Bios

Francesco Petrarch (1304 – 1374) is the great Italian master whose work helped to create the Renaissance sonnet craze in England. He was a priest, a scholar of the Classics, a friend to the great poet Giovanni Boccaccio, and an immensely popular poet in his day. Although a religious professional, he had two children out of wedlock, and is best known for his sonnets professing his intense love for a woman named Laura.

Bilal Shaw, is a Kashmiri scientist working in quantum information science who completed his PhD at the University of Southern California. In the past he has worked on DNA-based computation and nanotechnology, software architecture, and theoretical self-assembly. He is currently working as a scientist in the Analytics department at ID Analytics in San Diego, where he applies machine-learning techniques to build statistical risk models for fraud and credit space. He is also an accomplished poet.

Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797 – 1869), known by his pen name, Ghalib, is the famous romantic and mystical poet of the Mughal Empire in India. His poems are characterized by great wit, puns, and a mystical, erotic imagery so passionate as to veer at times into the surreal. He is the acknowledged world master of the ghazal, though certain Persian poets such as Hafiz and Rumi give him a run for his money!

Tony Barnstone is The Albert Upton Professor and Chair of English at Whittier College and author of fifteen books and a music CD, Tokyo’s Burning: WWII Songs. His poetry books include Beast in the Apartment, Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki, The Golem of Los Angeles, Sad Jazz: Sonnets, Impure, and selected poems in Spanish, Buda en Llamas: Antología poética (1999-2012). He is also a distinguished translator of Chinese literature, and he dabbles in other languages.

Martial, Latin in full Marcus Valerius Martialis (c. 40 – c. 103), was born in the Roman colony on the Iberian peninsula in present-day Spain. He made his way to Rome and chronicled courtly life with epigrams, some of which were bitingly satirical, and others of which were clearly poems-for-hire and occasional verse likely commissioned or written with the anticipation of patronage in return. As the winds of favor shifted, he returned to his native Iberia, where he died.

Mark S. Bauer’s poems have appeared in various literary journals and two chapbooks: Imperial Days (Robert Barth Publishing, 2002), a chapbook of epigrams, and The Gnarled Man Rises (Scienter Press, 2005), a chapbook of lyrics. He edited the anthology A Mind Apart: Poems of Melancholy, Madness, & Addiction (Oxford, 2009), and is on the psychiatry faculty at Harvard Medical School.

Christine de Pizan (1364 – c. 1430) was the daughter of the official astrologer to the French court, who gave her the same education that a son would have received. When her husband died of plague, leaving her a widow with three children at the age of 25, she began a career of writing, both prose and poetry, which marks her as a first European woman to support herself entirely by her pen.

Maryann Corbett’s third book of poetry, Mid Evil, won the 2014 Richard Wilbur Award and is forthcoming from The Evansville Press. Her poems, essays, reviews, and translations have appeared widely in journals in print and online and in a variety of anthologies and have also won the Lyric Memorial Award and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize.

José Luis Puerto (b. 1953) was born in the village of La Alberca, in the Sierra de Francia of Salamanca Province. Graduating from the University of Salamanca with a degree in Romance Philology, he served as secretary to Rafael Alberti. In addition to his many volumes of poetry, he has edited several anthologies, translated Portuguese poetry, and produced works of ethnography focusing primarily on folk legends of Northern Spain. He has taught in Sevilla, Segovia and León, where he now resides with his wife María.

Michael Bradburn-Ruster, a native of Carmel, California, has published poetry, fiction, translations, and scholarly essays in international journals including Able Muse, Sacred Web, Cincinnati Review, Grey Sparrow Journal, Perigee, Broken Bridge Review, Marginalia, Berkeley Poetry Review, Rain City Review, Damazine (Syria), and Antigonish Review. He is a frequent contributor to Poetry Salzburg Review, and was a featured reader at the Monterey Bay Poetry Festival.