Truth to Power:
Writers Respond To The Rhetoric Of Hate And Fear

Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts announces the publication of a special collection of poetry, fiction and nonfiction, meant to address the rise in the public rhetoric of hatred and fear prompted by the 2016 presidential campaign and election.  Writers from diverse cultures, genders, ethnic backgrounds and races from all over the U.S. respond in poetry, fiction and nonfiction to social issues ranging from immigration, LGBT rights, women's rights, rights for people with disabilities, African American rights, Indigenous American Rights and Latino rights, poverty, inequality, the attack on our natural environment and more.

Doug Anderson served as a corpsman with a marine infantry battalion in Vietnam. His first book of poems, The Moon Reflected Fire, won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and his second, Blues for Unemployed Secret Police a grant from the Academy of American Poets. His memoir, Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, the Sixties and a Journey of Self-Discovery, was published by W. W.Norton in 2009. His most recent book of poems is Horse Medicine. He has taught in the MFA programs at the Pacific University of Oregon and Bennington College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts. He has won awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Massachusetts Cultural Council, Poets & Writers, The Virginia Quarterly Review and the MacDowell Colony. He has twice held a residency at Fort Juniper, the former home of the poet Robert Francis, in Amherst, MA. He is at present working on a novel about the Vietnam War.
 

Chard deNiord is the poet laureate of Vermont and author of six books of poetry, most recently Interstate, (The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) and The Double Truth (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011). He teaches English and Creative Writing at Providence College, where he is a Professor of English. His book of essays and interviews with seven senior American poets (Galway Kinnell, Donald Hall. Maxine Kumin, Jack Gilbert, Ruth Stone, Lucille Clifton, Robert Bly) titled Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs, Conversations and Reflections on 20th Century American Poets was published by Marick Press in 2011. His new book of interviews with Natasha Trethewey, Jane Hirshfield. Carolyn Forche, Martin Espada, Peter Everwine and others will appear this spring from the University of Pittsburgh Press under the title I Would Lie to You If I Could. He is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Providence College and a trustee of the Ruth Stone Trust. He lives in Westminster West, Vermont with his wife Liz.
 

Called by Sandra Cisneros “the Pablo Neruda of North American authors,” Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. His latest collection of poems from Norton is called Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016). Other books of poems include The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), Alabanza (2003), Imagine the Angels of Bread(1996), and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (1990). He has received the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The title poem of his collection, Alabanza, about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. His book of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona, and has been issued in a new edition by Curbstone/Northwestern University Press. A former tenant lawyer, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
 

Howie Faerstein’s full-length book of poetry, Dreaming of the Rain in Brooklyn, was published by Press 53. About it, Martin Espada said: “In the voice of Howard Faerstein we hear the voice of Whitman—the original Brooklyn poet—and the voice of Ginsberg, but above all the voice of experience. Faerstein has seen it all, and these poems are the stuff of life itself.”  Howie’s second book, Googootz and Other Poems, is forthcoming from Press 53. His work can be found in numerous journals, including Great River Review, Nimrod, Cutthroat, upstreet, Rattle, Off the Coast, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Mudfish, and on-line in Gris-Gris, The Pedestal, and Connotation Press. Howie is Assistant Poetry Editor at Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts and lives in Florence, MA.

Leslie McGrath's poems have been published widely. She teaches creative writing at Central CT State University. Her third book, Feminists Are Passing From Our Lives, will be published in spring 2018.

Lauren Marie Schmidt is the author of four books. Her new collection of poems from Curbstone/Northwestern University Press is called Filthy Labors. Of this book, Sam Hamill says: “No one, I believe, has written with such delicate honesty and compassion about shelters for homeless (often abused) women…The range of her vision is exquisite, and the unity of the work is inspiring.” Other collections include The Voodoo Doll Parade (2011), Psalms of the Dining Room(2011), and Two Black Eyes and a Patch of Hair Missing (2013). Her work has appeared in such journals as The Progressive, North American Review, New York Quarterly, and Rattle. Her awards include the Vilcek Prize for Poetry from the Bellevue Literary Review, the So to Speak Poetry Prize and the Neil Postman Prize for Metaphor.  She received her MFA from Antioch University, served as a Poet in the Schools in Paterson, New Jersey, and now teaches English at Bay State Academy in Springfield, Massachusetts.