Brian James Baer is Professor of Russian and Translation Studies at Kent State University. He is the author of the monographs Other Russias (2009) and Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature (2016), as well as the editor of several collected volumes, including Beyond the Ivory Tower: Re-thinking Translation Pedagogy with Geoffrey Koby (2003), Contexts, Subtexts, Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia (2011), Researching Translation and Interpreting, with Claudia Angelelli (2015), Translation in Russian Contexts, with Susanna Witt (2018), and Queering Translation, Translating the Queer, with Klaus Kaindl (2018). He is founding editor of the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies and co-editor of the Bloomsbury book series Literatures, Cultures, Translation. He is also the translator of Juri Lotman’s final monograph, The Unpredictable Workings of Culture (2013), and a forthcoming collection of essays by Lotman on cultural memory. He is the current president of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association.
Dr. John Beall is Head of English at the Collegiate School in Manhattan. He is a widely published award-winning poet. In 2018 he was a featured poet at the XVIII International Hemingway Conference in Paris.
Eric Berman will graduate from SUNY New Paltz’s English MA program in May 2019 with a certification to teach grades 7-12. He is undertaking an independent study in linguistics to supplement the findings in “Eff the Ineffable,” and recently completed a thesis on David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Before teaching in public schools, Eric’s near-term plans include working in the solar industry and teaching English abroad in South Korea.
Jonas Black graduated from the New Paltz MA program in 2018.
Gregory E. Bruno teaches English, runs the library, and coaches cross country at Salesian High School in New Rochelle, NY. He completed his MA at SUNY New Paltz in 2017. His poetry has appeared in several collections including, most recently, Songs & Poems for Hemingway and Paris (2018). He lives in Dobbs Ferry.
Marie D’Apice is an MA student and Teaching Assistant in the New Paltz English Department.
Joann K. Deiudicibus is the Staff Assistant for the Composition Program and an Adjunct Instructor at SUNY New Paltz, where she earned her MA in English (2003). She is the Associate Editor (poetry) for WaterWrites: A Hudson River Anthology (Codhill Press, 2009). Her poems have appeared in A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley (Codhill Press, 2013), Chronogram, and around the Hudson Valley. Her articles about poetry include “Axing the Frozen Sea: Female Inscriptions of Madness” from the anthology Affective Disorder and the Writing Life: The Melancholic Muse (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and an untitled work from Reflecting Pool: Poets and the Creative Process (Codhill Press, 2018).
Dennis Doherty teaches creative writing and literature and SUNY New Paltz. He has also enjoyed teaching, lecturing, and reading for many other public and private schools in the region, from elementary to high school to prison. He is author of four volumes of poetry: The Bad Man (Ye Olde Font Shoppe Press, 2004), Fugitive (Codhill Press, 2007), Crush Test (Codhill Press 2010), and Black Irish (Codhill Press, 2016) as well as a book-length study of Huckleberry Finn: Why Read the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New Street Communications, 2014). His essays, poems, and stories appear throughout the literary press.
Thomas Festa, Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of a scholarly monograph and 22 articles, and co-editor of 3 books, all focused on John Milton, John Donne, and other early modern English writers. His current research interests include the poetry of W. S. Merwin. When not writing of himself in the third person, he thinks to write, translate, and read more poetry.
Autumn Holladay, a recent graduate of SUNY New Paltz, is a poet and film-maker who lives in New Orleans and works for YAS Entertainment. She is currently at work on a documentary film about Elizabeth Madox Roberts.
Evan Hulick, a former TA in the New Paltz English Department, received his MA in 2016.
Jordana Jampel is an English MA candidate at SUNY New Paltz and anticipates to graduate in December 2019. Her interests include law and literature, deconstructive narratives of the posthuman, comparative animal representation across literary eras, human-animal relations in literature, Romantic ecocriticism, and everything Kafka. She hopes to complete a thesis on how late eighteenth-century legal shifts affected animals as witnessed through Romantic literature.
Nathan Lindsay Lee recently attained his Masters in English Literature from SUNY New Paltz. He is a scholar, playwright, and poet from Nashville, Tennessee.
Edward Maietta [please try Ed or Ned]: I’ve lived in Brooklyn, Queens, Jupiter-FL, Savannah-GA, Flagstaff, AZ, Lake Ronkonkoma, Cicero, Liverpool, Mineola, Red Bank, NJ, & on a bicycle traveling from NYC to Claremont-MN, where a broken clavicle ended that adventure. Laura & I adopted our daughters in China; Maddie is from Dingbian, a village on the edge of the Gobi Desert, and Sammi is from Ruijin, a small city in Jiangxi Province. I have been teaching English since 1976, when my first paid tutoring experience involved a student named Hector, who was failing basic grammar but refused to right anything but love letters to his “cold” girlfriend. He dropped out of college to woo her. My second student overcame his fear of writing and went on to graduate. If I am not writing, mostly poetry, I do lots of story-telling, making or fixing things, and some photography, as well as hiking, cycling and enough eating to offset the salutary effects of the above pursuits.
Jessica Nickel, a teacher at Maria Kaupas Academy in Scranton, PA, finished her BA (2005), MAT (2012) and MA (2013) at SUNY New Paltz. She has co-edited a volume of essays on Elizabeth Madox Roberts, presented dozens of papers at national and international conferences, and she has served as Program Chair of the Annual Elizabeth Madox Roberts Conferences for several years.
Matthew Nickel, Associate Professor of English at Misericordia University, finished his BA (2002) and MA (2007) at SUNY New Paltz and PhD at University of Louisiana (2011). In 2018, he co-directed the International Ernest Hemingway Conference in Paris, France, and currently serves as Board Member of the Hemingway Foundation & Society and as Vice-President of the Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society. He is the author/editor of numerous books including Hemingway’s Dark Night (New Street Communications, 2013) and The Route to Cacharel (Five Oaks Press, 2016).
Alex Pennisi graduated with his MA in English from SUNY New Paltz in 2018.
Hannah Phillips will be graduating from SUNY New Paltz’s English MA program in May 2019. Her interests include Gothic literature, domesticity, gender and sexuality studies, interior decoration, architecture, and the nineteenth century. She has extended her symposium paper into a Master’s Thesis, which she plans on extending further in her post-graduate future.
Julia Ponder is a teacher and a writer living in the Hudson Valley. She is currently pursuing an MA in English at SUNY New Paltz. Her poetry and creative non-fiction have appeared in The Chronogram, The Susquehanna Review, 805Lit, That Magazine, The Sonder Review, and The Stonesthrow Review.
Dr. Zuzana Říhová, from Prague (Czech Republic), is a widely published literary critic, scholar, novelist and poet of international reputation. Before her current position in the Editorial and Textological Department of the Institute of Czech Literature (Czech Academy of Sciences), she taught at Oxford University. From 2014-2017 she was Head of the Czech Department in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford. During the Fall 2018 semester, she was a visiting fellow at Columbia University. In the course of her PhD studies at Charles University in Prague, she held visiting fellowships at universities in Germany and the UK and also studied, on a visiting scholarship, at SUNY New Paltz—and she regards New Paltz as her beloved American “home.”
Neal Rowland will graduate from SUNY New Paltz’s Master of Arts in Teaching program in early 2020, whereupon he plans to teach high school English Language Arts. In a previous life, he completed a doctoral thesis at Trinity College in Ireland on the relationship between narrative and ideology in popular Hollywood cinema.
Melissa Rubbert graduated from the MA program at SUNY New Paltz in May 2018 and intends to build a career in writing and editing. She enjoys reading literary criticism that explores language and the diverse fashions in which it has the potential to function, and hopes to utilize her learning not only to benefit her future editorial career, but also to contribute to professional theoretical conversation.
Ron Smith is a widely published award-winning poet and the writer-in-residence at St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, Virginia. His volumes of poetry include Moon Road (2007), Its Ghostly Workshop (2013), and The Humility of the Brutes (2017)—all from LSU Press—, and Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery (1988 University Presses of Florida). In 2018 he was a featured poet at the XVIII International Hemingway Conference in Paris. From 2014 to 2016, he was Poet Laureate of Virginia.
Jan Zlotnik Schmidt is a SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor at SUNY New Paltz in the Department of English where she teaches autobiography, creative writing, women’s literature, American and cotemporary literature, and Holocaust Literature. She has been published in many journals including The Cream City Review, Kansas Quarterly, The Alaska Quarterly Review, Home Planet News, Phoebe, Black Buzzard Review, The Chiron Review, Memoir (and), The Westchester Review, and Wind. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Press Prize Series. She has had two volumes of poetry published by the Edwin Mellen Press (We Speak in Tongues, 1991; She had this memory, 2000) and two collections of autobiographical essays, Women/Writing/Teaching (SUNY Press, 1998) and Wise Women: Reflections of Teachers at Mid-Life (Routledge, 2000 ). Her chapbook, The Earth Was Still, was published by Finishing Line Press and another, Hieroglyphs of Father-Daughter Time, was published by Word Temple Press. Most recently she co-edited with Laurence Carr a collection of works by Hudson Valley women writers entitled A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley, which won the 2013 USA Best Book Award for Anthology. Her multicultural and global literature anthology, Legacies: Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Nonfiction, co-authored with Dr. Lynne Crockett and the late Dr. Carley Bogarad is now in its fifth edition and used nationwide.
H. R. Stoneback is Distinguished Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz, where he has taught for 50 years. An internationally renowned Hemingway scholar, he is the author or editor of 40 books (roughly half literary criticism and half his own poetry) and some 400 essays and articles published in scores of scholarly journals and volumes. He has served as President, V.P. and Trustee of numerous national and international literary societies including the South Atlantic Modern Language Association and is immediate Past President and board member of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation & Society, Founder and Honorary President of the Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society. His widely published poetry (more than a dozen volumes from various presses) has won numerous awards; his 400-some conference papers include 40-some Keynote Addresses that have been delivered at every major conference in his field, from the South Atlantic Modern Language Association to the American Literature Association, from national/international conferences on Aldington, Burroughs, Durrell, Faulkner, Hemingway, McCarthy, to Roberts and others. Of his many awards and honors for national/international cultural leadership he cites only his commission by the Governor of Kentucky as a Kentucky Colonel, and his ambassadorial-level nomination to the French Legion of Honor. He is the Founding Editor of The Shawangunk Review and one reason this contributor’s bio is so long is this: after decades of brief bios here, this will be the last one in this journal. With this issue he announces his retirement from SR editorial labors as well as his retirement from SUNY New Paltz. He looks forward to completing his 7 or 8 books-in-progress, to writing a number of keynotes and visiting lectures scheduled around the globe in the next few years. And, a professional performing singer-songwriter for over 60 years, he plans to keep on singing (including a future concert appearance with his old road-buddy from the 1960s, the legendary singer-songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker, composer of “Bo Jangles” and “Stoney” and 30-some albums). The name of this tune, then, is “Hail and Farewell”—farewell to the Shawangunk Review, farewell to the New Paltz English Department. Ave atque vale in a footnote. The rest is not silence. As Hemingway’s Nick Adams said by the Big Two-Hearted River: He was there, in the good place. For 50 years.
Robert Waugh Puppeteer, poet, author of critical books on Lovecraft, and professor of courses on Joyce, Tolkien, Pynchon, and many other authors in his diverse career, Waugh is now emeritus at SUNY New Paltz. His most recent book is a collection of weird tales, The Bloody Tugboat and Other Witcheries. Bob is almost finished working on a new collection of essays on Lovecraft, title still pending.
Ethel Wesdorp is a 2001 graduate of SUNY New Paltz, and works in the SUNY New Paltz English Department. She has published poems in WaterWrites, From Penn’s Store to the World, A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley, and Shawangunk Review.
Michelle Woods is an Associate Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz. She is the author of Kafka Translated: How Translators Have Shaped Our Reading of Kafka (2014); Censoring Translation: Censorship, Theatre, and the Politics of Translation (2012); Translating Milan Kundera (2006); and is the editor of Authorizing Translation (2017). She is currently working on a book, Anna and Her Translators.
