AMERICA | CONTRIBUTORS

Russell Celyn Jones is a novelist and critic. His novels are: The Ninth Wave; Ten Seconds From The Sun; Surface Tension; The Eros Hunter; An Interference of Light; Small Times; Soldiers and Innocents. He has won a Society of Author’s Award, a Welsh Arts Council Fiction Prize, David Higham Prize and the Weishanhu Award (China). He has been a Man Booker Prize Judge and is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London.

lloyd robson is a writer, broadcaster, maladjusted malcontent and loose gum for hire. He is author of city & poems; edge territory; letter from sissi; cardiff cut; bbboing! & associated weirdness; and Oh Dad! A Search for Robert Mitchum.

Bobby Sanabria – drummer, percussionist, composer, arranger, recording artist, producer, film-maker, conductor, educator, multi-cultural warrior and multiple Grammy nominee – has performed with a veritable Who’s Who in the world of jazz and Latin music, as well as with his own critically acclaimed ensembles.

Catherine Fletcher is a poet, an editor for Rattapallax magazine, and the Director of Poetry Programs at City Lore. Her work has appeared in Poetry Wales, Urhalpool, Rattapallax and other journals, and she has produced poetry events around New York City and abroad, most recently Illuminated Verses: Poetries of the Islamic World. She lives in New York.

Salena Godden hosts and produces The Book Club Boutique – Soho’s hippest literary salon. She features regularly on the BBC’s The Verb and Bespoken Word and is a poet-in-residence on Radio 4’s Saturday Live. Her latest poetry collection Under The Pier was published by hip-indie imprint Nasty Little Press in 2011.

Rhian Edwards’ first collection of poems Clueless Dogs will be published by Seren in February 2012. Rhian’s pamphlet Parade the Fib, (tall-Lighthouse), was awarded the Poetry Book Society Choice for autumn 2008.

Taylor Glenn is an award-winning American comedienne, writer and actress based in the UK.

Tom Abbott lives in Bath. After growing up in Hertfordshire, it was the five years he spent living in Virginia as a teenager that had the most profound effect on his writing. He is represented by AP Watt literary agency, and his first novel,To The Pines, set in prohibition-era East Tennessee, has been delivered to publishing houses in both the UK and the USA. Whilst he keeps his fingers crossed hoping for a publishing deal, he has started work on a new novel, Mark Me With An Anchor, set in a tattoo parlour in modern-day Savannah, Georgia. He is 28 years old.

Jo Mazelis is a writer of short stories, non fiction and poetry. Her collection of stories Diving Girls (Parthian, 2002) was short-listed for The Commonwealth Best First Book and Welsh Book of the Year. Her second book, Circle Games (Parthian, 2005), was long-listed for Welsh Book of the Year.

Tamar Yoseloff was born in the US in 1965. Since moving to London in 1987, she has been the organiser of the Terrible Beauty reading series at the Troubadour Coffee House; Reviews Editor of Poetry London magazine; and from 2000 to 2007, Programme Coordinator for The Poetry School. She currently works as a freelance tutor in creative writing.

Tom Anderson grew up in Porthcawl, and was led into a writing career through journeys taken as a surfer. His debut travel memoir Riding the Magic Carpet told the story of a quest to visit South Africa and surf at the fabled ‘J-Bay’; this was followed by Chasing Dean, a mixture between novel and travelogue set against the backdrop of the Atlantic hurricane season.

Yahia Lababidi, born 1973, is an internationally published writer of Egyptian-Lebanese origin. His first book was Signposts to Elsewhere. In 2007, his work was included in an encyclopedia of the World’s Great Aphorists. Meantime, Lababidi’s essays and poems have appeared in journals world-wide. His latest collection of essays is Trial by Ink.

Heathcote Williams – poet, playwright and actor, has made a significant contribution to many fields. He is best known for his extended poems on environmental subjects:Whale Nation, Falling for a Dolphin, Sacred Elephant and Autogeddon. His plays have also won acclaim, notably AC/DC, produced at London’s Royal Court, and Hancock’s Last Half Hour. As an actor he has been equally versatile – taking memorable roles in Orlando, Wish You Were Here, and Derek Jarman’s The Tempest, in which he played Prospero.

David E. Oprava is an American writer who has been published in over one hundred journals online and in print. He has three full-length collections of poetry: VS. (Erbacce Press, 2008), American Means (American Mettle Books, 2009), and sole (Blackheath Books, 2010). He lives in the UK.

Graham Isaac is a writer of fiction, poetry, and music reviews who grew up in the Pacific Northwest. He holds an MA in Creative and Media Writing from University of Wales, Swansea, and his work has appeared in Licton Springs Review, Jeopardy, Roundyhouse, Hoarse and other publications. He currently lives and writes in Seattle.

Robert Lewis is from the Black Mountains, in the Brecon Beacons. The Last Llanelli Train, his first novel, was nominated for the 2006 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and began the Robin Llewellyn Welsh noir trilogy. He concluded it with his latest book The Bank of The Black Sheep (SerpentsTail, 2010).

Joâo Morais is from Cardiff, and is about to start a PhD at the University there. He appeared in Parthian’s recent anthology, Nu2: Memorable Firsts. He was a runner-up in the 2009 Rhys Davies Short Story Competition.

Dan Tyte is a writer based in Cardiff, Wales. He’s written on subjects as diverse as Tim Burton movies, baby names and the Icelandic mayoral system, for men’s magazines and newspapers. He used to interview rock stars in budget hotel rooms but got out before the beer got flat. He had a poem turned into a short film earlier this year and is currently writing his debut novel.

Mimi Thebo is an American author who lives and works in England. She has published seven books in the last ten years. Her work has been read on Radio Four, adapted for a Bafta-winning film by the BBC, translated into eight languages and illustrated in light against the Shell Building on London’s South Bank.

Tim Wells has cultivated a laugh that’s more like a caress. He walks properly. He does not slouch, shuffle or stumble about. He knows that wide, floating trousers are only good for wearing on a veranda with a cocktail in your hand. His latest collection, Rougher Yet, is published by Donut Press.

Jack Foley is a widely-published San Francisco poet and critic. Born in Neptune, New Jersey in 1940, raised in Port Chester, New York, and educated at Cornell University, Foley moved to California in 1963 to attend U. C. Berkeley. His new book, a mammoth encyclopaedia of Beat poetry, Visions & Affiliations: A California Literary Time Line, Poets & Poetry, is out now published by Pantograph Press.

Todd Zuniga is a Puschart Prize-nominated writer for his short fiction and an award-winning journalist. The founding editor of Opium magazine, the journal of literary humor for the deliriously captivated, Zuniga is also the co-creator and host of worldwide spoken word event Literary Death Match.

INTERVIEWED THIS ISSUE: Journalist and political historian Godfrey Hodgson has been ‘in the wings’ during some of the most significant events of the twentieth century. As Washington correspondent for The Observer during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, he also befriended a young Martin Luther King Jr when a post-graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania in 1956. As well as his biography of King, Godfrey has written many books on some of the more interesting figures of American history, including Henry Stimson (US Secretary of War during World War 2) and Edward M. House (Woodrow Wilson’s indispensable advisor). He was in the room when Robert Kennedy was assassinated, and he was working in the offices of the Washington Post when Woodward and Bernstein broke the Watergate story. As well as The Observer, and a colossal canon of books about American political history, Godfrey also worked at The Sunday Times (where he headed a team of staff-writers who went to the US in ’68, resulting in the best-seller An American Melodrama: The Presidential Campaign of 1968), and as Foreign Editor for The Independent. In more recent times he spent many years as Director of the Reuters Institute at Oxford University.