UniVerse: World Literary Voices. Featuring Bei Dao, Breyten Breytenbach, Martín Espada, John Godfrey, Fadhil al-Azzawi, Dunya Mikhail, Oksana Zabuzhko, Joan Margarit Consarnau & Elif Shafak. April 21, 2005 at 9pm. Free. St. Mark's Church, 131 E. 10th St. & 2nd Ave., NYC. Sponsored by Rattapallax & Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church & PEN American Center. More info at www.pen.org/festival

Bei Dao was born in Beijing in 1949. Since 1987, Bei Dao has lived and taught in England, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, France, and the United States. His work has been translated into over 30 languages, including five poetry volumes in English Unlock, Landscape Over Zero, Forms of Distance, Old Snow, The August Sleepwalker, the story collection Waves, and two collections of essays, Blue House and Midnight's Gate. Translator who will read is Eliot Weinberger.

Breyten Breytenbach is a writer, painter, and activist of South African origin. He lives on Gorée Island, Dakar, where he is the Executive Director of the Gorée Institute, a Pan-African Center for Democracy, Development and Culture in Africa, and for part of the year in New York where he teaches in the Creative Writing Program of NYU. His most recent publications are Dog Heart, a travel memoir, and Lady One, a volume of poems. His recent one-person exhibitions are in La Maison Française (New York, 2003) and in Galerie Espace, Amsterdam, 2005.

Martín Espada's seventh collection, Alabanza: New and Selected Poems (1982-2002) was published by Norton in 2003, received the Paterson Award. An earlier collection of Espada's work, Imagine the Angels of Bread (Norton), won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Another volume, Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (Curbstone), received the Paterson Poetry Prize and a PEN/Revson Fellowship. Other awards include the Robert Creeley Award and two NEA Fellowships. Espada is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he teaches creative writing, Latino poetry, and the work of Pablo Neruda.

John Godfrey's latest books are Push the Mule (The Figures, 2001) and Private Lemonade (Adventures in Poetry, 2003). Other books include Midnight on Your Left (The Figures, 1988), Dabble (Full Court Press, 1982) and How to Give Yourself a Clean Shot (distributed nationally by The Needle Exchange).

Fadhil al-Azzawi left Iraq in 1977 and settled in Berlin where he still lives. He has edited many newspapers and magazines and founded the poetry magazine Shi’r 69. His publications include 10 volumes of poetry in Arabic and one volume in German, novels, short-story collections, criticism, and numerous works of translation from English and German. His collection In Every Well a Joseph Is Weeping was published in 1997 and in 2003, BOA Editions published Miracle Maker: Selected Poems. Translator who will read is Niloufar Talebi.

Dunya Mikhail is a teacher of Arabic and graduate student in Near East Studies, Wayne State University. She was Managing Director, Al-Mashreq Company for Press in Amman, Jordan (1995-96) and Literary Editor, The Baghdad Observer (1988-95). Her works include Bleeding of the Sea (poetry, 1986) Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea (creative writing, 1999) The Songs of Absence (poetry, 1993) Almost Music (poetry, 1997) and The War Works Hard (poetry, 2000). Translator who will read is Niloufar Talebi.

Joan Margarit Consarnau was born in Sanaüja (Segarra). Consarnau published his first collection of poetry in Spanish, Crónica, in 1975. Since then, he has lived in Sant Just Desvern, where he shares an architecture studio with Carles Buxadé. His most emblematic works are the fruit of this long collaboration: the Museum of Science and Technology of Catalonia, the Áraba Pavilion, in Vitoria, the Olympic Stadium and Ring for the 1992 Olympic Games (in collaboration with Correa-Milà), the campus of the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and the calculations and executive projects for the Temple of the Sagrada Família. Translator who will read is Idra Novey.

Elif Shafak was born in France and spent her childhood in Spain. After studying political science in Turkey, she held teaching positions in the United Kingdom, Turkey, and the United States. She now teaches women's studies at the University of Michigan. Her publications include both novels and essays, among them The Saint of Incipient Insanities, which was her first book published in English, Bit Palas, Mahrem, which won the Turkish Writers' Association Best Novel of the Year Award, and Sehrin Aynalari. She has also published reviews in The Economist, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, and The Washington Post.

This event is funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc. through a grant it has received from Verizon.