Please join Berks Bards in welcoming Charles Cantalupo to First Thursday.
Charles Cantalupo has
three book-length collections of poetry:
Light the Lights (Red Sea Press, 2004), Anima/l Woman and
Other Spirits (Spectacular Diseases, 1996) and The Art of Hope (Notre Dame, 1985).
His memoir, Joining Africa – From Anthills to Asmara
(Michigan State University Press, 2012), is a story of poets and poetry in
Africa and a Next Generation Indie Book Award in 2012. His website is http://joiningafrica.com. His translations include three books of poetry
from Eritrea: We Have Our Voice:
Selected Poetry of Reesom Haile (Red Sea Press, 2000), We Invented
the Wheel (Red Sea Press, 2002), and Who Needs a Story? Contemporary
Eritrean Poetry in Tigrinya, Tigre and Arabic (Hdri Publishers,
2006). His monograph, War and Peace in Contemporary Eritrean Poetry
(Mkuki na Nyota, 2009) analyzes the poetry in Who Needs a Story? He is the writer and director of the
documentary Against All Odds (African Books Collective, 2007) and a
co-author of the historic “Asmara Declaration on African Languages and
Literatures” (2000). His poetry and
essays appear in a wide range of print and online journals. He is also the author of The World of Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Ngugi wa Thiong’o: Texts and
Contexts (Africa World Press, 1995), and his first book was A Literary Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes’s Masterpiece of Language
(Bucknell University Press, 1991).
Charles Cantalupo is Distinguished Professor of English, Comparative
Literature, and African Studies at Penn State Schuylkill. He lives in Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania, one hundred yards north of the grave of the modernist poet, H.D.
(Hilda Doolittle).
