Pansy Maurer-Alvarez invites Amy Hollowell, poet and Robert Hershon, publisher to the bookshop

Paris-based poets Amy Hollowell and Pansy Maurer-Alvarez are joined by Robert Hershon, poet and publisher from Brooklyn, NY.

Amy Hollowell is the author of Peneloping: Episodes in the Day of She and Giacomettrics and is a contributor to numerous publications in Europe and the United States. She has been named one of the leading English-language poets in France by The Café Review andEkleksopgrahia. Forthcoming next year is a bilingual collection of her work, translated into French by Célin Vuraler and excerpted in the chapbook Ultrasound/Ultrason. A former editor of the Paris-based review Pharos, she is also a journalist, translator, Zen Buddhist teacher and founder of the Wild Flower Zen groups in France and Portugal. Her current writing projects include a series of poems addressing the notion of “presence” in the 21^st-century “electronic age” and a Buddhist reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses. She lives in Montreuil and blogs at zenscribe.ovh.org.

Pansy Maurer-Alvarez was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in Pennsylvania. She did her literary studies at universities in the US, Spain and later in Switzerland, where she worked for a time as a teacher and translator. After moving to Paris some 20 years ago she began writing full time. Her poetry has appeared in several anthologies and numerous magazines in Austria, France, Spain, Switzerland, the UK and the US and some of her poems have been translated into French, German and Spanish. Her collections are: Dolores: The Alpine Years (1996)and When the Body Says It’s Leaving (2004) both from Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn; and Lovers Eternally Nearing (1997) a limited edition, fine press collaboration with the Swiss artist Walter Ehrismann, with German translations by Rudolf Bähler (Editions Thomas Howeg, Zurich). She is a Contributing Editor for the British magazine Tears in the Fence.

Robert Hershon was born and raised in Brooklyn. Once a copy boy for the Herald Tribune, he majored in journalism at New York University and wrote stories on the side, later turning to poetry while living in San Francisco. Back in New York, he became one of the founding editors of Hanging Loose magazine (in 1966). He is the author of 12 collections of poetry, most recently Into the Punch Line: Poems 1984-1994 (1994), The German Lunatic (2000), and Calls from the Outside World (2006). His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, the World, Michigan Quarterly, Ploughshares and The Nation, among many others. He is also the recipient of various awards including 2 NEA fellowships. He has edited several anthologies of High School writing and is a co-editor of Hanging Loose Press as well as Hanging Loose Magazine.