane — United Flight 93 – was hijacked about 40 minutes after leaving Newark International Airport in New Jersey. The passengers fought the hijackers and crashed into a rural field in Shanksville, a town in western Pennsylvania, at 10:10 a.m. Its intended target is not known, but theories include the White House, the U.S. Capitol, Camp David or one of several nuclear power plants along the eastern seaboard. At 9:40 a.m., the FAA grounded all aircraft within the continental U.S., and all international flights were banned from landing on U.S. soil for three days. Three buildings in the World Trade Center Complex collapsed due to structural failure. The South Tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m. after burning for 56 minutes in a fire caused by the impact of United Airlines Flight 175. The North Tower collapsed at 10:28 a.m. after burning for 102 minutes. When the North Tower

collapsed, debris fell on the nearby 7 World Trade Center building, damaging it and starting fires that burned for hours. It finally collapsed at 5:21 p.m. The attackers were Islamic terrorists from Saudi Arabia and several other Arab nations. Reportedly financed by Saudi fugitive Osama bin Ladenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s al-Qaeda terrorist organization, they were allegedly acting in retaliation for Americaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s support of Israel, its involvement in the Persian Gulf War and its continued military presence in the Middle East. In the end, close to 3,000 people died, with 6,000 others treated for injuries, many severe. In Washington D.C., 125 military personnel and civilians were killed in the Pentagon, along with all 64 passengers aboard the plane. In Shanksville, 45 people including the passengers aboard that plane were also killed. On October 7, 2001, the United States led Operation Enduring Freedom, an international effort to oust the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and destroy Osama bin Ladenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s terrorist network. The Patriot Act was enacted by the U.S. Congress on October 26, 2001, at the request of President George Bush in response to the terrorist acts of September 11th, which gave controversial new powers to the Justice Department in terms of domestic and international surveillance of American citizens and others within its jurisdiction. After a year of debate, the invasion of Iraq began on March 20, 2003 because the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom asserted that Iraq had in its possession weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which threatened their security and that of their coalition/regional allies. This assertion was later proven false. The invasion of Iraq led to an occupation and the eventual capture of Saddam Hussein on December 13, 2003, who was executed on December 30, 2003. Barack Obama was elected President of the United States in 2008. Osama bin Laden was killed on May 1, 2011. The Afghanistan and Iraq wars continue.

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Osam in LLaaden’s samaa bbin Am eri can LLeg eg Ame rican egaacy It’s TTim im e tto o SStt o p C e l e b ra tin g an d G o B o K ansa ime Ce ting and Go Baa c k tto Kansa ansass

960S, Senator George Aiken of Vermont offered two American presidents a 1960S, ACK IN THE 1 plan for dealing with the Vietnam War: declare victory and go home. Roundly ignored at

the time, it’s a plan worth considering again today for a war in Afghanistan and Pakistan now in its tenth year. As everybody not blind, deaf, and dumb knows by now, Osama bin Laden has been eliminated. Literally. By Navy Seals. Or as one of a crowd of revelers who appeared in front of the White House Sunday night put it on an impromptu sign riffing on The Wizard of Oz: “Ding, Dong, Bin Laden Is Dead.” And wouldn’t it be easy if he had indeed been the Wicked Witch of the West and all we needed to do was click those ruby slippers three times, say “there’s no place like home,” and be back in Kansas. Or if this were V-J day and a sailor’s kiss said it all. (cont’d pg. 20)

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BRIDGING THE CULTURAL DIVIDE REMEMBERING SEPTEMBER 11TH

Post-9/1 1W ar FFe ever t-9/11 War

VALS, the American body T PERIODIC INTER INTERV politic has shown a marked susceptibility to messianic fevers. Whenever an especially acute attack occurs, a sort of delirium ensues, manifesting itself in delusions of grandeur and demented behavior. By the time the condition passes and a semblance of health is restored, recollection of what occurred during the illness tends to be hazy. What happened? How’d we get here? Most Americans prefer not to know. No sense dwelling on what’s behind us. Feeling much better now! Thanks! Gripped by such a fever in 1898, Americans evinced an irrepressible impulse to liberate oppressed Cubans. By the time they’d returned to their senses, having (cont’d pg. 21)

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Joe Kerr’s Blog

EY! BL OG BUDDIES! You’re all wondering BLOG what’s up with your ol’ Bud, Joe Kerr. Not a word from your award-winning, free-lance, foreign news correspondent in weeks and weeks. Well not to worry, Big Blog Buds. Yours truly has been hanging out in Dubai putting in some much needed R & R. After my harrowing experiences over the last decade through Iraq and Afghanistan (graphically described in Joe Kerr’s Adventures, available in both print and ebook versions through Amazon} I was more than ready for a vacation. And where better to take a break than in Dubai! (cont’d pg. 23)

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Our mission is to increase interest in reading by providing cool, short book recommendations in poetry, fiction and nonfiction. To submit book reviews, send them to editor@phatitude.org. Happy reading!

Arab American Women’s Writing and Performance: Orientalism, Race and the Idea of the Arabian Nights By Somaya Sami Sabry Tauris Academic Studies, 2011 http://us.macmillan.com/series/TaurisAcademicStudies $88.00; 224 pp.; ISBN-10: 1848855680

RAB RAB--AMERICAN WOMEN’S WRITING and Performance: Orientalism, Race and the Idea of the Arabian Nights by Somaya Sami Sabry is a complex, comprehensive and erudite study of the use of “Scheherazadian narrative” in Arab American women’s writing and performance to counter Western depictions and misrepresentations of Arabian culture and women in literature, film and media. Sabry tackles a formidable subject matter with an evident background in diaspora, (cont’d pg. 34)

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BRIDGING THE CULTURAL DIVIDE REMEMBERING SEPTEMBER 11TH

Songs of Love and War: Afghan Women’s Poetry By Sayd Majrouh, Marjolijn de Jager (Tr) Other Press; 2010 www.otherpress.com $14.95; 128 pp.; ISBN-10: 1590513983

ONGS OF LO VE AND WAR: Afghan Women’s LOVE Poetry is a collection of two-line poems — called landays — improvised and sung by thousands of anonymous female voices. The poems stem from an oral tradition among Afghan women and it is only through the efforts of the editor, poet and visionary Sayd Bahodine Majrouh, and two diligent translators, André Velter and Marjolijn de Jager, that they have become accessible to us in Songs of Love and War. As Majrouh explains in his wonderfully succinct introduction, the landay (literally, (cont’d pg. 34)

Modern Arab American Fiction: A Reader's Guide By Steven Salaita Syracuse Univ. Press, 2011 www.syracuseuniversitypress.syr.edu $19.95; 154 pp.; ISBN-10: 0815632533

ODERN ARAB AMERICAN FICTION FICTION:: A Reader’s Guide, by Steven Salaita, is a complex study which takes the unique standpoint of attempting to introduce the reader to the realm of Arab American Fiction whilst continuously struggling against the existence and the constraints of such a category. While Salaita concedes the necessity of categorizing fiction for the sake of critical analysis, he is careful to stipulate that “‘Arab American literature’ is a political category, not a cultural and historical given,” just as the Middle (cont’d pg. 35) V O L. 3 N O. 3

Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East Edited by Reza Aslan W. W. Norton & Company, 2010 www.wwnorton.com $35.00; 657 pp.; ISBN-10: 0393065855

HILE THE U .S. HAS BECOME DEEPL U.S. DEEPLY Y involved in the Middle East, most Americans, lack knowledge about the region. Yet from Afghanistan to Palestine, from Morocco to Iraq, there is a vibrant and exciting

literature by living authors that portrays the diverse experiences and perspectives of this vital part of the world, which lack exposure to the general public. The insights offered by this type of literature have the power to replace stereotypes, transform worldviews, develop personal connections, humanize the Islamic religion and (cont’d pg. 36)

One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature Edited by Zohra Saed and Sahar Muradi Univ. of Arkansas Pr., 2010 www.uapress.com $24.95; 290 pp.; ISBN-10: 155728945X

WENT Y YEARS A GO, THE IDEA of a specific WENTY AGO, Afghan American literature was almost non-existent and Afghan culture appeared invisible to the general public in the United States. With 9/11 and the U.S. war in Afghanistan, this changed dramatically and first and second generation Afghan Americans consequently began to emerge and make their voices known. One Story, Thirty Stories can be classified as the first comprehensive Afghan American anthology. The title, taken from the opening line of Afghan fairy tales, "Afsanah, (cont’d pg. 37)

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BRIDGING THE CULTURAL DIVIDE REMEMBERING SEPTEMBER 11TH

Poetic Acrobat: The Poetry of Ronny Someck By Yair Mazor Goblin Fern Press, 2008 www.goblinfernpress.com $12.95; 160 pp.; ISBN-10: 1595980709

OETIC ACR OBA Y OF RONNY ACROBA OBAT POETRY T: THE POETR Someck by Yair Mazor offers a glance into the work of Baghdad-born Israeli poet Ronny Someck. The translations of Someck’s work by Marganit Weinberger-Rotman are extremely fluid, seemingly effortless and often complimented by Mazor’s own notes (in his closereadings of the text, Mazor refers to the original Hebrew words and their connotative values within the Hebrew lexical topography to inform his analysis). The illustrations of various Israeli artists, interspersed throughout the study, fall into step with Someck’s writings in portraying a (cont’d pg. 38)

Literature and War: Conversations With Israeli and Palestinian Writers By Runo Isaksen Interlink Pub Group, 2008 www.interlinkbooks.com $18.00; 222 pp.; ISBN-10: 1566567300

HILE AMERICAN LITERA TURE covers an abunLITERATURE dance of ethnic literatures and a myriad of social and political issues, the unifying factor is the English language. On the other hand, Israeli literature is a bit more complex; while the literature is unified by religion, works classed as Israeli literature are written in five languages; with Hebrew as the dominant language, some Israeli authors write in Yiddish, English, Arabic and Russian. But that’s not all. Political and social scenarios are vast, ranging from Zionism (which has supported the self-deter(cont’d pg. 39) V O L. 3 N O. 3

Poets on the Edge: An Anthology of Contemporary Hebrew Poetry Edited by Tsipi Keller State University of New York Pr., 2008 www.sunypress.edu $29.95; 384 pp.; ISBN-10: 0791476863

HERE IS NO O THER EXAMPLE in human history of OTHER the successful revival of an unspoken, semifossilized language such as was Hebrew with the rise of Zionism at the end of the 18th century and the return of Jews to the Land of Israel in the mid-20th century. Poets were the spearhead of the drive towards the renewal of Hebrew speech in practice, and until the middle of the 20th century, their poetry was celebrated both for its intrinsic merit and as a national achievement. The two giants of the era, Saul Tchernikhovsky and Chaim Nahman (cont’d pg. 40)

Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry Edited by Hayan Charara Univ. of Arkansas Pr., 2008 $24.95; 328 pp.; ISBN-10: 1557288674

HILE ARAB AMERICAN LITERA LITERATURE TURE has been around since the first immigrants landed on America’s shores during the 1800s, only recently has the genre had been recognized as part of the ethnic literary landscape. In fact, most people would agree that during the mid-1980s and throughout the 1990s, Arab American literature grew by leaps and bounds, beginning with the anthology, Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab-American Poetry (1988), which alluded to the exclusion from writing circles and publications felt by Arab Americans as a group. This groundbreaking work paved the way for (cont’d pg. 41)

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THE 9/11 TERRORIST ATTACK was the physical orchestration of mass murder. It was a symbolic, political and religious act of war waged on the Western world. Literary responses have begun to grow in number in the last seven years, cementing the event and its microcosmic and macrocosmic significance in history by representing it, recreating it and reacting to it in the arts. Contrary to the linguistic ideology employed immediately by the U.S government, these responses are frequently pessimistic in their outlook and gritty (1) in their representation of the events. The “positive ideology” which they reject is epitomised by George W. Bush’s speech on the evening of 9/11. Bush imagined America as “the brightest beacon for freedom” attacked, but not shattered, by a biblical evil; this literature disinherits the ideology established by the President on that day. In resisting such linguistic fashioning, pessimistic artistic response to 9/11 encompasses elegy, melancholy and cynicism, with work becoming increasingly disillusioned in light of the fallout from 9/11, such as the war in Afghanistan and the Patriot Act. The rhetorical recasting of 9/11 into a triumph of American spirit, of rescue workers and emergency teams, was an appropriate linguistic course to take in the short-term, and is carried on in artistic works such as the film United 93, but, in the longterm, responses needed to confront the grief which this devastating attack caused. (cont’d pg. 46)

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A Ammiel Alcalay

Illuminating Cultural Identities in Literature that Bridge the Cultural Divide

MMIEL ALCALAY IS A BOSTON NATIVE, who is a first-generation American son of Sephardic Jews from Yugoslavia and the Balkans. This hybridity has funneled Alcalay’s identity experiences into literary ones, giving us many literary delights in an array of genres that illuminate connections to the Israeli, Arab, Bosnian, and American worlds. Alcalay’s literary background is steeped in a rich, American tradition. As a child, Alcalay grew up in Boston, spending time in Gloucester where family friends included poets and writers Charles Olson and Vincent Ferrini, with whom he maintained friendships until their respective deaths. Growing up as a “first generation” American, with parents and extended family speaking different languages as well as being around middle-class and working class children in similar situations — Italian, Greek and Chinese — certainly enriched his literary sensibility. As a teenager, through the Grolier and Temple Bar Bookshops in Cambridge, he befriended many poets, including John Wieners, and began to explore the works of Jack Kerouac, John Burroughs, Robert Creely, Robert Duncan, Douglas Woolf, Denise Levertov, (cont’d pg. 60)

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Speaking Heart to Heart: Using Immigrant Literature to Impact Our Communities & World Movements D.H. Melhem

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S THE BIRTHPLACE of many cultural movements, including the Harlem Renaissance, abstract expressionism, and the dance capital of the world, New York City is a destination point for people from every corner of the globe drawn by the age-old promise of “streets paved with gold.” What’s astonishing about New York City is that it has become the world’s most diverse gathering of nationalities, religions, races and ethnic groups; a place where poet, novelist, editor and scholar D.H. Melhem’s Lebanese immigrant parents (with paternal Greek ancestry) settled in Brooklyn, where she was born and raised; and grew up to become a keen observer of a city that she loves to write about.

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Seeking Truths Through Poetry to Inform and Inspire as a Tool for Peace

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My connection tto o the Middle East is, in par t, a part, connection that o ther people mak e or imagine, other make and because of the politics behind that imaginar imaginaryy connection, there’s no escaping it. It’s a trap.

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Hayan Charara

ONSIDER THIS: A young boy born to Lebanese immigrants in Detroit, Michigan, whose family members were victims of a senseless war thousands of miles away. Such is the legacy of poet Hayan Charara.

Charara is a true poet, committed to the act of poetry, using his words to paint truths. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history. For Charara, poetry that reveals truth becomes a way of taking back power. Not only the power to express oneself, but to actively engage with the events of a world that seem to render ordinary people helpless. This desire to write poetry to document and tell truths began at a young age. Charara has always been interested in literature — his mother was a school teacher and an avid reader, and so books were always a part of his life. It was this early relationship with books that got him started with writing. By the time he was a teenager, as he (cont’d pg. 70)

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Karen Alkalay-Gut

Insight into Human Understanding: An Israeli Writer’s Reflection on Literature

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HERE IS NO ONE REALLY QUITE like Karen Alkalay-Gut, the daughter of two Polish Jews who fled from Lida in Lithuania to Danzig, were persecuted for her father's communist background in Danzig and fled on the proverbial last train on the night before Hitler invaded. Alkalay-Gut was born in a shelter during the bombing of London, raised in America, transplanted to Israel with a husband and daughter. She is an Israeli poet who writes in English and has published over 20 poetry books and chapbooks, mostly in English, some in Hebrew translation (she has also translated hundreds of Hebrew poems into English). She has performed with a rock band half her age, hosted a television show, and teaches poetry at Tel Aviv University, where she encourages students to produce an anthology of their poetry in English, Hebrew, and Arabic. (cont’d from pg. 75)

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I see a lo ilms about Afghanistan. lott of ne news, ws, pubications and ffilms antasy type er,, the same kinds of Orientalist rescue ffantasy How wever Ho st ories ha o the mainstream. More critical w or ks stories havve made it int into wor orks that of ple offfer com comple plexx images of Afghanistan are published in less mainstream publications.

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Recognizing Unique Voices in Afghan American Literature

Zohra Saed TH OF SEPTEMBER 11TH N THE AFTERMA 11TH, Afghan Americans found AFTERMATH themselves caught in a cultural crossfire as their adoptive homeland was at war with their native land. Certainly, many people began to engage in critical discussions concerning Afghanistan’s history and politics. More importantly, the attacks stimulated an unprecedented degree of activism among Afghan Americans to present a more accurate picture of Afghanistan and Islam, and to distance mainstream Islam from the extremists who perpetrated the September 11th violence. A vibrant, active, and intellectual Afghan American community of young bilingual and bicultural Afghans, who had quietly begun to develop their own media outlets and create cultural organizations, exploded. And one of those young vibrant Afghans is Zohra Saed. (cont’d pg. 80)

PHOTO: Anjali Bhargava

Naomi Shihab Nye

To Any Would-Be Terrorists I AM SORRY I HAVE TO CALL YOU THAT, but I don’t know how else to get your attention. I hate that word. Do you know how hard some of us have worked to get rid of that word, to deny its instant connection to the Middle East? And now look. Look what extra work we have. Not only did your colleagues kill thousands of innocent, international people in those buildings and scar their families forever, they wounded a huge community of people in the Middle East, in the United States and all over the world. If that’s what they wanted to do, please know the mission was a terrible success, and you can stop now. Because I feel a little (cont’d pg. 88)

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BRIDGING THE CULTURAL DIVIDE REMEMBERING SEPTEMBER 11TH

Karen Beatty

Anything Can Happen Day — September 11, 2001 I LEFT FOR WORK A FEW minutes after 9 a.m., fully appreciative of the clear blue skies and unusually warm sunshine for a mid-September day in New York City. Before 11 a.m. on any given day in the West Village, the streets are nearly traffic-free and the sidewalks are sprinkled with people. On this particular morning, however, a few steps beyond the entrance to my building, just where MacDougal intersects W. 8th, I noticed two or three people staring intently and silently downtown. “Something’s up,” I thought, and stepped forward to join the aggregate. I was stunned to see that several top floors of the North Tower of the World Trade Center appeared to be belching white smoke. “What’s (cont’d pg. 89)

Nan Hunt

Fighting With The Dark I STARTED A SMALL WAR THE OTHER DAY. Two days after the Twin Towers in New York City exploded, burned, and collapsed, I escaped to the solitude and quiet of a small, unpopulated lake, leaving behind radio voices that had been a palpable presence ever since the horrific event (no television at my mountain cabin).Voices turned to images in my mind’s eye: the mouths gaping open in screams, towering infernos, burning bodies, falling bodies, ash like concrete and jet oil smoke shrouding the buildings. (cont’d pg. 94) V O L. 3 N O. 3

LEARNING ABOUT DIFFERENT LITERATURES “

RIDGING THE CULTURAL DIVIDE” addresses the complex questions raised by the ‘hyphenated’ or hybrid identities of Arab American, Arab, Israeli, Jewish American and Aghan American authors writing in and reacting to contemporary political and literary climates. The essayists — Lisa Suhair Majaj, Ranen Omer-Sherman, Zohra Saed and Sahar Muradi, Bassam K. Frangieh and Morris Dickstein — all grapple with the same questions of individual and authorial identity as well as the universality of specific cultural experiences even though they approach these questions from different cultural and ideological standpoints. If bridges “span or provide passage over a gap or barrier,” then these works span multiple and continually shifting cultural and national identities. Bridging such a large gap is more than just a feat for such artists and writers however; it is a condition inherent to their hybridity. Imagine a person physically bridging two countries in two different continents; perhaps with one foot in Afghanistan and one foot in Queens. It's an image that borders on the comedic; the person's legs are rubber-bands twanging in the wind and their torso, arms and head are high in the air. Perhaps they windmill their small arms to maintain their balance; perhaps they develop a squint, trying to glance in both directions at once without being able to make out either foot in the distance; perhaps they only feel the insistent tug of two identities pulling them into an ever-deepening stretch that can almost no longer be borne. It is in fact a precarious condition which can easily lead to an over-stretching of the self in an attempt to please both sides and which presents the near-constant risk of losing one's balance and toppling over into an ocean of discontented voices in the process. And yet, this is a risk which the writers discussed in the following essays take in the name of opening up new avenues of communication in their writing. For, the process of bridging ultimately requires an unabashed truthfulness about both sides of one's hyphenated or hybrid cultural identity-something which may not be acceptable to either side. Ultimately, what becomes abundantly clear in the following essays is the highly personal nature of the process of configuring and coming to terms with issues of one's own hybrid nationality and identity through literature. Once we accept the fact that we may never come across unanimously acceptable terms of identity when multiple ethnicities and nationalities are involved, it is the willingness of writers and artists to attempt to "bridge the gap" — or at least to sing across it through literature, performance and visual arts-that becomes important, and pleasing, in and of itself.

BRIDGING THE CULTURAL DIVIDE REMEMBERING SEPTEMBER 11TH

The Hyphenated Author: Emerging Genre of ‘Arab-American Literature’ Poses Questions of Definition, Ethnicity and Art Lisa Suhair Majaj S THERE AN ARAB TURE? On the face of it, the question seems a ARAB--AMERICAN LITERA LITERATURE? simple one. Of course there is Arab-American literature, if what is meant by this is poetry and prose by American authors of Arab descent. It is true that we have not produced as much literature as other ethnic groups, even accounting for the small size of our population. But writing by Arab Americans would appear, to the casual observer, to be proliferating.

For evidence, one might point toward two anthologies, Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab American Poetry, and Food for Our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American and Arab-Canadian Feminists. One might mention special issues of journals focusing on Arab-American writing (such as Jusoor) as well as the newly inaugurated journal, Mizna, dedicated entirely to Arab Americans. And one might note the new books that appear with growing frequency from established and new Arab-American authors alike. The question, however, is not whether there are Arab-American writers, but whether there is such a thing as Arab-American literature — whether, that is, there is some “Arab-American” essence defining and binding together individual texts as part of a larger whole. To

raise this question points toward a broader contestation over what it means to be Arab American. The Arab-American community, shaped by a century-long history of migration, is remarkably diverse. It includes third and fourth generation Americans as well as recent immigrants; people from different countries and different religious denominations; those who speak no Arabic and who speak no English; people who identify primarily with the “Arab” side of their heritage and those who identify primarily with the “American” side. This diversity complicates assessment of what constitutes “Arab-American” identity. At the present time there are two main viewpoints: The first view that Arab-American identity is in essence a transplanted Arab identity, turning upon a preservation (cont’d pg. 126)

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Jewish & Muslim Hybridity in Recent Israeli Short Fiction Ranen Omer-Sherman

N THE SUMMER OF 2009 2009, Ariel Atias, Israel’s housing minister, declared that it was a national responsibility to curtail the Arab population in the state. He stipulated that the proximity of Jewish and Arab populations (especially in the Galilee, a region of many ArabIsraeli communities) was highly undesirable: “Populations that should not mix are spreading there. I don’t think that it is appropriate [for them] to live together.” Though it is hard to imagine a more incendiary statement (nor one more likely to be painful for those who would defend Zionism from the charge of racism) such rhetorical efforts to undermine the prospect of healthy civic attitudes toward Israel’s multicultural complexity have been uttered frequently by members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition. Yet, even at a time when members of Israel’s minority have good cause to feel dangerously alienated from the state, a careful examination of cultural and intellectual trends suggests that a more hopeful multicultural ethos, based on an expansive sense of regional belonging (that transcends national identity), continues to find vibrant expression. In a pair of twentyfirst century magical-realist stories of transformation, the Israeli writers Almog Behar and Sayed Kashua, a Jew (cont’d pg. 127)

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and a Muslim respectively, each reveal the absurdity of “Arab” and “Jewish” identities as exclusive, impermeable categories. Most significantly, each of their narratives of identity confusion, published just a year apart from one another, is provocatively set in the eternally troubled and contested city of Jerusalem. Both writers respond to the segregations, divisions and separations that govern the lives of the “reunited” city’s Jewish and Arab citizens.(1) In Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi’s compelling essay, “‘Jerusalem Assassinated Rabin and Tel Aviv Commemorated him’: Rabin Memorials and the Discourse of National Identity in Israel,” she builds on the foundation of anthropologist Chaim Chazan’s assertion that “in Jerusalem, the boundaries between mythological time and terrestrial time are blurred . . . while

BRIDGING THE CULTURAL DIVIDE REMEMBERING SEPTEMBER 11TH

Exploring The Genesis of Afghan American Literature Zohra Saed & Sahar Muradi

O BETTER UNDERST AND the Afghan American literary tradition, it is important to UNDERSTAND contextualize our arrival and root-taking in the U.S. The Soviet-Afghan War resulted in the greatest influx of Afghan refugees into the U.S. in the history of Afghan immigration to America. In the early 1980s, mostly affluent, educated Afghan families were able to emigrate here. Many used life savings to pay smugglers to get their families out of the country and across

the Atlantic. Doctors, engineers, lawyers, and businessmen in Afghanistan now took jobs in the U.S. as service workers, taxi drivers, and food vendors. After becoming openly involved in the war in 1986, the U.S. airlifted Afghans from villages and gave them refugee status. In the diaspora, we came together across class, ethnicity, and rural/urban lines to build communities and re-narrate our lives. The 1980s was a time of adjustment and transformation. Storefront mosques slowly appeared on the streets of New York City and California. These mosques were not the architectural wonders of our parentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; generation; mostly, they were humble rooms in four-story buildings, or the second floors of houses with illustrations of domes and minarets to make up for the

lack of ornate design. These mosques were places where Afghans came together for comfort, company, and to carry on our traditions. In Queens, New York the housing projects were filled with new Afghan refugees. Their numbers were so large that this area became known affectionately as Deh Afghanan: village of Afghans. This concentration of Afghans helped create a self-sufficient community of Afghan specialty shops, restaurants and translation offices all along Main Street. Similar neighborhoods bloomed in other parts of the country when adventure, or desperation, or the cultural claustrophobia of immigrant neighborhoods thrust families off to New Jersey, Virginia, California, Colorado, Nebraska and Texas. We children were raised in communities where a strong work ethic became the (contâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d pg. 134)

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Modern Arabic Poetry: Vision & Realty Bassam K. Frangieh

HE ARAB POET HAS T NO TIME in history, been entirely free from political and HAS,, A AT social commitment. Since pre-Islamic times, Arab poets have played a critical role in their society. The Arab poet was the voice of his tribe: its defender and representative — and above all, its provocative force. The ideal Arab hero has always been embodied in the warrior poet who fought against injustice and oppression. In modern times, the role of the Arab poet

has not changed a great deal. The poets Hafiz Ibrahim (d. 1932), Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi (d. 1936), Ma’ruf alRusafi (d. 1945), Ibrahim Tuqan (d.1941) and Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri (d. 1997), to name only a few, fought for social and political justice, reaffirming the continuing involvement of Arab poets in their societies. Mahmoud Darwish (d. 2008), serving as a representative and spokesperson for Palestinians, is one fine example of the importance of the Arab poet in contemporary Arab society. Also, nowhere in the modern world are poets more actively involved in the social, political and national realities of their societies than in the Arab World. Arab poets are considered persons of vision and prophecy, and because of this they have been a source of fear for (cont’d pg. 136)

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many Arab leaders. In the latter part of the twentieth century, as challenges and crises intensified, the poet became even more involved and his role became increasingly critical. Today, the Arab poet has become a “fighter against his time,” to use Nietzsche’s words. In the last few decades, most prominent Arab poets have been imprisoned, tortured, and forced into exile, or have lived outside the borders of their homelands. As a consequence of their brave words, Qassim Haddad (b. 1948), Muhammad Afifi Matar (b. 1935) and Abdllatif La’bi (b.1942) were tortured and imprisoned. Kamal Nasir (d. 1973) was murdered, Abd al-Wahab al-Bayyati (d. 1999) lived in continuous exile, and Muzaffar al-Nuwwab (b. 1934) lives underground, while Adonis (b. 1930) resided in Lebanon then France,

BRIDGING THE CULTURAL DIVIDE REMEMBERING SEPTEMBER 11TH

Ghost Stories: The New Wave of Jewish Writing Morris Dickstein

HE CURRENT RESURGENCE OF JEWISH AMERICAN writing in a world rife with assimilation is as surprising as the survival of the Jews themselves. As early as the 1960s when writers like Bellow and Malamud were at the height of their powers, when Philip Roth had only recently made his spectacular debut, informed and sympathetic critics like Ted Solotaroff and Irving Howe worried aloud whether younger Jewish writers were running out of material: their work was turning derivative and predictable as they lost contact with the immigrant experience and its vigorous culture. So soon after the Holocaust, barely a decade after the postwar, Jewish writers had touched a universal chord, and their successors, cut off imaginatively from Europe and the ghetto, seemed unable to serve up the rich ethnic flavors of the past or to subsist on the thin gruel of the suburban present. By the sixties young Jews were living much the same lives as other Americans. If anything singled them out, it was their widespread attraction to radical politics, not Jewish experience. With antisemitism and discrimination in sharp decline, the young were becoming even more assimilated than their

Americanized parents, who had at least grown up with some Yiddish ringing in their ears. But with the rise of black separatism, the sixties climaxed with a surge of identity politics. Black nationalism forged a compelling model for radical feminism, gay liberation, and finally what Michael Novak called "the rise of the unmeltable ethnics." Over the next few years it became as fashionable to explore your roots as it once been to transcend them. The fervent patriotism of the World War II generation and the existential humanism of the early sixties were now seen as part of a discredited liberal mind-set that had deprived us of personal meaning and led us into Vietnam. Culture, identity, and ethnic pride were the new American watchwords, multiculturalism the new faith. (contâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d pg. 148)

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WHILE SUBJECT OF THESE AR T WORKS of a full ART series of 75 begins on 9/11, its genesis was a month earlier in July 2001 during a glorious summer week when my thirteen- year-old grandson from Texas came to New York City for the first time to visit me and my wife, Shirley Sherak. I took him to my favorite places, starting with the view from the top of the World Trade Center. As we approached the WTC located barely a thousand feet from our home, we came upon the large cement planter-barriers on the sidewalk in front of the entrance. I mentioned to Randy that they were there as a result of an attack in 1993 when a terrorist had driven a bomb-laden truck into the parking garage and set it off by remote control. His alarm at my statement surprised me. I had thought of the bombing as a long past criminal event and regretted that I upset him. Like most of us, I was oblivious to the holy war aspect of the situation. I thought of it as the work of a religious zealot, who stood trial and was now in jail. It seemed an almost forgotten ugly episode far removed from that beautiful summer day — except for the cement planters. (cont’d from pg. 162)

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A Visual Record of September 11, 2001 & Its Aftermath

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A VISUAL RECORD OF SEPTEMBER 11TH George Harkins (cont’d from pg. 160) We went to the TKTS office located in the South Tower to buy discounted theater tickets and, as usual, there was a long line of people waiting for the office to open. I sat on the floor with some visitors from out of town and we chatted about the city while Randy did what a thirteen-year-old does: he roamed around taking pictures and buying ice cream. After purchasing our tickets, we took the express elevator to the observation deck. We were able to see the Statue of Liberty, the Atlantic Ocean beyond the Verrazano Bridge, the Empire State Building and Manhattan all the way to the Bronx. On our way back to the elevators, Randy wanted to stop at the souvenir shop to purchase gifts for his brother and sister. (5) The lady who helped him with his selection was very pleasant and patient. I thought about her and the others who worked in the Twin Towers a few weeks later as clouds of black smoke engulfed the tops of the towers. Throughout the day of the attack, a thousand feet away, I photographed the drama before me from the roof of our Tribeca building and down on the streets below. In the aftermath, as an unexpected witness to history, I walked the neighborhood streets and circled the site every day, sometimes alone, sometimes with Shirley getting

as close as was permitted, to experience, observe and record the activity and atmosphere. The attack has never been far from my mind in the months and years since 9/11, and I wanted to leave an historical account for future generations to view. After experimenting with different media, I decided to use pen and ink and watercolor to create smaller, intimate artworks. I found this technique suited to expressing what I had witnessed. The notion of having the works tell a story — a visual diary, I’ve included only events and scenes that I witnessed — surfaced only after most of these pieces were completed. It also became apparent that an accompanying text would help explain the everyday experiences of New Yorkers caught in proximity to Ground Zero. When it was clear that what was taking place was actually an attack and an act of war, we knew our lives had been changed, but not how much or in what way. For us, 9/11 is never past: we live with its effects: uncertainty and coping with the fear of another attack. In the decade that has passed, the feeling that we lost a way of life has deepened. Still, the city of that glorious July week that my grandson spent with us will always be the city I remember fondly — the fountains and flowers, the clever mimes in the parks, the people enjoying the warm days of summer. As New Yorkers, we choose to be here and live in this wonderful city. The banners we hung out of our windows proclaimed the slogan coined by a neighbor, “Here to Stay.” And we are.

ARTWORK

(1) 8:48 a.m. Thomas Street, 9"x7", Pen and Ink and Watercolor. Copyright © 2008 by George Harkins (2) Crowd on West Broadway, 9-1/4"x13", Pen and Ink and Watercolor, Copyright © 2009 by George Harkins. (3) One Tower Down, 8-1/4"x11", Pen and Ink and Watercolor, Copyright © 2008 by George Harkins (4) Greenwich Street, 7"x10", Pen and Ink and Watercolor, Copyright © 2009 by George Harkins (5) Duane Street, Rooftop, 10"x7", Pen and Ink and Watercolor, Copyright © 2008 by George Harkins

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FEATURED ARTIST George Harkins IW AS BORN IN PHILADELPHIA A in 1934 and grew up WAS PHILADELPHIA,, P PA in its western suburbs. I had been drawing and painting since childhood, but my formal art education began at the Philadelphia College of Art where I majored in Illustration. After graduation I was drafted into the U.S. Army and served two years of active duty as an illustrator. I spent the next few years working as an art director and as a free-lance illustrator. In 1967 I entered the University of Arizona and earned an MFA in Painting. While still a graduate student, I became part of a group of artists and teachers who founded an arts community on an old dude ranch north of Tucson, Arizona, called Rancho Linda Vista. The community is thriving to this day and is a vibrant part of the local art scene. In the late 1970s I moved into Manhattan and was caught up in the urban pioneering movement, converting old manufacturing lofts into art studios in lower Manhattan. For those first few years I free-lanced in illustration and exhibited my watercolor paintings in numerous one-man and group shows in the City and elsewhere. Since the early 1980s, I have devoted all my time to fine art. My main medium and subject matter are large scale watercolor landscapes, sometimes comprising two or three panels. I gather material for these pieces in Vermont and near our house in upstate New York. I am currently represented by the Jane Haslem Gallery in Washington, DC, and the Gail Severn Gallery in Ketchum, ID. We live about 1,000 feet from ground zero, and our first hand experiences on 9/11 are the subject of over 75 pen and ink and watercolor drawings in full color. These original drawings form a personal visual diary I originally began as a way to tell my grandchildren about what happened. It took a number of years before I began this series because I found the subject matter so painful. I worked from memory and the photographs that I had shot as the stunning events unfolded before my eyes.

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Sharing Stories that Connect

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A Question of Identity: A Story behind a Story; A Palestinian Woman’s Rite of Passage Leila Diab THE QUESTION OF “IDENTITY ,” and who has the right to define it, seems to have caused a “IDENTITY,” tremendous amount of disunity among several cultural groups living in the United States. Whether the ethnic group is African, Arab, Palestinian, Jewish or Bosnian, many of its cultural identity issues are invariably the same. Yet in the present climate of anger, sorrow and overwhelming injustice, how does (cont’d pg. 166)

Falling Asleep on the Watch David Lisbona "LEHIRADEM BESHMIRA BESHMIRA”” (falling asleep on the watch) is one of countless expressions in colloquial Hebrew taken from the military experience. Almost all Israelis, male and female, do compulsory military service starting at age eighteen. The current period of compulsory service is three years for men and twenty-one months for women. Some become officers and the better soldiers and officers (cont’d pg. 167)

The Afghan-American Response Nadia Maiwandi Y RUBBING THE SLEEP from my eyes when at 8:54 a.m. the message, “in response IW AS BAREL WAS BARELY to all the anti-middle eastern bullshit rhetoric we are sure to be inundated with over the course of the next few weeks, let me just apologize now on behalf of America. love, Lisa,” came through my email account.

(cont’d pg. 168)

49 Bethlehem Road LAW OF RETURN Judy Labensohn BO AZ SHOWED ME THIS PLA CE the day after Independence Day. We parked across the street. The BOAZ PLACE first thing I saw were the two date palms out front, a grape vine entangling the two. The trees reached beyond the second floor. It seemed they had been there for decades. I wondered who planted them. Bak’a was rundown in those days with youth gangs hanging out on the corner of Judah and (cont’d pg. 170) V O L. 3 N O. 3

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Joseph S. Walker

Disaster Girl IF I MAKE A REALISTIC ATTEMPT to reconstruct that morning it must have been shortly before the second plane hit the Towers when I left my apartment to go get breakfast. It’s unlikely, then, that the girl who came around the corner just as I was turning from my door, the girl who seemed so startled and who looked at me with wide eyes before hurrying on her way — disaster girl — knew anything of what was happening hundreds of miles away. How could she? At the moment she looked at me so fearfully even people looking at the Towers didn’t yet comprehend what was happening. It wasn’t yet something that could be imagined, even if it was something that had actually happened. In my memory, though, she is so alarmed, so rushed, so anxious that it’s difficult to believe that she wasn’t some harbinger of the news I had not yet heard. I want to be clear about this, and accurate, and most of all careful. Peel away the varnish from almost ten years worth of memory and see the moment for what it was, know the reality of it. I will try to do this even while knowing that it’s not really possible, that the mind forms its own story in which “what really happened” is only one element. Still, almost ten years later, this is what I believe happened. This is how the day continues to live in my mind. (cont’d pg. 218)

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Wendy T. House

One ONE MORNING, ONE MOMENT, one person’s hatred for another can turn your whole world upside down. One instant, one action, one beautiful blue sky can make you rethink everything that is important in your life. It can make you rethink your career, where you live and who you want to become. It can help you make instant changes in your life that otherwise may have never have happened or taken years to evolve. This one life altering minute, hour, day, month or year can change your perspective on life and how you live it forever. This moment for me was a beautiful September morning as I was running late for work. (cont’d pg. 220)

Himanshu Suri

Post 9/11 All Over Again: The Hate-Mongers Who Bombarded the Internet After Osama bin Laden’s Death

THE FIRST FATAL VICTIM OF POST-9/11 hate crimes was a man named Balbir Singh Sodhi. He was killed in . . . wait for it . . . Arizona. He owned a gas station and was mistaken for a Muslim because he, like many Sikhs, wore a turban. Up until about a week ago, Arizona legislation was in place to ensure his name wouldn’t be included in a state memorial. Just prior to Osama bin Laden’s killing, new legislation was enacted to include his name. According to Colorlines, “Singh Sodhi’s family members said they felt re-victimized by the bill, a decade after the national tragedy and the death of Balbir, but now feel relieved.” But for how long? (cont’d pg. 221) V O L. 3 N O. 3

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THEFINALWORD I T’ S N O T W H O Y O U K N O W B U T W H A T Y O U K N O W

Out Of Rubble: How Ar elp eca 1 Artt H He lpss U Uss R Reca ecasst 9/1 9/11 an d Im e a PPea ea ce ful W orld and Imaagin gine eace ceful Wo On “10 Years And Counting,” an all-inclusive, activist artist movement starting in September.

TIS TS and activists and have Y OF AR COME FR OM A FFAMIL AMIL TISTS AMILY ARTIS FROM long made paintings that grappled with abused resources, misplaced priorities, and histories we forget only to repeat. As a painter, I dismantled hierarchies, invented new cartogra-

Susanne Slavick is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon where she joined the faculty in 1984 and served as Head of the School of Art between 2000 and 2006. Slavick has exhibited in museums and galleries in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and

phies, and exposed structures that generate the very conditions they were meant to prevent. After my son was born during the first Gulf War, the intellectual pacifism behind my work got emotional. Pietàs were the only possibility. By the time of the second Gulf War, I struggled with how not to sink into resignation and cynicism, wondering how art can really matter. Responding to the ongoing disasters of war and the policies and conditions that lead to them, artists can condone or condemn. The challenge lies in finding a constructive stance. In the midst of the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War and years into our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, I tried to find a way to mourn the carnage and reveal the loss while offering a metaphoric restitution. The results were two series: R&R(…&R), that counters

Minneapolis as well as in

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Europe and Asia.

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Artists wrestle constantly with the failure of images to represent the full complexity of lived reality. In “PsychoSusanne Slavick analysis, Culture and Trauma,” Cathy Caruth posits the paradox that traumatic experience suggests: “that the (cont’d from pg. 265) most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it.”(1) If those who directly experiart historical and contemporary media representations of war with restorative interventions, and Horsepower Hu- ence the traumas of violence are unable to know them, bris, that questions violence and the valor that we all too how can artists from afar know or empathize with them? frequently assign to it. I wanted to convert military expres- Extending the inquiry from Theodor Adorno to Elaine Scarry, sions like “rest and recuperation” to words like “regret we continue to ask whether horrific realities can even be and restitution.” I wanted to convey the misery of the monu- represented and, if so, how? Still, artists plunge into the paradox. The images they create are, as Susan Sontag mental getting caught up in its own machinery. describes in Regarding the Pain of Others, “an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers,” asking: “Who caused what the picture shows? Who is responsible? Is it excusable? Was it inevitable?”(2) Such crucial questions inform and motivate contemporary artists as war and its ensuing wreckage continues to plague the planet. The rubble that each war leaves behind is also carried into the future, whether physically, psychologically, culturally or spiritually. Artists record, remember, reflect, re-purpose and restore that rubble — materially and conceptually, literally and metaphorically. Whether responding personally or collectively, they recognize what has been destroyed and speak to how (or whether) it can be restored or redeemed. Perhaps the best we can do is to strive for empathic unsettlement, which Dominick LaCapra defines as an emotional reRebuild: Mdeirej Bridge, 2008, archival digital print/Hahnemühle paper, 16" sponse that comes with respect for the other and x 20"; Border from A Chinese Dignitary, a copy in Istanbul, probably made in the realization that the experience of the other 15th century Tabrîz, Library of the Topkapì Sarayì Museum, Istanbul. is not one’s own.”(3) The empathic response is, The border’s source is an oblique reference to the dynamism of a culture as Geoffrey Hartman posits, indispensable in art, historically engaged in diplomatic exchange and not always in warbut it must be checked: art’s “truest reason” is mongering mode. The Mdeirej Bridge, the tallest in the Middle East, was in expanding “the sympathetic imagination while completed in 1998, destroyed by Israeli strikes in 2006 and is currently under reconstruction with USAID funding. teaching us about the limits of sympathy.” Faced with the obliteration of human lives Aware of the masters like Goya and Kollwitz whose and habitats, the sympathetic imagination is a pendulum portrayals of war haunt to this day, I began to seek swinging wildly from rage and sorrow to compassion and out contemporary international artists who react to the confidence in our capacity to mend. Artists use images, wake of war — its realities and its representations. I actions, materials and processes that speak to decimacollected some of their invariably somber responses, tion and disintegration and our struggle to resist or overboth tender and unflinching, in a book project, OUT come it. In OUT OF RUBBLE, they represent the aftermath OF RUBBLE. Unfortunately, witnessing and sifting the of war in specific places (Beirut, Berlin, Gaza, Hiroshima, remains of traumas we inflict on each other, through Kabul, Karachi, Nagasaki, Najaf, Sarajevo, Tehran, Tokyo state-sponsored or individual acts of violence, never and more) as well as in invented or unidentifiable sites. The chaos of war does not discriminate or differentiate one seems to end.

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place from another, nor soldier from civilian. Its rubble bequeaths anonymity, eradicating the defining features of cultures and peoples. Some artists depict such erasure while others counter it by re-injecting or animating the human traces that distinguish time and place. Reflecting on war from a country with a long history of conflict, the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska wrote: “Reality demands that we mention this: Life goes on.” Artists face this demand through gestures both tentative (given the scope of loss) and blatant (given the severity of impact). They mourn the havoc we wreak and atone the atrocities we commit. They create narratives bound up in the crises of truth, striving toward the impossible task of comprehending the incomprehensible, or exposing the lies that lead us to folly. Before and long after the rubble is cleared, they review, anticipate and sometimes Restoration (Bridge 1), 2007,16" x 20,” gouache and metallic acrylic on lay ground for what needs to be rebuilt. archival digital print/Hahnemühle paper. Laying this ground is a project beyond the Photo source of bridge north of Beirut after 2006 Israeli airstrike from scope of one book or even one hundred artists. http://www.habeeb.com/lebanon.photos.18.beirut.war.destruction.html It requires seeds from all sources and constant cultivation. One collective project that embraces OUT OF RUBBLE artists appearing as 10YAC featured artists this reality is Ten Years + Counting (10YAC) that grew out include: Wafaa Bilal, Enrique Castrejon, Monica Haller, Andrew of a Blue Mountain Center focus residency on the Costs Ellis Johnson, Curtis Mann, Samina Mansuri, Simon Norfolk, elin of War. Launched from the shore of Eagle Lake, its ripples o’Hara slavick, Susanne Slavick, and Elaine Spatz-Rabinowitz. Click here to see their work and more. yearn to become a tsunami. 10YAC is an online resource open to all who want to commemorate a decade of sense- For more information on “Ten Years + Counting”: http:// less war, promote a shift in our national priorities, divert www.10yearsandcounting.org/ resources from the machinery of death and destruction, WORKS CITED redirect them toward social welfare and justice, and imag- 1. Cathy Caruth, “Traumatic Awakenings” in Violence, Idenine a world with economic parity and peace. 10YAC en- tity, and Self-Determination, ed. Hent de Vries and Samuel courages all of us to recognize that these goals are not Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 208. impossibly utopian, but possible and realistic, and to act 2. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 101-102. on their feasibility and necessity. 3. Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and ConVisitors to the 10YAC site can view the work of artists temporary Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 8. committed to exposing the futility and folly of war and what it costs us in so many dimensions. They can read poems, learn lyrics, and find films. They can analyze economic statistics and count their own costs of war. There would be no debt ceiling to raise if we stopped funding war. Browse the site to discover tools and ideas for organizing events and spurring others to do the same. Register and share them with all. This online pooling of creative initiative is meant to spill offline with a momentum that floods every institution and moves every heart, hand and mind toward making anything but war. Parts of this article were adapted from the introduction to OUT OF RUBBLE, published in 2011 by Charta Art Books, Milan and available now in Europe and in the USA in late October.

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CONTRIBUTORS M E E T W H O

T H E P O E T S M A K E I T

& W R I T E R S H A P P E N!

Elmaz Abinader is an award-winning poet and playwright known for her work, Children of the Roojme, A Family’s Journey from Lebanon, a memoir; In The Country of My Dreams, a collection of poetry that won the Josephine Miles PEN Oakland award in 2000; and her three plays, “When Silence is Frightening,” “Under The Ramadan Moon,” and “Country of Origin,” which won two Drammies. Abinader received her B.A., cum laude, from University of Pittsburgh, an M.F.A. at Columbia University, School of the Arts Poetry Writing, and her Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska. She currently teaches creative writing at Mills College, hosts summer writing workshops on memoir and creative nonfiction at the University of San Francisco’s Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, which sponsors workshops for published and developing writers, and participates in the Hurston-Wright Writers’ Week West. www.elmazabinader.com Ada Aharoni, writer, poet, playwright and lecturer, was born in Cairo, Egypt, and now lives in Haifa, Israel. She writes in the Hebrew and English, and has published 25 books to date, that have been translated into several languages. She received a B.A. in Literature and Sociology, at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, an M.Phil at London University, and was awarded her Ph.D. at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She has lectured at Haifa University, and taught at the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) in Haifa. Her honors include The British Council Award, the Keren Amos President Award, the Haifa and Bremen Prize, the Korean Gold Crown of World Poets Award, and the Merit Award of the HSJE: The Historical Society of the Jews from Egypt. Aharoni is the Founder and international President of IFLAC: PAVE PEACE, the International Forum for the Literature and Culture of Peace, established in 1999. Her latest work is A Bilingual collection of Selected Poems (2002) published in Hong Kong. www.iflac.com/ada Saladin Ahmed was born in Detroit. His poetry has appeared in over a dozen journals and anthologies, and has earned fellowships from the University of Michigan, the Bronx Council on the Arts, and Brooklyn College. His fantasy fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and podcasts and he has been a finalist for the Nebula and Campbell Awards. His debut novel, Throne of the Crescent Moon, is forthcoming in February 2012. www.saladinahmed.com Ammiel Alcalay is poet, translator, critic, scholar and activist. He teaches in the Department of Classical, Middle Eastern & Asian Languages & Cultures at Queens College (CUNY) and is a member of the faculties of American Studies, Comparative Literature, English, and Medieval Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center where he also serves as Deputy Chair of the Ph.D. Program in English. Alcalay has published numerous poetry and essay collections. His latest books are the poetry collection, Neither Wit or Gold (Ugly Duckling Pr., 2011); the novel, Islanders (City Lights, 2010); and the poetry collection, Scrapmetal: work in progress (Factory School, 2007). He has translated works by Shimon Ballas, Semezdin Mehmedinovic, Zlatko Dizdarevic and others. Alcalay is interviewed in this issue of phati’tude Literary Magazine. Jeffrey Alfier is a two-time nominee for the Pushcart prize, and a 2010 nominee for the UK’s Forward Prize in poetry. His work has appeared recently in Connecticut River Review and Crannog (Ireland), with work forthcoming in New York Quarterly. His latest chapbook is The Torch Singer (2011). In 2012, The Wolf Yearling, his first full-length book of poems, will be published by Pecan Grove Press. He serves as co-editor of the San Pedro River Review. Karen Alkalay Gut is a poet, writer and professor who was born in London, grew up in Rochester, NY and since 1972, has been living in Israel. She teaches poetry at Tel Aviv University. is the Chair of the Israel Association of Writers in English, serves as Vice Chair of the Federation of Writers Unions in Israel, and is a board member of the Yiddish Writers Association. Alkalay-Gut is also the coordinating editor of the newly revived Jerusalem Review and a trustee for the Alsop Review. She has published numerous academic papers, and her poetry has been widely anthologized and published in literary publications. Alkalay-Gut is interviewed in this issue of phati’tude Literary Magazine. www.karenalkalay-gut.com

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BRIDGING THE CULTURAL DIVIDE REMEMBERING SEPTEMBER 11TH Olivia Arieti, a U.S. citizen and high School English teacher, lives in Italy with her family. Her plays were published by Brooklyn Publishers, Desert Road Publishing, JAC Publishing, USA, and Lazy Bee Scripts, UK. Her poems have appeared in Women In Judaism, The Wanderlust Review, Poetica Magazine, Eye On Life, VWA: Poems For Haiti, Cliterature, The Harsh And The Heart Anthology, Pagan Friends; and her short stories have published in The Smoking Poet, Enchanted Conversations, Pill Hill Press Anthology, Voices From The Garage, and Riverbabble. Qais Arsala was born in Kabul Afghanistan and migrated to Los Angeles, CA in 1984. His poetry has been featured in the recent anthology, One Story, Thirty Stories, including various online magazines such as StckYourNeckOut, Afghanmagazine.com, among others. Andrew J. Bacevich is Professor of International Relations and History at Boston University. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, he received his Ph.D. in American Diplomatic History from Princeton University. Before joining the faculty of Boston University, he taught at West Point and Johns Hopkins. The author of several books, his most recent publication is Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (2010). His essays and reviews have appeared in publications such as Foreign Affairs, The Nation, and The New Republic. His op-eds have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Boston Globe, and Los Angeles Times, among others. Bacevich’s honors include a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin; fellowships at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Eric Barbera is an Editorial Intern at phati’tude Literary Magazine. A native of Jackson Heights, Queens, he is currently an English major at the Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College (CUNY). He edited and designed his high school’s yearbook, winning a state award in 2010 for its design. He worked as a reporter with the Queens Courier, as a featured columnist for Aspire magazine, a guest contributor on WKRD sports talk radio, worked for the Garden Writing Project (a program that fosters the growth of young writers in Queens), Kaplan Test Preparation, and as a copywriter and researcher for InTheMO, a worldwide media production company. Karen Beatty is a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York and works in the Department of Counseling. She also serves as a trauma response counselor for students, many of whom are veterans, firefighters and police officers. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Eureka Literary Magazine, Snowy Egret and other publications. She is a resident of Greenwich Village, NY. Gary Beck has spent most of his adult life as a theater director, and his poetry and fiction has appeared in hundreds of literary magazines. He has published the chapbooks Remembrance (Origami Condom Pr.), The Conquest of Somalia (Cervena Barva Pr.), The Dance of Hate (Calliope Nerve Media), Material Questions (Silkworms Ink), Dispossessed (Medulla Press), and Mutilated Girls (Heavy Hands Ink). Beck has also published the poetry collections Days of Destruction (Skive Press) and Expectations (Rogue Scholars Pr.). His original plays and translations of Moliere, Aristophanes and Sophocles have been produced Off-Broadway, and have toured colleges and outdoor performance venues. He currently lives in New York City. Francis Blessington is a poet, fiction writer, literary critic, translator, and a professor of English at Northeastern University in Boston. He has published verse translations of Euripides’ The Bacchae and Aristophanes’ The Frogs, a verse play, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Paradise Lost: Ideal and Tragic Epic, Paradise Lost and the Classical Epic, a novel, The Last Witch of Dogtown, and two books of poems, Wolf Howl and Lantskip. He is working on a translation of Euripides’ Trojan Women. Lynne Bronstein is a writer, journalist, and poet who is a native New Yorker who now resides in Santa Monica, CA. She has written four books of poetry, Astray From Normalcy, Roughage, Thirsty In The Ocean, and Border Crossings. Her poems and short stories have appeared in small magazines and literary websites, and she has reviewed books, plays, films, and restaurants. Bronstein currently writes for the Santa Monica Mirror as a civic affairs and arts reporter. Shonda Buchanan received her B.A. and M.A. in English from Loyola Marymount University, and her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Antioch University. She has freelanced for the Los Angeles Times, the LA Weekly, The Writer’s Chronicle and The International Review of African American Art; and her creative works have appeared in the anthologies Bum Rush the Page, Step into a World: A Global Anthology of New Black Literature, and Rivendale. Buchanan’s honors include the Eloise Klein-Healy Scholarship Award, a PEN Center Emerging Voice fellow, a Sundance Institute fellow of the Writing Arts program, a grant from the NEA. She is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Hampton University; an editor of Voices from Leimert Park: A Poetry Anthology, and is working on a second collection of poetry, a memoir and a novel. www.shondabuchanan.com. Penny Cagan was born in Trenton, New Jersey. She earned an M.A. in Creative Writing from New York University, and an M.L.S. from Rutger’s University. Her undergraduate education was completed at the University of Rochester, and

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she spent her junior year abroad at the University of Edinburgh. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies, including What’s Become of Eden: Poems of the Family (Slapering Hol Pr., 1994), Calyx, Earth’s Daughters, The California State Poetry Quarterly, and The Jewish Spectator. She is employed in New York City as a Research Analyst. Michael Campagnoli is the author of three chapbooks, Ah-meddy-ga, Loons, and Penobscot Voices and his poems and stories have appeared in Best New Writing of 2010 and ISFN’s Anthology #1. Three of his poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His honors include the New Letters Poetry Award, the All Nations Press Chapbook Award, and The Chiron Review Novella Prize. His fiction and poetry have appeared in New Letters, Nimrod, Southern Humanities Review, Natural Bridge Saint Ann’s Review, Rattle, and elsewhere. Fern G. Z. Carr is a former lawyer, teacher and past president of the local branch of the BC Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. A member of The League of Canadian Poets, Carr composes and translates poetry in English, French, Spanish, Italian and Yiddish. She has been published by The Literary Translators’ Association of Canada and is a winner of national and international poetry contests. Carr has published extensively worldwide and has been cited in India as a contributor to the Prakalpana Literary Movement. www.ferngzcarr.com Marc Carver, a British poet, has published four books of poetry and has had over seventy poems published and posted at various websites. He has worked in a variety of jobs and lived in Germany for three and a half years while serving in the Army. Carver performs in numerous venues in and around London, and is currently working on his book of fiction. All of his books are available on Amazon.com. Hayan Charara, born in Detroit, Michigan to Lebanese immigrants, is the author of two poetry books, The Sadness of Others (Carnegie Mellon, 2006), which was nominated for the National Book Award and The Alchemist’s Diary (Hanging Loose, 2001), named a “Notable Debut” by Publishers Weekly. He received a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship in 2009, and was recently awarded the Lucille Joy Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in numerous publications, with several poems nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He founded the literary journal, Graffiti Rag, and is the editor of Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry (Univ. of Arkansas, 2008). He earned a B.A. in English from Wayne State University, an M.A. in humanities from New York University, and a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston. Charara is interviewed in this issue of phati’tude Literary Magazine. Karen Chau is an Editor at phati’tude Literary Magazine. She is originally from Allentown, Pennsylvania, and recently graduated from Brandeis University. She has previously been published in Racialicious. Mbizo Chirasha, born in Zvishavane District in Zimbabwe, is a performance poet, writer, and creative projects consultant. He has published in more than thirty-five journals, magazines, and anthologies around the world. He served as poet-in-residence for the Iranian embassy/UN Dialogue Among Civilizations project; was a convener/event consultant for THIS IS AFRICA POETRY NIGHT; participated in the international conference of African culture and development/ICACD 2009; and was official poet for the Sadc Poetry Festival, NAMIBIA. A delegate to the UNESCO photo novel writing project in Tanzania, Chirasha is the poet-in-residence for the ISOLA/ International Conference of Oral Literature in Kenya. http://mbizotheblackpoet.blogspot.com Lucille Clifton (1936-2010) was an award-winning poet, writer and educator from Buffalo, NY. Her first poetry collection, Good Times, was published in 1969, and listed by The New York Times as one of the year’s 10 best books. Her collection, Two-Headed Woman (1980), was a Pulitzer nominee and won the Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts. In 1988, she became the first author to have two books of poetry chosen as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980 (1987) and Next: New Poems (1987). Her volume, Blessing the Boats: New and Collected Poems 1988–2000, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2000. In addition to her numerous poetry collections, she has written many children’s books. She served as Maryland’s poet laureate from 1974 until 1985, and as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets until her untimely death. Clifton taught at Coppin State College, Columbia University, University of California, Santa Cruz, and retired as a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Her achievements also include fellowships and honorary degrees from Fisk University, George Washington University, Trinity College, and other institutions; two grants from the National Endowment of the Arts; and an Emmy Award from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Barbara Crooker is the author of three poetry collections, Radiance, which won the 2005 Word Press First Book competition and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance (Word Press, 2008) winner of the 2009 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence; and More (C&R Pr., 2010). Her work has appeared in magazines such as The Green Mountains Review, The Hollins Critic, The Christian Science Monitor, The Beloit Poetry Journal; and the anthologies The Bedford Introduction to Literature, Good Poems for Hard Times (Viking Penguin), Boomer Girls (Univ. of

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BRIDGING THE CULTURAL DIVIDE REMEMBERING SEPTEMBER 11TH Iowa Pr.), and Commonwealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (Penn State Univ. Pr.). Her honors include the 2007 Pen and Brush Poetry Prize, the 2006 Ekphrastic Poetry Award from Rosebud, the 2004 WB Yeats Society of New York Award, and the 2004 Pennsylvania Center for the Book Poetry in Public Places Poster Competition including three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, and fourteen residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Gabrielle David, Editor-in-Chief of phati’tude Literary Magazine, is a multimedia artist that has worked as a desktop publisher, photographer, artist, video editor and musician. David has published several essays on multicultural literature and published the poetry collections: this is me, a collection of poems & things (CCI Books, 1994); and spring has returned & i am renewed (CCI Books, 1995). Her work has published in Paterson Literary Review, Journal of New Jersey Poets, AIM Magazine, and phati’tude Literary Magazine. She is the Executive Director of the Intercultural Alliance of Artists & Scholars, Inc. (IAAS), a NY-based nonprofit organization that promotes multicultural literature and literacy, which publishes phati’tude Literary Magazine. Leila Diab is a Palestinian American educator, lecturer and has received several outstanding awards as a journalist/photographer. Diab’s poems and other published work on the Middle East, multicultural issues have appeared in several local, national and international publications such as the Muslim Journal, Voice of Jordan Newspaper, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, The Reporter Newspaper, The Chicago Daily Herald Newspaper, Arab American Voice, Arab American View Newspaper, The Arab World Review Magazine, Al-Jadid Newspaper , Middle East News Online, Palestine Chronicle Online, News Circle Magazine, Popoli Magazine, and Azizah. She is an adjunct faculty member of Moraine Valley Community College, and a consultant and owner of Global Communications Network, a media/information enterprise. Diab is co-editor of A Different Path, an Arab American Anthology and cofounder of RAWI (Radius of Arab American Writers, Inc.). Morris Dickstein is Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and senior fellow of the Center for the Humanities, which he founded in 1993 and directed for seven years. He is a widely published reviewer and critic, perhaps best known for his recent book, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (2009). His other books include Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties (1977, 1997), Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945–1970 (2002), and A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World (2005). His essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications; and is a founder and former board member of the National Book Critics Circle, former Vice-Chair of the New York Council for the Humanities, served as president of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, and was a contributing editor of Partisan Review. Stephen Dunn was born in New York City. He earned a B.A. in history and English from Hofstra University, attended the New School Writing Workshops, and finished his M.A. in creative writing at Syracuse University. He taught poetry and creative writing and held residencies at Wartburg College, Wichita State University, Columbia University, University of Washington, Syracuse University, Southwest Minnesota State College, Princeton University, and University of Michigan. His books of poetry include What Goes On: Selected and New Poems 1995-2009 (W.W. Norton, 2009); Everything Else in the World (W. W. Norton, 2006); Local Visitations (2003); and Different Hours (2000), winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry. He is also the author of Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry (BOA Editions, 2001), and Riffs & Reciprocities: Prose Pairs (1998). Dunn’s honors include the Academy Award for Literature, the James Wright Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. He splits his time between Ocean City, NJ and Frostburg, MD. Tom Engelhardt is co-founder of the American Empire Project, and is the creator of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, an online blog. He is the author of several books, including The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books, 2010) and The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (Univ. of Mass. Pr., 2007). He received his undergraduate degeree from Yale University and his Master’s degree in Area Studies from Harvard University, where he was a founding member of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars. Samuel Evans is a recent graduate of Oxford University, England where he completed a B.A. in English Language and Literature. Evans is a frequent blogger and is currently lives in London working for a Communications consultancy. www.samueljevans.co.uk Addy Evenson is an emerging writer and her short story “Precession” published in the summer issue of Prime Mincer. Her writing has also appeared in the 2009 edition of Inkblot, the Orange County High School of the Arts Literary Magazine. She recently graduated from high school and intends to pursue Creative Writing and Literature in college.

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Rod Farmer, a Vietnam Vet and former high school history and social science teacher, is currently a professor of social science/multicultural education at the University of Maine at Farmington. He has received three Fulbright Fellowships to study in India, Pakistan and Israel and two grants to study and travel in Japan. He has published over 350 poems in over 100 journals and magazines, including Black Fly Review, Black Buzzard Review, The Cafe Review, Chaminade Literary Review, Dog River Review, ELF, Ellipsis, Galley Sail Review, Phase and Cycle, Psychopoetica, Sandscript, Skylark, and Riverrun. He has also published over fifty articles and essays in such journals as The Humanist, Maine Historical Society Quarterly, Mind Matters Review, The New England Journal of History, Poet, and Self and Society. Farmer’s book of poetry, Universal Essence, was published in 1986. Nick Fonda has lived in several different countries and tried his hand at jobs as varied as lumberjack, carpenter and teacher. A multiple newspaper award winner, Fonda has a number of plays to his credit as well as a book of nonfiction, Roads to Richmond. His book, Principals and Other Schoolyard Bullies, is forthcoming. He currently lives and works in rural Quebec, in Canada. Linda Nemec Foster, born near Cleveland, Ohio, is a child of immigrants from southern Poland. From 2003-2005 she served as the first poet laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan. She graduated magna cum laude from Aquinas College with a B.A. in social science and received her M.F.A in creative writing at Wilson College and graduated with the Board of Directors’ highest commendation. She is the author of nine collections of poetry, her most recent are Talking Diamonds (New Issues Pr., 2009); Ten Songs from Bulgaria (Cervena Barva Pr., 2008); and Listen to the Landscape (Eerdmans Pub., 2006) which was short-listed for the Michigan Notable Book Award. Her poems have appeared in various magazines and journals and has taught poetry workshops throughout the state of Michigan for the Creative-Writers-in-Schools Program and on the college level at Ferris State University and Aquinas College. Foster’s honors include the International Creative Arts Award from the Polish American Historical Association, grants from the Michigan Council for the Arts, and fellowships from the Arts Foundation of Michigan and ArtServe Michigan. Bassam K. Frangieh is a scholar, translator and writer. Born and raised in the Middle East, he received his B.A. from Damascus University in Syria, and earned a Master of Arts in Arabic Language, Linguistics, and Literature and a Ph.D. in Arabic Language and Literature at Georgetown University. In addition to writing numerous articles in this field, he has authored several books, including Arabic for Life: A Textbook for Beginning Arabic (Yale Univ. Pr., 2011) and Anthology of Arabic Literature, Culture, and Thought from Pre-Islamic Times to the Present (2004). He has translated the works of several leading Arab poets and novelists into English, including Abdul Wahab al-Bayati, Nizar Qabbani and Haydar Haydar. Frangieh has taught at Georgetown University, University of Washington and Yale University, where he was a Senior Lector of Arabic and Director of Yale University’s Modern Arabic Language Program. Frangieh is currently a professor of Arabic in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Claremont McKenna College in California. His honors include the Yale College Prize for Teaching Excellence by a Lecturer or Lector in 2001, and the Glenn R. Huntoon Award for Superior Teaching. Kenny Fries is the author of The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory (Carroll and Graf, 2007), Body, Remember: A Memoir (Univ. of Wisconsin Pr., 2003) and editor of Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out (Plume, 1997). His books of poems include Desert Walking: Poems (The Advocado Pr., 2000) and Anesthesia: Poems (The Advocado Pr., 1996). His honors include a 2009 Creative Capital grant in Innovative Literature, the 2007 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, the Gregory Kolovakos Award, a Creative Arts Fellowship from the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission and the National Endowment, and served as a Fulbright Scholar to Japan. He teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Goddard College. Marilyn Hacker is a poet, translator and critic. She has published many poetry collections, more recently, Names (W. W. Norton, 2009), Desesperanto: Poems 1999-2002 (2005); First Cities: Collected Early Poems 1960-1979 (2003); and Squares and Courtyards (2000). As a translator, she has published Marie Ettiene’s King of a Hundred Horsemen: Poems (FSG, 2008); Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s collections, Here There Was Once a Country (Oberlin College Pr., 2001), She Says (Graywolf Pr., 2003), and Nettles (2008); and Claire Malroux’s A Long-Gone Sun (Sheep Meadow Pr., 2000) and Birds and Bison (2004). Her honors include the Bernard F. Conners Prize from the Paris Review, the John Masefield Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. In 2008, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2010, she received the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. Hacker is Professor of English at the City College of New York, and lives in New York City and Paris. Atar Hadari was born in Israel, raised in England, and trained as an actor and writer at the University of East Anglia before winning a scholarship to study poetry and playwriting with Derek Walcott at Boston University. His plays have been staged at the Finborough Theatre, Wimbledon Studio Theatre, Chichester Festival Theatre, the Mark Taper Forum

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BRIDGING THE CULTURAL DIVIDE REMEMBERING SEPTEMBER 11TH (where he was a Mentor Playwright), Nat Horne Studio Theatre (NY) and Valdez, Alaska; and he has won awards from the BBC, Arts Council of England, National Foundation of Jewish Culture (NY), European Association of Jewish Culture (Brussels) and the Royal Shakespeare Company. Hadari’s first book of poetry, Songs from Bialik: Selected Poems of H. N. Bialik (Syracuse Univ. Pr., 2000) was a finalist for the American Literary Translators’ Association Award and his poems have won the Daniel Varoujan award from New England Poetry Club, the Petra Kenney award and many others. He is currently a member of the Critical Mass writing group and an associate of the Royal Court Theatre, London. Colin D. Halloran is a former infantryman and public school teacher who now spends his days travelling and leading student and teacher workshops on understanding war through poetry. Halloran is an M.F.A. candidate at Fairfield University where he is editor-in-chief of the literary journal, Mason’s Road. His work has appeared internationally in print and online in such publications as The New York Times, Welter Magazine, San Pedro River Review, SAND, Structo Magazine, and www.notalone.com. James Harms has published six books of poetry, most recently After West (Carnegie Mellon Univ. Pr., 2008). His second collection, The Joy Addict (Carnegie-Mellon Univ. Pr., 1998) for which he received the PEN/Revson Fellowship, will be reprinted this year in Carnegie Mellon’s Classic Contemporaries Series. Newer work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review, Oxford American, West Branch, Poetry International, Quarterly West, The Cincinnati Review, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, Drunken Boat, Cave Wall, Barrelhouse, and others. A recipient of an NEA Fellowship and three Pushcart Prizes, Harms is Professor of English at West Virginia University, where he was the founding director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing. He also directs the low-residency MFA Program in Poetry at New England College. Samuel Hazo was the first poet laureate of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (1993-2003). An author of poetry, fiction, essays and plays, he is a McAnulty Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Duquesne University, where he taught for forty-three years, and the founder and director of the International Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His recently published works include The Stroke of a Pen: Essays on Poetry and Other Provocations (Univ. of Notre Dame Pr., 2011) and Like a Man Gone Mad: Poems in a New Century (Syracuse Univ. Pr., 2010). Hazo’s translations include Denis de Rougemont’s The Growl of Deeper Waters; Nadia Tueni’s Lebanon: Twenty Poems For One Love; and Adunis’s The Pages of Day And Night. His honors include the Governor of Pennsylvania Award, Maurice English Award for Poetry, and The Griffin Award for Creative Writing, University of Notre Dame, 2004. www.samuelhazoauthor.com Dima Hilal is a poet and writer born in Beirut and raised in California, where she studied at the University of California at Berkeley. Her work has appeared in various publications, including the San Francisco Chronicle, Orion literary journal, Aramco, The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, edited by Nathalie Handal (Interlink Books, 2001) and Scheherazade’s Legacy: Arab and Arab American Women on Writing, edited by Susan Muaddi Darraj (Praeger, 2004). Her numerous readings include radio appearances on KPFA, KXLU and KPFK. She has been featured at the Beyond Baroque Cultural Center, World Stage, Levantine Cultural Center, Autry Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. www.dimahilal.com Wendy T. House currently resides in Louisville, KY and is a 5th grade teacher at Kenwood Elementary School in Jefferson County. She has an English degree from Union College and completed post graduate work at Bellarmine University and the University of Louisville. Nan Hunt has taught college English, poetry and writing workshops in more than thirty-five U.S. and European cities for over thirty years. Her poetry has appeared in over one hundred publications, including Poets On, Slant, Beloit, Poetry Journal, Southern California Anthology, Kyoto Review, Poet India, (M)other Tongues, The Oregonian, Shelia-Na-Gig, & as finalist in Nimrod and Comstock Review. She has received poetry fellowships from Harcourt Brace, Centrum, Suffield College, and Hambidge Center for the Arts. Hunt’s collection of poetry is The Wrong Bride (Plain View Pr., 1999). Arnold J. Isbister is a noted artist, painter and writer who transforms his images into words in a compilation of short stories of myth, legends of the Plains Tribes. He authored the book Stories Moshum & Kokum Told Me that was short-listed for Aboriginal-Book-of-the-Year. Many of his stories and poems are used for Canadian Teacher Foundation Resources and Saskatchewan education curriculum. He is currently finishing his first novel (narrative fiction) based factually on Native Spirituality, the supernatural and Forensic Psychology. Jennifer-Crystal Johnson, Associate Editor of phati’tude Literary Magazine, is originally from Germany, but was raised all over. She has published one novella, The Outside Girl: Perception is Reality (Publish America, 2005) and the poetry collection, Napkin Poetry (Broken Publications, 2010). Her poetry has appeared in various anthologies including The Lightness of Being (Int’l Library of Poetry, 2000), Theatre of the Mind (Noble House, 2003), Invoking the Muse (Noble House, 2004), and Our 100 Most Famous Poets (Famous Poets Pr., 2004). She is a freelance writer and editor, and is based in the Pacific Northwest. www.soulvomit.com

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Rebecca Kaye, an Editor of phati’tude Literary Magazine, is in her second year of the Masters in Creative Writing program at Oxford University. As an undergraduate, she attended Durham University where she mastered in English Literature and French. She is the former editor of Etcetera Magazine, literary supplement to The Cherwell, an Oxfordbased student newspaper. She is currently a house contributor to the online journal, The Fabelist. Sharon Kessler, poet and translator, owns Fish-Eye Press in Pardes Hanna, Israel that prints broadsides and chapbooks on handmade or other fine paper using handset metal type. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including at a bus stop in Santa Fe, and in a Guerilla Poetics broadside. Kessler grew up in Bohemia, NY and holds degrees from SUNY Binghamton and Stanford University, where she was a Mirrielees Scholar in Literature and Creative Writing. Her translation of the Hebrew poet Lea Goldberg was awarded a Witter Bynner Poetry Translator Residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute in 2005. www.fisheyepress.com Laurie Kuntz is the author of the poetry collection, Somewhere in the Telling (Edwin Mellen Press, 1999); and two chapbooks, Women at the Onsen (Blue Light, 2003) and Simple Gestures (Texas Review Pr., 2000), winner of the 1999 Texas Review Chapbook Contest. She is also the author of two English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) books, The New Arrival, BKS. 1 & 2 (Prentice-Hall, 1982, 1992). Her poetry has appeared in numerous publications, including The Bloomsbury Review, The New Virginia Review, Crosscurrents, and The Sun. She won first prize in the America’s Review Political Poetry Contest; was a finalist in The Nation/Discovery Contest in both 1992 and 1997; and has won honorable mention in The Wildwood Poetry Contest, Negative Capability Poetry Contest, and the Chester H. Jones National Poetry Contest. She was the editor of the University of Maryland’s Asian Division’s literary magazine, Blue Muse, a contributing editor to Hunger Mountain Magazine, and served as a contributing editor for RockSaltPlum online literary magazine. Kuntz works and writes in Northern Japan. Judy Labensohn was born in Cleveland, Ohio and has lived in Israel for the past 44 years. Her essays have been anthologized in Jewish Possibilities: The Best of Moment Magazine (Leonard Fein, Ed., Jason Aronson Inc.), other words: a writer’s reader (David Fleming, Ed., UMass Amherst Writing Program) and The Best of Creative Nonûction (Lee Gutkind, Ed., Norton). Essays and stories have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Southwest Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Natural Bridge and Lilith Magazine, among others. Labensohn earned her B.A. in American Culture from the University of Michigan, a B.S. of Social Work from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an M.F.A. in creative nonûction from Goucher College and an M.A. in literature from Bar-Ilan University, Israel. She teaches creative writing in Jerusalem and is the Coordinator of the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. She blogs at www.WriteInIsrael.com David Lisbona is a semi-retired family man born in England of German-Egyptian-Jewish heritage, living in Israel. For over 30 years, he held in line positions in international business and the high-tech telecom industry, and holds M.A. and M.B.A. degrees. He is currently involved in social and peace initiatives in Israel. He is one of the founders of Middleway and of Gisha, organizations that promote nonviolence and dialogue through community work, and also writes articles for MidWestWeb and other outlets. At the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem, he coedited, with Marc I. Sherman and Israel W. Charny, the first computerized Bibliography of the Holocaust and Genocide for the United States Institute of Peace. Nadia Maiwandi is a magazine editor and freelance writer currently based in the Bay Area in California. A U.S.born Afghan, she has a B.A. in English and Creative Writing. Maiwandi has traveled to Afghanistan twice a child, and twice post-9/11 for humanitarian work. Lisa Suhair Majaj is a Palestinian-American writer, poet and critic. Born in Hawarden, Iowa, Majaj was raised in Jordan and lives in Nicosia, Cyprus. She earned a B.A. in English literature from the American University of Beirut and a M.A., A.B.D. in English literature and American culture from the University of Michigan. She has published her poetry and creative prose in many journals and anthologies across the US, the Middle East and Europe, including World Literature Today, South Atlantic Quarterly, Banipal: Magazine of Modern Arab Literature and The Poetry of Arab Women, among others; and published the chapbooks These Words and What She Said. Her publications include three co-edited volumes of critical essays: Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers (Garland, 2000), Intersections: Gender, Nation and Community in Arab Women’s Novels (Syracuse Univ. Pr., 2002), and Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab American Writer and Artist (McFarland Pub., 2002). Her recent book of poetry is Geographies of Light (Web del Sol Assoc., 2009), winner of the Del Sol Press Poetry Prize in 2007. B. W. Mayer is a Long Island poet and educator. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in KingsPark with his Smith Corona typewriter which has yet to be rendered obsolete. Working with Dr. David Axelrod, his work has

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BRIDGING THE CULTURAL DIVIDE REMEMBERING SEPTEMBER 11TH appeared in such publications as Bards Annual 2011, Westward Quarterly and Thick with Conviction. He has been a featured writer at The Poetry Superhighway and placed second in the Westhampton Written Word contest. Jesús Papoleto Meléndez, a proud Puerto Rican, is one of the original founders of the Nuyorican poets’ movement. He is a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry (2001); an Artist for Community Enrichment (ACE) Award from the Bronx Council on the Arts, New York (1995); and a COMBO (Combined Arts of San Diego)-NEA Fellowship in Literature (1988). Meléndez has spent the past 30 years working as a poetry-facilitator working in the public schools, during which time he has coordinated many successful poetry/creative writing workshops, impacting the lives of tens of thousands of young people. The author of the poetry collections, Casting Long Shadows (1970), Have You Seen Liberation (1971), Street Poetry & Other Poems (1972), and Concertos On Market Street (1993). D. H. Melhem is the author of eight books of poetry, including Art and Politics: Politics and Art (Syracuse Univ. Pr., 2010), New York Poems (Syracuse U. Press, 2005), Conversation with a Stonemason (IKON, 2003), and a chapbook sequence, Poems for You (P&Q Pr., 2000). She has also published a trilogy of novels under the title Patrimonies: beginning with Blight (Syracuse Univ. Pr., 1995), and recently optioned as a feature film); and Stigma & The Cave (Syracuse Univ. Pr., 2007). Her Notes on 94th Street (1972; 1979) was the first poetry book in English by an Arab American woman. Of her scholarly works, Melhem published Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice (Univ. Pr. of Kentucky, 1988), the first comprehensive study of the poet; and Heroism in the New Black Poetry: Introductions and Interviews (Univ. Pr. of Kentucky, 1990), featuring six leading African American poets. Melhem has also authored over 70 essays, edited two anthologies, and written Children of the House Afire, a musical drama based on her poems about Manhattan’s West Side and produced in New York. Melhem is interviewed in this issue of phati’tude Literary Magazine. www.dhmelhem.com Philip Metres is a poet, editor and translator. He has published the poetry collection, To See the Earth (2008); the anthology, Come Together: Imagine Peace (2008); a critical study. Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 (2007); the translations, Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein (co-translated with Tatiana Tulchinsky, 2004); and A Kindred Orphanhood: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky (2003). He is also the author of four chapbooks, abu ghraib arias (2011), Ode to Oil (2011), Instants (2006) and Primer for Non-Native Speakers (2004). Metres’ work has appeared in Best American Poetry, and Inclined to Speak: Contemporary Arab American Poetry. His honors include an NEA, a Watson Fellowship, two Ohio Arts Council Grants, and the Cleveland Arts Prize in 2010. He teaches literature and creative writing at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. Were it not for Ellis Island, his last name would be “Abourjaili.” www.philipmetres.com Lenard D. Moore a North Carolina native, is the Founder and Executive Director of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective and Co-founder of the Washington Street Writers Group, and is Executive Chairman of the North Carolina Haiku Society. He recently became the first Southerner and the first African American elected as President of the Haiku Society of America. His poetry, drama, essays and literary criticism have appeared in over 350 publications, and his poetry appeared in over forty anthologies. His poetry collections are A Temple Looming (WordTech Editions, 2008); Desert Storm: A Brief History (Los Hombres Pr., 1993); and Forever Home (St. Andrews College Pr., 1992). His honors include the Sam Ragan Fine Arts Award, the Alumni Achievement Award, and Raleigh Medal of Arts for Lifetime Achievement. Moore earned his M.A. degree in English/African American Literature from NC A&T State University, and his B.A. degree with honors (Magna Cum Laude) from Shaw University. He teaches Advance Poetry Writing and African American Literature at Mount Olive College, where he directs the literary festival and advises The Trojan Voices. Sahar Muradi is a writer and performer living in New York City. She is co-editor of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature (Univ. of Arkansas Pr., 2010) and an Organizing Fellow for the Open City Project, a community-based writing project through the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Her writing has been featured in literary journals and on public radio. Her theatre credits include a devised adaptation of “Masque of the Red Death” through HiveMind Theatre and a production of “Undocumented” through Unboxed Voices. Muradi has an M.P.A. in international development from New York University and a B.A. in literature and creative writing from Hampshire College. Jean Nordhaus earned an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Barnard College and a Ph.D. in German literature from Yale University. She is the author of the poetry chapbook, A Language of Hands (1982) and the poetry collections, Innocence (Ohio State Univ. Pr., 2006), The Porcelain Apes of Moses Mendelssohn (Milkweed Editions, 2002) and A Bracelet of Lies (Washington Writers’ Publishing Hse,1987). Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Hudson Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Washington Review and West Branch. Nordhaus has been the poetry coordinator for the Folger Shakespeare Library’s poetry programs and has taught at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. She lives in Washington, D.C.

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Lorraine Miller Nuzzo has been Curator, Art Director of phati’tude Literary Magazine and “phati’tude-related” projects since 1997. While pursuing her professional career, Nuzzo studied painting with Mary Nagin and Carole Jay in New York; and with Tim Holden in Italy. She has held exhibitions at MIB and BJ Spoke Gallery; and is also a former partner of “hotshots unlimited photography,” which held an exhibit at the Langston Hughes Library. She holds a Master’s degree in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Hofstra University and a Bachelors degree in Psychology with a minor in Art from SUNY, Empire State. www.rainynuzzo.com Naomi Shihab Nye is the author of numerous books of poems, including You and Yours (BOA Editions, 2005), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, as well as 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002), Fuel (1998), Red Suitcase (1994), and Hugging the Jukebox (1982). Her poems and short stories have appeared in various journals and reviews throughout North America, Europe, and the Middle and Far East, and she is a children’s and young adult author. Her collection of poems for young adults, Honeybee, won the 2008 Arab American Book Award in the Children’s/Young Adult category. Nye has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow (Library of Congress). Her honors include a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, and two Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards. Nye was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2010, and lives in San Antonio, Texas. Ranen Omer-Sherman is a professor of English at the University of Miami, specializing in literature and Jewish identity. He earned his B.A. from Humboldt State University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame. Omer-Sherman is the author of Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American Literature: Lazarus, Syrkin, Reznikoff, Roth (2002) and Israel in Exile: Jewish Writing and the Desert (2006) as well as coeditor of The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches (2008) and the forthcoming War and Narrative in Israeli Society and Culture (2012). His essays have appeared in numerous journals, and his current research focuses on diasporic and hybrid identities in literature, especially in memoirs and fiction of the Levantine world and the Middle East as well as literary representations of the kibbutz movement. Claire Ortalda, a fiction writer, poet and former journalist, is an instructor at San Francisco State University. Her work has been published in numerous literary journals, including Konch, Ink, Common Ground, Seeds Sown, Caesura, Poetry, U.S.A., Box of Words, Red Wheelbarrow and Brazos River Review, as well as the San Diego Reader. She is the winner of the Georgia State University Fiction Prize and Hackney and Fugue Magazine awards, and is the editor of The Other Side of the Closet (IBS Press) and Financial Sanity (Doubleday, 1989). Her story, “A Village Dog,” recently won the Georgia State University Review’s 2004 Fiction Award, and her poem “City Girl” won First Prize in the Bottomfish Magazine poetry competition, 1998. Amanda Ostrove is an Editorial Intern of phati’tude Literary Magazine. She is a junior at Skidmore College where she is double majoring in English and Dance. She received her high school’s “Excellence in English” award and currently works in the writing center at Skidmore. She is studying English at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland in the Fall, 2011. Shann Palmer is a professional musician and music teacher from Texas living in Virginia. She attended the University of Arizona in Tucson, receiving a degree in Vocal Music and Piano, with education credentials. She taught elementary music at public schools, and is currently a part-time assistant to P.A.V.E. (Program for Vocational Education) at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College. She has published poetry, fiction and non-fiction articles in numerous outlets in print and online. Palmer has published six chapbooks, a CD of her poetry, and in 2002, published the Shockoe Poets Anthology under her imprint, FlashPaperProductions. Active with the James River Writers and the Poetry Society of Virginia, she maintains a calendar of events for central Virginia on her website FlashPaperPoetry. http://shannpalmer.blogspot.com Walt Peterson has been a teacher for more than thirty years. He has worked as a teacher for the Pittsburgh Public Schools and has taught writing in places as diverse as Arcadia, California, and Cracow, Poland. He has several collections of poetry including In the Waiting Room of the Speedy Muffler King (Unmon Northland, 1999), Rebuilding the Porch (Nightshade Pr., 1990), Image/Song (Seton Hill Univ., 1994) and a collaboration with the sculptor James Shipman. He has also published short fiction, nonfiction articles and photographs. Winner of the 1998 Acorn-Rukeyser Award from Unfinished Monument Press of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, Peterson is a consultant for the Western Pennsylvania Writing Project and the International Poetry Forum. Richard Plfum, a former instructor of Advanced Poetry Writing at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, currently runs the Poetry Salon for the Writers’ Center of Indiana. He was a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony and poetry coeditor of Stoney Lonesome. His books include A Dream of Salt (Raintree Pr., 1980), A Strange Juxtaposition of Parts (Writers’ Center Pr., 1995), and has recorded the CD, “Strange Requests.” His recent chapbooks are The Haunted Refrigerator and Other Poems (Pudding Hse Pub., 2007) and Listening With Others (The Muse Rules Pr., 2007). His work

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BRIDGING THE CULTURAL DIVIDE REMEMBERING SEPTEMBER 11TH appears in several anthologies, including A New Geography of Poets (Univ. of Arkansas Pr., 1992), The New Laurel Review (1999), and Glass Works (Pudding Hse, 2002). His poems have appeared in Sparrow, Event, Kayak, The Reaper, The Exquisite Corpse, Arts Indiana Literary Supplement, Indiannual, The Hopewell Review, Ploplop, The Indiana Experience and Bear Crossings. Pflum was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by The Tipton Poetry Review, Spring 2008. Kenneth Pobo won the 2009 chapbook contest from Main Street Rag for his manuscript, Trina and the Sky, and it was published it in 2009. His new chapbook, Tea on Burning Glass, is forthcoming in 2010 from Tandava Poetry Press. Susan Rosenberg, American born and raised, has lived in Haifa, Israel since 1972. An 86-year-old great grandmother, she has been writing poetry since the third grade. From 1980 to 2010, Rosenberg served as Secretary to Voices Israel, an organization of Israeli poets who write in English. She has self-published two collections of poetry, and her poems have appeared annually in the Voices anthology, with work appearing in several anthologies and publications, the latest being Cyclamensandswords.com. Ruth Sabath Rosenthal is a New York poet. In 2006, her poem “on yet another birthday” was nominated for a Pushcart prize. Her work has appeared in many journals including Adagio Verse Quarterly, The Aurorean, Birmingham Poetry Review, Connecticut Review, Dawntreader U.K., Lilith; Magnolia’s Press, Mobius-The Poetry Magazine, Podium-92nd St.Y, Poetica, Quill & Parchment, Southampton Review, Taj Mahal Review (India), and The Human Genre. Her work has appeared recently in anthologies, Common Boundaries (Editions Bibliokekos, Inc., 2010); Mizmor L’David Anthology: Volume I-Holocaust (Poetica Pr., 2010); And Again Last Night (Indigo Dreams Pr., 2009) (U.K.); Book of Ten (Zebra Pr., 2009, U.K.); and Empty Shoes (Popcorn Pr., 2009). Rosenthal’s debut chapbook, Facing Home (Finishing Line Pr.) and her full-length book of poetry entitled, Facing Home and Beyond (Paragon Poetry Pr.) is available on Amazon.com. http://www.ruthsabathrosenthal.moonfruit.com Harley L. Sachs is Professor Emeritus from Michigan Technological University. His work has appeared in over 1000 publications and he has published over a dozen books. The majority of Sachs writings are fiction novels, but he has also written numerous essays, articles, and a collection of poetry. He attended Indiana University earning his M.A.T. and B.A. respectively, and Indiana Christian where he received his Ph.D. He has received numerous awards for articles, humor and short stories. He lives Portland, OR. Zohra Saed was born in Afghanistan and came to the United States with her family in 1980. She received her Masters in Fine Arts in Poetry at Brooklyn College and is a doctoral candidate in the English Literature program at The City University of New York Graduate Center. Currently, she teaches in the Asian American Studies Program at Hunter College and serves on the Board of Directors for Afghan American Peace Corp. Saed is co-editor of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature (Univ. of Arkansas Press, 2010. Her poems have been published in the online Afghan magazine Lemar-Aftaab among other publications. Saed is interviewed in this issue of phati’tude Literary Magazine. Jon Sands, Editor of phati’tude Literary Magazine, has been a full-time teaching and performing artist since 2007. He is a recipient of the 2009 New York City-LouderARTS fellowship grant, and has represented New York City multiple times at the National Poetry Slam, subsequently becoming an NPS finalist. He is currently the Director of Poetry and Arts Education Programming at the Positive Health Project, a syringe exchange center located in Midtown Manhattan, as well as a Youth Mentor with Urban Word-NYC. Sands’ poems have appeared in decomP, Suss, The Literary Bohemian, Spindle Magazine, The November 3rd Club, and many others. Sands recently published his debut poetry collection, The New Clean (Write Bloody Pub., 2011). www.jonsands.com Patricia Roth Schwartz lives in the Finger Lakes Region of New York State, where she writes poetry, short fiction, and creative non-fiction, offers numerous workshops and readings, and volunteers in Auburn Correctional Facility, doing poetry with inmates. She has published three volumes of poetry with FootHills Publishing, and will release her fourth book of short prose, from Blue Heron, an imprint of The Literary Guild of the Finger Lakes which she cofounded in 2011 with poet/ publisher Steve Tills. Schwartz has received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York State Council on the Humanities, the Delavan Foundation, and Poets & Writers. Ryan Seslow, graphic artist for phati’tude Literary Magazine, is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in New York. Working in many mediums, Seslow shows his work both nationally and internationally. He is a professor of fine arts teaching various studio art courses simultaneously between four colleges in the NY area. http://www.flickr.com/ photos/rmsmovement/sets; http://theongoingrms.wordpress.com Khalida Sethi lives, works and raises her family in Philadelphia. She practices trauma therapy, writes, and dreams about visiting the Kabul Museum one day. Purvi Shah’s book of poems, Terrain Tracks (New Rivers Pr., 2006), which won the Many Voices Project prize was also nominated for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Members’ Choice Award in 2007. Winner of the inaugural

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SONY South Asian Social Services Award in 2008, Shah holds an M.A. in American Literature from Rutgers University and is a former poetry editor of the Asian Pacific American Journal. After having led a community-based anti-domestic violence organization for nearly eight years, she is now consulting on the issue of violence against women, supporting the development of Kundiman (an Asian American poets organization), teaching literature at Hunter College, and working toward a second collection of poetry. Born in Ahmedabad, India, Shah lives in New York City. Tom Sheehan, of Saugus, MA, is poet, writer and memoirist. A graduate of Boston College, he served with the 31st Infantry Regiment in Korea, retired from Raytheon Corporation in 1990 and has concentrated on his writing full time. His latest books are the short fiction collections, From the Quickening (Pocol Pr., 2009), Brief Cases, Short Spans (Press 53, 2008), and Epic Cures (Press 53, 2005), which received a 2006 IPPY Award Honorable Mention. His poetry collections include This Rare Earth and Other Flights; Ah, Devon Unbowed; The Saugus Book; and Reflections from Vinegar Hill. He has been nominated for the illustrious Million Writers Award twice and the coveted Pushcart Prize an impressive twelve times, and has received a Silver Rose Award from American Renaissance for the TwentyFirst Century (ART) and the Georges Simenon Award for Excellence in Fiction. His work has appeared in Ocean Magazine, Perigee, Rope and Wire Magazine, Qarrtsiluni, Green Silk Journal, Halfway down the Stairs, Ad Hoc Monadnock, Hawk & Whippoorwill, Eden Waters Press, Milspeak Memo, Ensorcelled, Canopic Jar, SFWP, Eskimo Pie, Lock Raven Review, Northville Review and Pine Tree Mysteries. Sheehan serves as a mentor for Milspeak Writers. Susanne Slavick is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon where she joined the faculty in 1984 and served as Head of the School of Art between 2000 and 2006. Graduating summa cum laude from Yale University in 1978, she subsequently studied at Jagiellonian University in Krakow and Tyler School of Art in Rome. She completed her MFA at Tyler in Philadelphia where she began exhibiting through Jeffrey Fuller Fine Art. She has held positions at Kutztown State College in Pennsylvania and at University of Wisconsin at Madison. Slavick has been an artist-in-residence at The MacDowell Colony, Mt. Desert Island through the Four Seals Foundation, and in Skoki, Poland through the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan. In 1997, she held an exchange faculty position at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. She has exhibited in museums and galleries in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Minneapolis as well as in Europe and Asia. Her honors include “Artist of the Year” by the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, an artist fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and four awards from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Lester Smith hearkens from a blue-collar family with roots in Kentucky and Southern Illinois. He spent eight years as a sheet-metal worker before acquiring a Practical Nursing degree, followed by a literature degree at Illinois State University, and eventually landed a job as a writer and editor for a hobby game company. He has published “Dungeons & Dragons” materials and other games, winning three Origins awards in the process. He works for an educational design house in Wisconsin. His poetry has won awards from the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and has been published in Wisconsin Academy Review, Free Verse, Verse Wisconsin, Anthills V, Solitary Plover, Big Pulp, and more than one horror anthology. Currently, Smith serves as president of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. In his spare time, he publishes other writers under his Popcorn Press imprint. www.popcornpress.com; www.lestersmith.com Ronny Someck is an Israeli poet and author, who was born in Baghdad. He studied Hebrew literature and philosophy at Tel Aviv University and drawing at the Avni Academy of Art. Someck has published 10 volumes of poetry, his latest works in Hebrew, Algeria (2009), The Milk Underground (2005), The Revolution Drummer (2001), and authored a children’s book together with his daughter Shirly, The Laughter Button. In 2002, Someck published his first collection in English, The Fire Stays in Red (Univ. of Wisconsin Pr., 2002), translated by Moshe Dor and Barbara Goldberg. His honors include the ACUM Special Jubilee Prize, the Prime Minister’s Prize twice (1989, 2000), the Efrat Prize , the Ahi Prize, the Amichai Prize for Poetry, the “Wine Poetry” Award (Struga, Macedonia) and the Hans Berghuis Poetry Prize (Holland). Collections of his poetry have been published abroad in 8 languages; individual poems in 39 languages. He has worked with street gangs, and currently teaches literature and leads creative writing workshops. J. J. Steinfeld is a Canadian poet, fiction writer, and playwright living on Prince Edward Island. He has published ten short story collections, two novels, two poetry collections, along with five chapbooks, most recently, Misshapenness (Poetry, Ekstasis Editions, 2009), A Fanciful Geography (Poetry Chapbook, erbacce-press, 2010), and A Glass Shard and Memory (Stories, Recliner Books, 2010). His short stories and poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and periodicals internationally, and over forty of his one-act plays and a handful of full-length plays have been performed in Canada and the United States. http://www.ditchpoetry.com/jjsteinfeld.htm Himanshu Suri, an Indian-American who grew up in Queens, NY, is a member of the Brooklyn-based hip-hop unit “Das Racist.” Suri graduated from Wesleyan University. He publishes the blog, Nehru Jackets, and occasionally writes for online outlets such as Alternet.org and Guernica Magazine. http://nehrujackets.tumblr.com

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BRIDGING THE CULTURAL DIVIDE REMEMBERING SEPTEMBER 11TH Patti Tana is Professor Emerita of English at Nassau Community College (SUNY) and the author of eight poetry collections, most recently Any Given Day (Whittier Pub. Inc., 2011). The Walt Whitman Birthplace Association selected her as Long Island Poet of the Year 2009. Tana is the editor of the Songs of Seasoned Women poetry anthology and an associate editor of Long Island Quarterly. http://www.pattitana.com Larry D. Thomas was born and reared in West Texas. He served a four-year tour of duty in the U. S. Navy, and received his B.A. degree in English literature from the University of Houston. Since his retiring from a career in adult criminal justice, Thomas has concentrated full time on his writing. Throughout the years, his poems have appeared in numerous respected national literary journals. He has published 11 books of poetry, his first collection, The Lighthouse Keeper (Timberline Pr., 2000), was selected by the Small Press Review as a “pick-of-the-issue” (May/June 2001); and New and Selected Poems (Texas Christian Univ. Pr., 2008), was long-listed for the National Book Award. He was appointed in 2007 by the Texas Legislature and served as the 2008 Texas Poet Laureate. www.larrydthomas.com Kevin Vaughn is a doctoral student in English and Creative Writing at The University of Georgia. His work has recently appeared, or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, PANK and others journals as well as the anthology KILLER VERSE: Poems of Murder and Mayhem. A former Fulbright Fellow to Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, Vaughn is currently working on translations of the Polish National Poet, Adam Mickiewicz. Joseph S. Walker was raised in Peoria, Illinois and received his doctorate in American literature from Purdue University. He has published a number of critical pieces on contemporary fiction and popular culture, most recently in The Essential Sopranos Reader (Univ. Pr. of Kentucky, 2011) and On the Verge of Tears: Why Movies, Television, Music, Art, Popular Culture, Literature and the Real World Make Us Cry (Cambridge Scholars Pub., 2010). His short play “Six Lights” was produced by the Bloomington Playwrights Project as the 2010 Awarefest winner. He has recently turned his energy to fiction, and his stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and A Few Lines Magazine. He lives in Bloomington, IN, and works as an adjunct instructor for online universities. Neil Weisbrod has been writing poetry for many years. For the past forty years he has had a successful career as a Film and Television, Producer/Director/Writer, which began as a filmmaker at WGBH, Public Television’s flagship station in Boston, Massachusetts. When he moved to Jerusalem in 1978, he became a Staff Director at IBA, Channel One, Israel’s Public Broadcasting Station. In addition to directing and writing several large projects, Weisbrod served as Head of the Drama and Arts Department. He also directed several documentary films which include “Making Music with Friends” (2007), “Opening Night” 2010, and “The First Israeli in Space” (2003). In 2011 he left IBA and is working as a freelance Writer/Producer/Director. Ingrid Wendt, a long-time resident of Eugene, OR, is the author of five full-length books of poems, one chapbook, two anthologies, a book-length teaching guide, numerous articles and reviews, and more than 200 individual poems in such magazines and anthologies as Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Antioch Review, Northwest Review, Ms., and No More Masks! An Anthology of 20th Century American Women Poets. Wendt has taught literature and poetry writing for more than 30 years at all educational levels, including the M.F.A. program of Antioch University Los Angeles, as a Poet-in-Residence at several colleges, and in hundreds of public school classrooms in Oregon, Washington, Utah, Illinois, Iowa, and overseas. Her honors include, Oregon Book Award, the 2004 Editions Prize from WordTech Editions, the 2003 Yellowglen Award from Word Press, the Carolyn Kizer Award, several Pushcart nominations, an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship, and the D.H. Lawrence Award. www.ingridwendt.com Andrena Zawinski, born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA, lives on the city island of Alameda, CA and teaches writing at Laney Community College in Oakland, CA. She has authored several collections of poetry including Something About (Blue Light Pr., 2009), winner of the 2010 Josephine Miles PEN Oakland award winner for literary excellence; Taking the Road Where It Leads (Poets Corner Pr., 2008); Greatest Hits 1991-2001 (Pudding Hse, 2002); and Traveling in Reflected Light (Pig Iron Pr., 1995) as a Kenneth Patchen Prize. Her poems appeared in Quarterly West, Gulf Coast, Slipstream, Rattle, Many Mountains Moving, Pacific Review, The Progressive Magazine with several Pushcart Prize nominations. Zawinski served as Features Editor at PoetryMagazine.com since 2000, is the founder and organizer of a Women’s Poetry Potluck and Salon in the San Francisco Bay Area, and publishes photographs in literary journals in print and online. Seree Cohen Zohar was born in Australia and immigrated to Israel when she was 20 years old. Since then, she has spent the past two decades farming, which is echoed in her art, poetry and flash fiction. Her work has appeared in publications such as Routledge’s International Feminist Journal of Politics, Voices Israel, Arc, Skive and the Jerusalem Post. A professional translator and Reiki Master, Cohen Zohar also lectures on the metaphysical within the Genesis texts, and often uses a Biblical and Kabbalistic approach in her poetry. She recently collaborated as a Bible language consultant on a new verse translation of Davidic psalms by Alan Sullivan.

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P H A T I â&#x20AC;&#x2DC; T U D E L I T E R A R Y M A G A Z I N E F A L L 2 0 1 1

C O V E R A R T Linda Puiatti

HA VE AL WAYS BEEN DRA WING, P AINTING, MOLDING, SHARING HAVE ALW DRAWING, PAINTING, SHARING. As a child it was

color crayons, tempera paints and brilliant colors. In my teens it was oil painting, drawing, observing nature. I eventually studied art at Dutchess Community College, The Art Stu-

dents League and The School of Visual Arts, The Woodstock School of Art, The Byrdcliffe School of Art and Stedelijke Akademie voor Schoone Kunst, Deinze, Belgium. As a young professional, it was the world of graphic design and advertising that satisfied me. As a young mother overseas I began painting again, with a passion for landscape and a language that was familiar. I use color, depth and light to express an intimacy with nature and an observation of natural structure. I paint primarily with oils on canvas in my Holmes studio, as well as outdoors in the fields and hills of Duchess and Ulster County, New York. Smaller field studies created en plein aire in warm weather months give way to larger canvases painted in the studio during winter. I have exhibited at exhibitions and galleries such as NOA Gallery, Groton; and Whistler Museum of Art, Lowell; and some of my paintings hang in private collections throughout the U.S. and Europe. My inspiration as an artist has always been "To Reinterpret the World As I Feel It." So it was that the 9-11 Series came to be. You can find a gallery of paintings and more about me at www.lindapuiatti.com or visit Linda Puiatti Art & Design on Facebook. Hope, 30"x40", acrylic on canvas, Copyright ÂŠ 2001 by Linda Puiatti

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