Cyrus Cassells is the 2021 Poet Laureate of Texas. Among his other honors are a Civitella-Rainieri Foundation fellowship; an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship; a Guggenheim fellowship; two NEA grants; and the William Carlos Williams Award. Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas, translated from the Catalan, was awarded the Texas Institute of Letters’ Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translated Book of 2018 and 2019. To The Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu, combining translations, poetry, and memoir in homage to Catalan Spain’s most revered writer, was published in March 2023. His ninth and tenth books, Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch? and Evening Lasting as Long as Life: Selected Poems 1982-2022 are due out in March 2024 and April 2025. Cassells teaches in the MFA program at Texas State University, where he was named a 2023 University Distinguished Professor and received a 2021 Presidential Award for Scholarly/Creative Activities—the university’s two highest honors.
See first full published review of To The Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu (Stephen F. Austin State University Press: March 20, 2023)HERE.
Ellen Hinsey is the author of nine books of poetry, essays, dialogue and literary translation. Her most recent volume of poetry, The Illegal Age, which explores the rise of authoritarianism, was a National Poetry Series Finalist and was chosen as UK's Poetry Society's fall 2018 Choice. Hinsey's essays on democracy in Central and Eastern Europe are collected in Mastering the Past: Reports from Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe (Telos Press, 2017). Her book-length dialogue with Lithuanian poet and dissident Tomas Venclova, Magnetic North, explores post-war culture and ethics under totalitarianism, was a finalist for Lithuania's Book of the Year and has appeared in six languages. Hinsey's other volumes of poetry include, Update on the Descent, also a National Poetry Series Finalist, which draws on her experience at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague, and The White Fire of Time and Cities of Memory, which received the Yale University Series Award. The Invisible Fugue, a new collection of poems, will appear in 2023.
Interview discussing The Illegal Age (Arc Publications, 2018) HERE.
