Principal Contributor
Ed Folsom is the editor of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, co-director of the Walt Whitman Archive and editor of the Whitman Series at The University of Iowa Press. The Roy J. Carver Professor of English at The University of Iowa, he is the author or editor of twelve books, including Walt Whitman’s Native Representations (1994) and (with Kenneth M. Price) Re-Scripting Walt Whitman (2005), as well as numerous essays on Whitman and other American writers appearing in journals like American Literature, PMLA, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. He is now working on a biography of Leaves of Grass.
Principal Contributor
Christopher Merrill has published four collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and books of translations; and five works of nonfiction, most recently Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain and The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War. His writings have been translated into twenty-five languages and his journalism appears widely. As director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, he has undertaken cultural diplomacy missions in more than thirty countries.
Collaborators:
Eric Forsythe (voice actor for English texts) is a veteran stage, TV and film actor who trained at Dartmouth and Carnegie-Mellon (BA, MFA, PhD), and then with Grotowski's Lab Theatre in Poland. His recording career includes hundreds of credits, ranging from full-length works to poetry, to specials for NPR, radio and TV commercials and voices for stage productions across the country. He currently heads the Directing Program at the University of Iowa, and is Artistic Director of Iowa Summer Rep.
Nadia Fayidh Mohammed (translator into the Arabic) is a professor of English and American poetry at the University of Mustaserya in Baghdad (Iraq), where she specializes in contemporary African American poetry, as well as teaching various aspects of the ESL curriculum. She is also a member of the Iraqi Translators’ Association, working both from and into Arabic. Her own creative work appears on-line, and on her blog Seeing Things.
Hélène Cardona (translator into the French ) is a poet, literary translator and actor, the recipient of numerous awards and honors including a Hemingway Grant and the USA Best Book Award. Her books include two translations: Beyond Elsewhere, and Ce que nous portons; and three bilingual poetry collections, most recently Life in Suspension and Dreaming My Animal Selves. She co-edits Fulcrum: An Anthology of Poetry and Aesthetics, is Co-International Editor of Plume, essay contributor to The London Magazine, and co-producer of the documentary Pablo Neruda: The Poet’s Calling. She holds a Master’s in American Literature from the Sorbonne, and taught at Hamilton College and Loyola Marymount University.
Yves Lambrecht (translator into the French, assistant), a graduate of the Conservatoire national supérieur d'art dramatique (Paris), has co-written several screenplays with the director Maya Simon. As an actor, he worked for the cinema (with Claude Chabrol and Pat O'Connor, among others), TV (Régis Wargnier, Jacques Deray), and theater (performing Racine, Harold Pinter, Frank McGuinness, Tony Kushner), opposite Marie Trintignant, Natasha Richardson, Marthe Keller, Jacqueline Bisset and Anne Brochet, among others.
CHU Yunxia 褚云侠 (Translator into the Chinese, Comments) is a Ph.D. candidate in Chinese Literature at Beijing Normal University; she has also studied at National Taiwan University. In 2015-6, she was a research scholar at the International Writing Program, and a participant in the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, both at the University of Iowa. Several of her academic papers have appeared in refereed journals; she has also published book reviews, and poems.
Samantha Nissen (Coordinating Editor) was the Program Coordinator for Outreach and Special Programs at the International Writing Program. She graduated from the University of Iowa and holds BA degrees in journalism and international studies, with an emphasis in Japanese language and literature.