Suzanne E. Berger and Ifeanyi Menkiti
Suzanne E. Berger teaches advanced students in poetry at the Lesley Seminars at Lesley University. She has two books of poetry, These Rooms (Penmaen Press, 1979) and Legacies (Alice James Books, 1984) and a book of non-fiction, Horizontal Woman (Houghton Mifflin, 1997). Her work has also appeared in Ploughshares, The New Yorker, AGNI, Harvard Review, and elsewhere, and she has received a Pushcart Prize and a grant from the Somerville (Mass.) Arts Council. (11/2003)
Ifeanyi Menkiti was born in Onitsha, Nigeria and first came to the United States to attend Pomona College from which he received his undergraduate degree. Later he went on to Columbia University and New York University for further studies. He received his Ph.D in Philosophy from Harvard University. He has taught Philosophy at Wellesley College for more than 30 years, and is the owner of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, the oldest poetry book store in the United States.
Menkiti is the author of four collections of poetry, Affirmations (1971), The Jubilation of Falling Bodies (1978), Of Altair, the Bright Light (2005), and Before A Common Soil (2007). Other poems have appeared in journals and periodicals such as the Sewanee Review, Ploughshares, New Directions, New Letters, The Massachusetts Review, Stony Brook, Bitterroot, the Southwest Review, Chelsea. The African journals Okike, Transition and Nigeria Magazine have also carried his work. In 1975, he was honored with a fellowship in poetry from Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities through the Artists Foundation, followed in 1978 by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Menkiti's poetry has also been aired on local and national radio and he has given public readings in the New York City public schools under the aupices of the Academy of American Poets.
Poet Tomas O'Leary, reviewing Menkiti's collection, Of Altair, the Bright Light, has written, "Like a shaman at his divinations, Menkiti brings a childlike awe to his appointed task of scaring up profoundly moving truths from both the sere bones and the fertile aspirations of history." In his on-going work Menkiti continues the summoning up of truths that move us all, and 'the bones and aspirations of history' are still a center of his poetic concerns. As his editors once put it, "He speaks with the authority of a village elder except that now the world is his village."