- Contributors
Jacques-Stéphen Alexis (1922–1961), a native of Gonaives, Haiti, was a novelist, playwright, essayist, songwriter, and physician. For political reasons, he fled Haiti and made a clandestine return in 1961, when he was killed after a secret arrest. Gallimard in Paris published his novels, Compère Général Soleil (1955), Les Arbres musiciens (1957), L’espace d’un cillement (1959). He was an advocate of “réalisme merveilleux.”
Sharon Masingale Bell holds degrees in French from Hampton University and Brown University. She is currently a member of the Department of Modern and Classical Language Studies at Kent State University, where she teaches courses in technical and business translation and in Caribbean literature in French. Her translation of Jacques-Stéphen Alexis’ Romancéro aux étoiles, which includes “The Enchanted Second Lieutenant,” won the American Literary Translators Association’s Gregory Rabassa Prize for fiction translation in 1989.
Mairéad Byrne has published poems in Folio, Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Seneca Review. Her two plays, The Golden Hair and Safe Home, were produced in Dublin in 1982 and 1985. She has worked as a journalist in the United States and Ireland.
Tina Chang received her MFA degree in poetry from Columbia University. Her poems have appeared in various journals, including The Asian Pacific American Journal, The Cream City Review, Tamaqua, and Blue Ink Press. She has won awards for her poetry, among them the Allen Ginsberg Award and the University and College Prize from the Academy of American Poets.
Earl Maxwell Coleman lives in New Jersey.
Owen Dodson (1914–1983) was author of Powerful Long Ladder, Boy at the Window, The Confession Stone: Song Cycles, and Come Home Early, Child. He was also author of a number of plays, including Bayou Legend, Divine Comedy, Till Victory Is Won, New World A-Coming, and The Garden Time. With James Van Der Zee and Camille Billops, Owen Dodson authored The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978). For twenty-three years he taught at Howard University, where he taught courses in theater, and directed and produced plays. His students include Roxie Roker, Debbie Allen, Ted Shine, Glenda Dickerson, Robert Hooks, Amiri Baraka, Richard Wesley, and many others.
Zee Edgell, who was born in Belize, is author of Beka Lamb (Fawcett Society Book Prize), In Times Like These, and The Festival of San Joaquin. She has traveled and lived in a variety of countries, including Somalia, Nigeria, England, Jamaica, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh. She is currently Assistant Professor of English at Kent State University in Ohio.
Gilda M. Edwards, a native of Philadelphia, has art work in collections in the Columbus Museum of Art, The White House, The Ohio State University, and the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center in Wilberforce, Ohio. She has received a number of awards and fellowships for her work from a variety of agencies and places, including Art Matters (New York) and the Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, Massachusetts). She lives in Columbus, Ohio.
Benjamin D. Egnatz is currently a doctoral candidate in English at New York University, where he teaches freshman writing. He is also employed at the investment firm Hyperion Capital Management, Inc.
Mary Kay Francisco lives in San Francisco. She is completing her graduate degree in creative writing at San Francisco State University.
Margaret Gilbert has published poems in Crazyhorse, Mudfish, Poetry East, and other periodicals.
Jennifer Gonzalez is a student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern Maine.
Nathan L. Grant teaches African-American literature and cultural studies at the State University of New York in Buffalo, where he is an assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies.
Rachel E. Harding, a native of Atlanta, is a Latin American historian, writer, and arts consultant living in Denver, Colorado. Her work has appeared previously in Callaloo as well as in other literary magazines and anthologies.
Vincent Harding is author of The Other American Revolution, There Is a River, Hope and History, and numerous other studies. His most recent book publication is Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero (Obis, 1996). After he served as Chairman of the Department of History and Sociology at Spelman College in Atlanta, he...