The Barnstones @ City Lights

Aliki Barnstone is a poet, translator, critic, and editor. She is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently, Bright Body (White Pine, 2011) and Dear God Dear, Dr. Heartbreak: New and Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow, 2009), and the translator of The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy: A New Translation (W.W. Norton, 2006). Her first book of poems, The Real Tin Flower (Crowell-Collier, 1968), was published when she was 12 years old, with a forward by Anne Sexton. In 2014, Carnegie-Mellon University Press reissued her book, Madly in Love, as a Carnegie-Mellon Classic Contemporary. A chapbook, Winter, with Child, is forthcoming with Red Dragonfly Press. She is the author of the critical study Changing Rapture: Emily Dickinson's Poetic Development (University Press of New England, 2007) and wrote the introduction and reader's notes for H.D.'s Trilogy (New Directions, 1997). She co-edited A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now (Schocken, 1980; 2nd Edition, 1992), which is still the most comprehensive anthology of world women's poetry. She also edited The Shambhala Anthology of Women's Spiritual Poetry (Shambhala, 1998; rpt. 2002) and co-edited The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era (critical essays). Among her awards are a Senior Fulbright Fellowship in Greece, the Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Literature Fellowship in Poetry, and a residency at the Anderson Center at Tower View. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Missouri, an affiliate of the Department of Women's Gender Studies Department, and serves as Series Editor of the Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation.

Tony Barnstone was born in Connecticut and raised in Indiana, Vermont, and Spain. As a poet, translator, editor, and fiction writer, he is the author of seventeen books and a music CD. His honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, as well the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize and Pablo Neruda Prize. He lived for years in Spain, Greece, Kenya, and China and currently resides in California, where he is the Albert Upton Professor and chair of English at Whittier College. He will be reading excerpts from his new book PULP SONNETS published by Tupleo Press.

Willis Barnstone is a poet, translator, editor, and educator. Born in Lewiston, Maine, and educated at Bowdoin, Columbia, and Yale, he taught in Greece at the end of the civil war (1949-51), in Buenos Aires during the Dirty War, and during the Cultural Revolution went to China, where he was later a Fulbright Professor of American Literature at Beijing Foreign Studies University (1984-1985). His publications include Modern European Poetry (Bantam, 1967), The Other Bible (HarperCollins, 1984) The Secret Reader: 501 Sonnets (New England, 1996), a memoir biography With Borges on an Ordinary Evening in Buenos Aires (Illinois, 1993), and To Touch the Sky (New Directions, 1999). His literary translation of the New Testament – The New Covenant: The Four Gospels and Apocalypse – was published by Riverhead Books in 2002. A Guggenheim Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry, Barnstone is Distinguished Professor at Indiana University.