2024 Annual Dante Reading Participants
Doug Anderson served in the Vietnam war and his poems reflect the horrors, tragedies, and unlikely friendships of that tragic time. Upon returning home, Anderson earned his M.A. from the University of Arizona, and then settled in Northampton, where he began to write plays and poems in a workshop with Jack Gilbert. A meticulous, unerring chronicler, especially of his experiences in Vietnam, Anderson has published three volumes, including The Moon Reflected Fire, winner of the 1995 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Joyce Peseroff writes that this work is “not just about Vietnam but resonant with the history of warriors from the backyard to The Iliad to the Bible. Anderson’s subsequent collection, Blues for Unemployed Secret Police, was funded by a grant from The Eric Matthieu King Fund of the Academy of American Poets, and praised by Booklist for its “powerful, funny-horrific, brutal-tender poems.” His recent poetry and prose have been published in Ploughshares, the Connecticut Review and The Autumn House Anthology of American Poetry, as well as this year’s Contemporary American War Poetry. Recipient of a Pushcart Prize, an NEA grant, and a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship, Anderson teaches at the University of Connecticut and the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Its Social Consequences. He is currently at work on a memoir, Don’t Rub Your Eyes, about Vietnam and the nineteen-sixties.
Chodo Robert Campbell Sensei is a Zen teacher, bereavement specialist, grief counselor and a recognized leader for those suffering with the complexities of death & dying, aging, and sobriety. The educational non-profit he co-founded, the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, touches thousands of lives every year through its numerous educational programs, contemplative retreats, and Soto Zen Buddhist practices. Chodo has been featured in the New York Times, PBS, CBS Sunday Morning and other media outlets.
Meghan Maguire Dahn is the author of Domain (selected by Jennifer Chang for the Burnside Review Press Award, 2022) and the chapbook Lucid Animal (winner of the Harbor Review Editor’s Prize, 2021). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bennington Review, Boston Review, the Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Fence, Gettysburg Review, the Iowa Review, Lana Turner, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poetry Northwest, among others. She was selected for the 2017 Best New American Poets anthology by Natalie Diaz and she was a winner of the 2014 Discovery/92ndStreet Y Poetry Prize (judges: Rosanna Warren, Susan Mitchell, and John Ashbery). She has an MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts, teaches at Fordham University, and lives in New York with her family.
Kōshin Paley Ellison, is an author, Zen teacher, Jungian psychotherapist, leader in contemplative care, and co-founder of an educational non-profit called the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care. His books, grounded in Buddhist wisdom and practice, have gained national attention. Through its numerous educational programs, contemplative retreats, and Soto Zen Buddhist practices, the New York Zen Center touches thousands of lives every year. Koshin has appeared on dozens of podcasts and his work has been featured in the New York Times, PBS, CBS Sunday Morning and other media outlets.
Tom Fedorek has been introducing visitors to the history and architecture of St. John the Divine for forty years as a volunteer docent. He can point you towards the two images of Dante within the Cathedral.
Nick Flynn (writer, playwright, poet) has published twelve books, most recently This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire (2020), a hybrid memoir; and Stay: threads, collaborations, and conversations (2020), which documents twenty-five years of his collaborations with artists, filmmakers, and composers. He is also the author of five collections of poetry, including I Will Destroy You (2019). He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress, and is on the creative writing faculty at the University of Houston. His acclaimed memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004), was made into a film starring Robert DeNiro, and has been translated into fifteen languages.
Haleh Liza Gafori is a translator, vocalist, poet, and educator born in New York City of Iranian/Persian descent. She grew up hearing recitations of Persian poetry and has maintained and deepened her connection through singing and translating the poetry of various Persian poets. Her book, GOLD, translations of poems by Rumi, the 13th century sage and mystic. GOLD was released in 2022 by New York Review Books/NYRB Classics, distributed by Penguin Random House.
Organ Meditation by Jacob Gruss, Organist Jacob Gruss is a third-year undergraduate at the Juilliard School in New York City studying in the studio of Paul Jacobs. A native of Pittsburgh, PA, Jacob was fortunate to develop his musical interest through generous teachers and prominent church music positions. In high school, Jacob was Director of Music at Otterbein United Methodist Church (Greensburg), Assistant Organist at Blessed Sacrament Cathedral (Greensburg), and Sacred Music Intern at St. Bernard Church (Mt. Lebanon). Jacob recently completed a two-year music intern position at Hitchcock Presbyterian Church in Scarsdale, NY. Currently, he serves as Organ Scholar at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Jacob placed first in the Westmorland Symphony Orchestra's Young Artist Competition, and first in the Cassel Competition sponsored by the Harrisburg AGO. Additionally, he placed second in the 2023 AGO Quimby Northeast Regional Competition. Jacob is grateful to be the recipient of the American Guild of Organists' Pogorzelski-Yankee Memorial Scholarship, the Robert and Nancy Powell Scholarship, and the Guild's 2022-23 Student Commissioning Project. Eager to broaden his knowledge of both the organ and its repertoire, Jacob has performed in numerous masterclasses including those with John Salveson, Caroline Robinson, Gordon Turk, and Gregory Hand. Beyond the organ, Jacob studies Choral Conducting, Composition, Improvisation, and Organ Literature and enjoys art, opera, and golf.
Rachel Hadas, who taught English at the Newark campus of Rutgers University for many years, has two new books forthcoming in 2025: “Forty-four Pastorals,” brief prose pieces, and a prosimetrum of alternating poetry and prose, “From Which We Start Awake.”
Poet in Residence Marie Howe, is the author of Magdalene (W. W. Norton, 2017), which was long-listed for the National Book Award; The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (W. W. Norton, 2009), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; What the Living Do (W. W. Norton, 1998); and The Good Thief (Persea Books, 1988), which was selected by Margaret Atwood for the 1987 National Poetry Series. The poet Stanley Kunitz called her poetry "luminous, intense, and eloquent, rooted in an abundant inner life." He selected her for a Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets in 1988. Howe is the recipient of the 2015 Academy of American Poets Fellowship. Her other awards include grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Bunting Institute, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2018, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Ron Jenkins, a recipient of Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, has staged theater performances inspired by Dante in prisons in Italy, Indonesia, and the U.S. With the support of residencies at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music he has written plays in collaboration with formerly incarcerated men and women that parallel their journeys out of prison to Dante’s journey out of hell. Jenkins was introduced to Dante while working with the Italian Nobel Laureate Dario Fo, whose plays he has translated for productions at the Yale Repertory Theater, Harvard’s American Repertory Theater, the New York Theater Workshop and other venues. Jenkins is the author of several books, as well as articles that have appeared in the New York Times, Forum Italicum, Quaderni di Teatro Carcere, the Jakarta Post, and the Yale ISM Review, among other publications. Jenkins is Professor of Theater at Wesleyan University and a frequent Visiting Professor at the Yale Divinity School. He is an honorary member of the Dante Society of America.
Pierre Joris, although born on Bastille Day in 1946 in Strasbourg, France, Pierre Joris was raised in Luxembourg & has moved between the US, Europe & North Africa for 55 years by now, publishing more than 50 books of poetry, essays, anthologies, plays & translations. In 1992 he returned to New York, first the state, where he taught poetry & poetics at SUNY-Albany until 2012, but also, since 2008, the city — happily humming Bob Dylan’s “I’m going back to New York City, I believe I’ve had enough…”. When not on the road (see the “Events Calendar” page on this blog or on his site), he lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn — baptized Sorrentinostan by him — with his wife, painter, singer & multimedia artist Nicole Peyrafitte.
Johanna Beale Keller is an award-winning playwright and lyricist. Her plays have been produced this year in Brooklyn (Gallery Players), Houston (Theatre Southwest), and Port Jefferson (Theatre Three); she wrote and directed a film for Abingdon Theatre’s Rogue Festival in NYC and a radio show for the Atlanta Fringe Fest. She gardens in Syracuse, NY.
Bill Logan is the author of Sprout Lands, Oak, Air and Dirt, the last of which was made into an award-winning documentary. He is on the faculty of the New York Botanical Garden. He has spent the last three decades working in trees. He is a certified arborist, and founder and president of Urban Arborists, Inc., a Brooklyn-based tree company. Logan has won numerous Quill and Trowel Awards from the Garden Writers of America, and was a contributing editor to House Beautiful, House and Garden, and Garden Design magazines, as well as a regular garden writer for the New York Times. He won a 2012 Senior Scholar Award from the New York State chapter of the International Society of Arboriculture (ISA), as well as a True Professional of Arboriculture award from the international ISA. He also won an NEH grant to translate Calderón de la Barca and has published many translations from the Spanish, including the work of García Lorca, Ramón del Valle Inclán, and Calderón.
The Very Reverend Dr. Patrick Malloy, who joined the Cathedral in the summer of 2016 as Canon, Liturgy & The Arts, was appointed Sub-Dean in 2018, and became Acting Dean in June 2022. He was formally installed as the 11th Dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in December 2023. Prior to joining the Cathedral, he served as the Interim Dean at St. John’s Cathedral in Denver. He has taught at The General Theological Seminary, New York, where he was Professor of Liturgy; St. John’s University, Collegeville; the University of Santa Clara, California; and Duquesne University, Pittsburgh. In 2008-2009, Canon Malloy, then Rector of Grace Episcopal Church in Allentown, PA, designed and was general contractor for the renovation of the church. For this work, he received an architecture design award in 2012 from the American Institute of Architects. Dean Malloy holds a PhD in liturgical studies from the University of Notre Dame.
Charles Martin is a former Poet in Residence at the Cathedral. He is a recipient of the Harold Morton Landon Award from the Academy of American Poets and an Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His version of Euripides’ Medea was published in 2019 by the University of California Press, and his translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses has been reprinted in the Norton Library series. His next book of poetry, The Khayyam Suite, will be published in 2025 by The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Donna Masini was born in Brooklyn and has always lived in NYC. She attended Hunter College and received her MFA in Poetry from New York University in 1988. Her latest collection of poems, 4:30 Movie, an elegy for her sister, explores personal loss, global violence, the ways in which movies shape our imaginations. Her first collection of poems, That Kind of Danger (Beacon Press, 1994), was selected by Mona Van Duyn for the Barnard Women Poets Prize. She next published a novel, About Yvonne ( W.W. Norton and Co., 1997) which the New York Times called “a stunning novel of sexual obsession.” In 2004 she published her second collection of poems, Turning to Fiction (WW Norton and Co.) Of her poems Adrienne Rich has said: “Donna Masini’s poems are on the wavelength of Whitman and Rukeyser but are inimitable her own: urban, sexual, working-class, passionate, marked by great moral intelligence and generosity. She is one of the marvelous new poets this country is generating in a terrible time.” Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies including Best American Poetry, Poetry, Ploughshares, APR, Open City, TriQuarterly, Paris Review, Brooklyn Poets, Renga for Obama, et al. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, a Pushcart Prize, et al, she is a Professor of English at Hunter College where she teaches in the MFA Creative Writing program.
Joshua Mehigan’s second book, Accepting the Disaster (FSG) was cited in the TLS, New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere as a best book of 2015. He has received NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. In 2013 Poetry magazine awarded him its Levinson Prize. From 2017 to 2020, he was a visiting writer at Northwestern University. He lives in Brooklyn.
Frank Messina is a poet, actor, and artist. He is the author of four books of poetry including Disorderly Conduct (Published in Heaven Books) and Full Count: The Book of Mets Poetry (The Lyons Press). In 2013, his original, handwritten manuscript of 9/11-related poems was accessioned into the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. As an actor, Frank has appeared in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, Netflix’s Daredevil, and in the feature film Toxic Tutu. He serves on the advisory panel for the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence Project of Orlando, FL, and lives in Jersey City, NJ.
Anthony Newfield is an actor, director, writer, and book editor. Originally from Northern California, he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley (PBK), with a degree in Romance Languages. He studied at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco and received his MFA in acting from Carnegie Mellon University in conjunction with the Moscow Art Theatre. He spent six months in Russia, studying and playing Jim Casy in The Grapes of Wrath. His article about his time in Russia, “After the Orchard,” was published in American Theatre magazine.
Michael Palma has published the poetry collections The Egg Shape, Antibodies, A Fortune in Gold, and Begin in Gladness, as well as Faithful in My Fashion: Essays on the Translation of Poetry and twenty translations of modern Italian poetry. Forthcoming books include Local Colors, a poetry collection, and a translation of Bertgang by Luigi Fontanella. His fully rhymed translation of the Inferno was published by Norton in 2002 and reissued as a Norton Critical Edition in 2007 and in the Norton Library series in 2021. His fully rhymed translation of the complete Divine Comedy will be published by Liveright in December of this year. He is the only person to have participated in every one of the annual Dante readings since they began in 1994.
Joseph J. Portanova is a (semi-retired) teacher at New York University's Liberal Studies and Global Liberal Studies Program, where he has taught since 1984. He has published poetry in Icarus and The West Fourth Street Review. His connection with the Cathedral began in 1975, when he met Canon Edward Nason West. While teaching in Florence, Dr. Portanova read his poem "Reading Dante at the Cathedral" at the La Pietra campus. He read excerpts of his poetry cycle "Playland" at N.Y.U.
Ellen Rachlin’s poetry has appeared in American Poetry Review, Comstock Review, Granta, Court Green, Literary Imagination, and various anthologies. She has published two collections of her poems, Until Crazy Catches Me (Antrim House, 2008) and Permeable Divide (Antrim House, 2017), winner of the 2018 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Silver Award. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Waiting for Here (Finishing Line Press, 2004), a finalist in the New Women's Voices series, and Captive to Residue (Flarestack Publishing, 2009). She received her MFA from Antioch University. She serves as Treasurer of The Poetry Society of America and works in finance. Other writing genres include historical fiction with a work in process, Song From the Sands on the life of Enheduanna, and numerous textbook and journal articles on the subject of finance and investing with various publishers including Wiley.
Matthew Salyer, writes and works. He is an associate professor at West Point, where he has been on military or civilian faculties since 2015. He has taught or designed courses on writing, literature, and cultural geographies at several universities and organizations. From 2021-2023, he directed first-year writing at West Point. He holds a doctorate from the University of Connecticut and is completing a graduate program in medieval studies at Fordham. Author of two books and a pamphlet, his award-winning work has been published widely in the US, UK, and Ireland. Most recently, he was a finalist for the Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prizes, Iowa Review Prize, and Michael Waters Poetry Prize. He writes regularly for Forbes. On most weekends & holidays, he works as a bouncer in The Bronx, where he raises his family & his family raises him.
Webb Segur spent 35 years working in computer software and systems, private equity and corporate communications. He is a master trainer of sophisticated financial transaction and accounting software tools. He has bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the City University of New York. Webb writes and participates in a poetry group and narrates audiobooks for the New York Public Library. He enjoys opera, music, and a variety of sports. Originally from Canada, he has lived in New York City for half a century.
William M. Singer, a registered architect working as a Public Servant for the City of New York, welcomes the annual opportunity to immerse himself in the study of Dante’s Inferno and to share his pleasure publicly with those who have a similar interest. He is deeply honored tonight to join such esteemed colleagues.
Terrill Shepard Soules, putting Dante's Comedy into rhymed American: My decades-old goal is finally only two years away from being one-third reached.
The Reverend Canon Eva Suarez, The Canon for Community Engagement Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine
Anthony Viscusi, is a retired business executive. He joined the corporate world after having lectured on the Divine Comedy at Princeton.