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Contributors | 297
and an editor of Tortuca, a magazine for art and literature, and worked as
an independent visual artist and a poet.
Thomas Lux is a poet who currently holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry
at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he also runs the Poetry at
Tech program, one of the premier showcases of poetry in the Southeast,
and serves as director of the McEver Visiting Writers program. The author
of eleven poetry collections, most recently God Particles, and a recipient of
the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, he is also on the MFA faculties of Sarah
Lawrence College and Warren Wilson College.
Christopher Merrill has published four collections of poetry, including
Watch Fire, for which he received the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets
Award from the Academy of American Poets; translations of Aleš Debeljak’s
Anxious Moments and The City and the Child; several edited volumes;
and four books of nonfiction. His work has been translated into twentyfive
languages, his journalism appears widely, and for ten years he was
the book critic for the daily radio news program The World. He has held
the William H. Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of
the Holy Cross and now directs the International Writing Program at the
University of Iowa.
Luis Rodriguez is a poet, journalist, fiction writer, children’s book author,
critic, and author of the memoir Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang
Days in L.A. He has founded or cofounded numerous community organizations,
including Chicago’s Guild Complex, Youth Struggling for Survival,
Tia Chucha Press, and Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore,
which provides a bookstore, performance space, and workshop center for
its inner city neighborhood and sponsors Celebrating Words: Written,
Performed & Sung, a literacy and performing arts festival.
Anna Deavere Smith is an actress, playwright, author, and professor
at New York University. Her work exploring American character and
national identity has earned her many awards, including a MacArthur
Fellowship, two Obie Awards, and two Tony nominations. Her play Fires
in the Mirror was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is founding director
of Anna Deavere Smith Works, Inc., a center that convenes artists whose
work addresses the world’s most pressing problems.