Chris Brandt and John Hildebidle
Tuesday, October 28, 2008, at 7:30 p.m.
Chris Brandt is a writer and activist. Also a translator, carpenter, furniture designer, and theatre worker. He teaches poetry at Fordham University. He is proud to have been found guilty on May 29, 2008, of exercising free speech (sic) at the U.S. Supreme Court, and sentenced to ten days (suspended) and a year's probation. (Read his sentencing statement.) His poems and essays have been published in magazines, journals, and anthologies, including Off the Cuffs: Poetry by and About the Police (Soft Skull, edited by Jackie Sheeler); Lateral (Barcelona); El signo del gorrion (Valladolid); La Jornada (Mexico); Phatitude, Appearances; The Unbearables; National Poetry Magazine of the Lower East Side; Liqueur 44 (Paris) and Crimes of the Beats. His translations of Cuban fiction have been published in The New Yorker and by Seven Stories Press, and of two volumes of Carmen Valle's poetry by the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquena. Seven Stories published his translation of Clara Nieto's Masters of War, a history of U.S. interventions in Latin America. Translations of contemporary Cuban poetry will be included in a Univ. of CA Berkeley anthology to be published in 2009.
John Hildebidle survived a peripatetic childhood, a Harvard education, and eight years as a teacher in a public junior high. He has finally surfaced on the faculty of MIT (teaching English-a true adventure), happily lives a (literal) stone's throw from Cambridge Cohousing and co-founded the Fireside Reading Series with Jenise Aminoff in the spring of 2000. His newest book Signs, Translations, is available from Salmon Publishing in County Clare, Ireland. His publications include a study of Henry David Thoreau and another of 20th century Irish fiction, Five Irish Writers: The Errand of Keeping Alive plus several books of poetry and Stubbornness: A Field Guide, a work of fiction.