Bucknell University Press

Edimus quod nobis libet.

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Continued praise for Magical Realism and the History of Emotions in Latin America by Jerónimo Arellano

Jerónimo Arellano’s book, Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America, continues to receive high accolades. Read on for praise of the recent Bucknell Press publication.

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Iconoclastic in spirit, Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America is the first study of affect and emotion in magical realist literature. Against the grain of a vast body of scholarship, it argues that magical realism is neither exotic commodity nor postcolonial resistance, but an art form fueled by a search for spaces of wonder in a disenchanted world. Linking the rise and fall of magical realism and kindred narrative forms to the shifting value of wonder as an emotional experience, Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions proposes a radical new approach to canonical novels such as One Hundred Years of Solitude. Received as “one of the most convincing manifestations of the ‘turn to affect’ in contemporary Latin American critical thought,” Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions draws on affect theory, the history of emotions, and new materialism to reframe key questions in Latin American literature and culture.

Click here to purchase Magical Realism and the History of Emotions in Latin America.

REVIEWS

“Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America makes a valuable contribution to a crowded area of research by approaching magical realism through affect studies, the history of the emotions, and new materialist studies. Impeccably researched in all areas of expertise, [it] is a sophisticated study that models the kinds of innovative readings that new emotions-based and object-oriented theories may facilitate in Latin American literary and cultural studies.”—Modern Language Quarterly

“Una de las más convincentes demostraciones de la productividad del llamdo ‘giro afectivo’ en el pensamiento crítico latinoamericano contemporáneo. Un acercamiento pionero a la maravilla en el marco de la cuestión del afecto y las emociones en la historia de América Latina.”—Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana

“This is an excellent scholarly contribution that does not limit itself to regional contexts and instead traces transcultural and transnational connections in the study and reevaluation of the Latin American chronicle and magical realist narratives. . . .Essential.”—Choice

“An erudite, thought-provoking, and intellectually-probing volume. Jerónimo Arellano succeeded in bringing to the fore the theory of affect to the cultural history of Latin America and, in doing so, shed new light on both canonical and less canonical works from different times. It is a contribution to Latin American studies meant to last.”—Revista de Estudios Hispánicos

“The innovative interdisciplinary approach . . . offers a significant contribution to the studies of affectivity in Latin American and cultural studies.”—The Latin Americanist

“This study sheds a novel light on an already extensively researched topic. The argument is daring, subtle and remains engaging throughout the book.”—Forum for Modern Language Studies

“How do we experience wonder? Have people always felt wonder in the same way? How has the way we write about wonder changed over time? These questions lie at the heart of Jerónimo Arellano’s Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America, which examines expressions of wonder in Spanish colonial writings and in Latin American magical realism. . . . Arellano rejuvenates the field by interpreting canonical texts through the critical lens of affect studies.”—Transmodernity

“A very well researched study . . . contributing to the current critical re-examination and re-assessment of magical realism”—Bulletin of Latin American Research

“La alta calidad teórica y la profundidad de las reflexiones, además de la acertada combinación de la historia de las emociones con los estudios de los afectos, hacen de este libro una aportación significante para los estudios culturales y una aplicación inteligente del estudio de los sentimientos a un ámbito interdisciplinario.”—Iberoamericana

“Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America successfully directs the insights of the affective turn in the humanities towards magical realism and Latin America. This changes the game as far as our thinking about magical realism is concerned.”—Christopher Warnes, University of Cambridge

“Arellano’s brilliant study recasts the genealogy of the marvelous ordinary in Latin American literature. It provides a fresh, new look at a seemingly overanalyzed literary mode, Magical Realism, by contextualizing it with contemporary theories of affect, the cultural history of wonder, the sociality of emotions, as well as the changing structures of feeling and material practices. This book reveals a new history of wonder from the margins of the colonial/modern world-system, by revisiting the historical relationship—in both temporal and spatial terms—among magical realist narratives’ expression of wonder and those of the early modern Wunderkammer (cabinet of wonder) and the chronicles of the New World.”—Ignacio López-Calvo, University of California, Merced

“Jerónimo Arellano’s refreshing study is a subtle, thoughtful, and stimulating reassessment of Latin American literary history. Using notions of both affectivity and emotion, Arellano sheds new light on the wonder discourse of the ‘New World’ and comprehensively punctures and problematizes the common assumption that modern Magical Realist writing is essentially rooted in traditional versions of such a discourse.”—Philip Swanson, Hughes Professor of Spanish, University of Sheffield, UK

About the author:

Jerónimo Arellano is assistant professor of Latin American literature and culture at Brandeis University.

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University Press Week Day 4

#ReadUP on these 10 noteworthy Bucknell UP titles published in the last 10 years

Fire on the Water: Sailors, Slaves, and Insurrection in Early American Literature, 1789-1886

By Lenora Warren

“Readers will find Fire on the Water an important contribution to the study of slavery and abolitionism. Moreover, this book also makes major contributions to Black Atlantic studies and to maritime and oceanic studies at large. Scholars working in these fields will find Warren’s book essential reading. They will also find the book’s clarity and concision impressive. Fire on the Water will teach well in both the undergraduate and graduate classrooms.”

 —ALH Online Review

Testimony: Found Poems from the Special Court for Sierra Leone

By Shanee Stepakoff

“The poems in this collection stand as monument to remembrance and commemoration, a stay against oblivion for the people of Sierra Leone whose lives were marked by the civil conflict of 1991-2002. They are a significant contribution to the literature of that country and of conflict.”

 —Aminatta Forna, author of Happiness

Toni Morrison: Forty Years in The Clearing

Edited by Carmen R. Gillespie

“Gathering a tapestry of disparate materials, including reviews, letters, interviews, drama, critical essays, memoirs, and photos, Gillespie constructs a rich critical narrative of Morrison’s works.”

—The Journal of African American History

Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century

By Manu Samriti Chander

“Brown Romantics challenges readers to rethink the play of race, religion, class, and nation across the nineteenth-century globe. Chander adroitly critiques the disabling rhetoric of nationalism as it confronts the democratic ideals undergirding each of the three poets he studies.”

 —Victorian Studies

Indiscreet Fantasies: Iberian Queer Cinema

Edited by Andrés Lema-Hincapié and Conxita Domènech

“The editors of Indiscreet Fantasies have compiled a significant collection of essays that will be of interest to film scholars because they analyze cinema that sheds a new light on the representations of Iberian cultures and identities.”

—Isabel Estrada, author of El documental cinematográfico y televisivo contemporáneo

Confronting Our Canons: Spanish and Latin American Studies in the 21st Century

By Joan L. Brown

“The balance of theory and data analysis provides a comprehensive view of the topic and, although examples are gleaned from Spanish and Latin American literature, Brown’s observations and recommendations are accessible, and pertinent, to other fields.”

—Hispania

The Dark Eclipse: Reflections on Suicide and Absence

By A.W. Barnes

“The story Barnes weaves in this memoir—a story of suicidal desires and success, of what drives siblings apart and could, at turns, bring them back together—is a lyric noir of family instability, personal revelation, and queer inheritance both genealogical and literary….Our job, as Barnes beautifully demonstrates here, is to take the ashes of our lives—not only our lived lives, but our lives as readers, too—and sculpt them into a new art.”


—Lambda Literary

The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century

Edited by Chris Mounsey

“With respect to organization, Mounsey (Univ. of Winchester, UK) introduces a unique concept—to disability studies in general and certainly to 18th-century studies. The ten essays appear in three categories: “Methodological,” essays examining how disability is understood and represented by significant thinkers (1663 and 1788); “Conceptual,” essays looking at and problematizing representation of disability in literary works; and “Experiential,” essays examining how disability is represented by those who experienced it and left written records of their suffering. A few essays feature canonical figures (e.g., Margaret Cavendish, John Locke, Laurence Sterne), but most introduce overlooked, unknown texts, a result of impressive archival research. In this respect and others, the collection bridges disability studies and cultural studies. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students and researchers/faculty.”

—CHOICE

Faust: A Tragedy, Part I

Translated by Eugene Stelzig

“This exciting new translation of Goethe’s Faust brings the text to life for a contemporary audience. Stelzig’s ‘flexible’ approach to poetic translation is eminently successful: the complexity of the text is allowed to emerge without completely sacrificing its poetry. I highly recommend it—especially for the classroom and first-time English readers of Faust.”

—Astrida Tantillo, University of Illinois at Chicago

Woven Shades of Green: An Anthology of Irish Nature Literature

Edited by Tim Wenzell

“Readers familiar with Irish literature and ecocriticism will find this volume filled with familiar faces and materials, as well as a few more obscure and exciting ones. This anthology offers scholars a series of substantial pieces from which to expand and further consider Irish nature writing and Irish approaches to the natural world.”

—Irish Studies Review

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University Press Week Day 3

Bucknell UP’s partnership with Rutgers UP a way for small presses to #KeepUP with the times

Like many citizens of the UP community, Bucknell University Press proudly participates in several collaborative relationships on and off our beautiful Lewisburg, Pennsylvania campus. Locally, we copublish a book series with Bucknell’s Griot Institute for the Study of Black Lives and Cultures, celebrating the art, culture, and history of African America and the African diaspora through textbooks, poetry, fiction in translation, and groundbreaking scholarship. Further afield we partner with the Goethe Society of North America on the New Studies in the Age of Goethe book series, and with the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society on their book series, Studies in Eighteenth Century Scotland. We also team with Bucknell’s Bertrand Library to make our new books fully and freely available to the Bucknell campus community through our institutional repository.

But perhaps our most significant collaboration is with a fellow AUPresses member.

In 2017, Bucknell University Press’s then-director Greg Clingham made the vital decision to dissolve BUP’s relationship with commercial academic publisher Rowman & Littlefield in favor of a new partnership with Rutgers University Press for the production, promotion, sale, and distribution of our books and journals. At a time when economies of scale are so critical, particularly to smaller, underresourced publishers trying to do business in the age of powerful conglomerates, partnering with a like-minded, mission-driven university press has brought measurable advantages.

Beginning in the fall of 2018, new Bucknell University Press book projects became fully integrated with the Rutgers University Press workflow from manuscript transmittal to bound book and beyond. Bucknell University Press authors and editors now benefit from the experience of Rutgers UP’s project editors, publicists, designers, and marketing staff, as well as its business relationships with printers, foreign sales agents, and the Chicago Distribution Center. Through Rutgers, Bucknell University Press, which publishes about 20 new books annually, has been able to professionalize its own in-house systems through access to Firebrand’s Title Management bibliographic database, and can retrieve and track granular sales data 24/7 at the touch of a button through the CDC.

Most meaningfully—particularly to our authors!—this partnership allows Bucknell University Press to bring out its books simultaneously in affordably-priced paperback, cloth, and multiple eBook editions for a range of readers. This materially supports our mission to disseminate new scholarship as broadly and accessibly as possible.

Notably, this innovative partnership frees Bucknell University—a small, liberal arts college for which a fifty-year-old university press might seem a luxury—from many of the typical overhead costs (think printing, binding, warehousing, shipping); instead, we can focus efforts and resources on signing and developing exceptional books in the humanities and expanding our editorial list thoughtfully over time.

This collegial relationship has also been a synergistic one. Rutgers University Press director Micah Kleit offers, “We are proud to be Bucknell’s publishing partner. BUP’s books are of the highest scholarly quality, and have added luster to our own list, allowing us to keep company with each other in significant ways, through conferences, domestic and international sales, and through heightened awareness of our programs. Our books speak to each other, and in so doing have made both presses stronger.”

Rutgers UP editorial director Kim Guinta suggests that for the larger press, such a partnership “extends what we can offer our authors—Rutgers’ Latin American studies list tends toward the social sciences, for example, but I can suggest that people with Latin American projects in the humanities talk to Bucknell, thus increasing your pipeline but also highlighting our usefulness to authors.”

She remarks further about the collaboration that, “It’s fun. I’ve enjoyed getting to know the BUP staff, and our willingness to work together and figure out solutions to problems makes us all more connected to the UP world. I really enjoy the camaraderie and the feeling of team-building involved.

“The partnership has also given me a better appreciation for the hurdles small presses face. I think that the way we’re working can relieve some of that pressure of having to go it alone or be taken advantage of. We hope the partnership makes BUP feel instead part of a supportive web of university press publishing.”

It does indeed. Ours is not the only big press/little press collaboration in the UP universe, certainly. That such partnerships among AUPresses members are becoming more common may speak in part to the need for mission-driven university presses to distinguish themselves from commercial academic publishers by—among other things—strategically aligning with their peers. Three years into the Bucknell-Rutgers partnership seems a fitting time to take stock of this successful and mutually beneficial initiative, and to highlight it as a financial and organizational model—at once practical and congenial—that could help to ensure the sustainability of very small presses into the future.

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University Press Week Day 2

Bucknell UP welcomed these 10 developments over the past 10 years, making it a force to #KeepUP with.

Since 2012, Bucknell University Press…

1. Celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2018.

2. Became a full member of the Association of University Presses (AUPresses) in 2020.

3. Saw the retirement of its longtime director, Greg Clingham, at the end of 2018 after 22 years of service to the Press.

4. Welcomed, in 2019, Suzanne Guiod as its first fulltime, non-faculty director.

5. In 2018, entered into a new distribution partnership with Rutgers University Press.

6. Began to release all new books simultaneously in paperback, cloth, and ebook formats as a result of its new arrangement with RUP.

7. Made all new publications since 2018 available free of charge to Bucknell students, faculty, and staff via Bucknell’s Digital Commons.

8. Saw the creation of two new book series, Scènes francophones: Studies in French and Francophone Theater (edited by Logan Connors) and Campos Ibéricos: Bucknell Studies in Iberian Literatures and Cultures (edited by Jason McCloskey and Isabel Cuñado).

9. Took over the publication of two long-running annuals, 1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiry in the Early Modern Era (edited by Kevin L. Cope) and The Age of Johnson (edited by Jack Lynch & J. T. Scanlan), both in their 24th year.

10. Upgraded its office space in 2018 when it moved from the basement of Taylor Hall, the oldest building on campus, to the top floor of the newly-renovated and named Hildreth-Mirza Humanities Center.

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University Press Week Day 1: Guest blogger Manu Chander

To kick off the 10th annual University Press Week (UP Week) celebration, we invited author Manu Samriti Chander to share his thoughts on publishing with university presses and why they matter. Professor Chander’s first book, Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century, published by Bucknell UP in 2017, calls for the academy in general and scholars of European Romanticism to acknowledge the extensive international impact of Romantic poetry. Reviewers agree, proclaiming it “the kind of book that Romantic literary studies has needed for a very long time”[1] and declaring, “[t]here’s no doubt that it will be looked back upon as a landmark work in Romantic studies.”[2]

“‘Leo’s’ poems have not even the thinnest guise of poetry. They illustrate a strain of trite, and often silly reflection, and a sentiment of ‘goodiness’ that is nauseating.” That was one London reviewer’s assessment of a poetry collection called Leo’s Poetical Works, which was published in 1883. The author in question, “Leo,” was an Afro-Guianese poet and essayist whose birth name was Egbert Martin. The review, which appeared in the Saturday Review on May 3, 1884, made its way across the Atlantic and back to Martin, who, understandably, took offense, writing in the preface to his second collection, Leo’s Local Lyrics, “Some…held that my book of poems published in 1883 contained too much ‘goody-goodiness,’ and I must confess that I have deliberately searched through at least two dictionaries without being able to discover such a word.” In a world in which an English reviewer’s opinion would always trump that of a Black colonial subject, Martin nevertheless found a way to express his frustration with the imperial order of things.

I learned of Martin’s poetry while conducting research for my first book, Brown Romantics, which looked at the way that colonial writers in the nineteenth century struggled to be considered as what Emerson (whom Martin had read and admired) called a “representative man”: “a monarch who gives a constitution to his people; a pontiff who preaches the equality of souls and releases his servants from their barbarous homages; an emperor who can spare his empire.” Or, in the case of the Brown Romantics, a poet capable of unifying diverse readers into a coherent whole. Martin, along with such figures as Henry Derozio in India and Henry Lawson in Australia, saw poetry as a means of community-building, a way of forging connections among peoples through the shared experience of reading. My book sought to recognize these figures in a way that reviewers from centers of literary power rarely did. 

Shortly after the publication of Brown Romantics, as I was preparing an edition of Martin’s collected works, I visited Le Repentir Cemetery in Georgetown, Guyana, where, I knew from my research, Martin was buried. When I arrived at the cemetery office I was met by a woman who had never heard of the poet. She asked me to write down his information, name and date of death: “Egbert Martin,” I wrote, “June 24, 1890.” Just wait, she told me, and she headed to a back room, returning after several minutes with a large log book. When she found the page for June 1890, my heart sped up, and it continued to race as she ran her finger down the yellowed page. It landed on Martin’s name, penciled in neat cursive. Age: 29. Nation: Demerara. The log indicated where he was buried by division (New General), space number (30), and grave number (108). I asked if I could visit the spot, and I was told it’s a “mud grave,” no marker, nothing to see.

“Pecuniary success,” wrote Martin in the preface to Leo’s Poetical Works, “is…outside the Author’s anticipations; and fame, the idol of so many, for him has so little attraction that he cares not so much as to couple his name with his works.” And yet, we know from his response to his London critic, he was not without pride. I wonder what it might have meant to him to know that, over a one-hundred twenty years later, someone would see in his poetry something more than “trite” and “silly” “goodiness.” I wonder what it might have meant to him, as he labored daily over his verse, a “confirmed invalid,” as one British Guianese newspaper described him, largely confined to his home at 317 East Street in Georgetown (this, at least, is the address listed in an issue of the London periodical Truth on January 6, 1887)–I wonder what it might have meant for him to know that someone would one day see in the poems he wrote a serious contribution to that literary movement we call “Romanticism,” worthy of collecting and making available to readers across the globe.

Poetry is not as popular as it was in Martin’s time (although it is making a bit of a comeback). It is not regularly published in daily newspapers for readers to peruse casually as they get caught up on the events of the day. Nor is the study of poetry the stuff of popular books, not usually at least. It is largely sustained by scholars and, importantly, publishers who see value in poetic labor, both the labor of producing poetry and that of thinking through poetry in prose. Beyond–to recall Martin’s phrase–“pecuniary success,” we believe that something is gained, that the world is somehow better when we reserve a space for the analysis of line breaks and metrical substitutions, textual variations and publication histories. Perhaps that belief makes us Romantics, as well. If so–if we who publish with and work for university presses are inheritors of certain Romantic commitments–we have figures such as Martin to thank for sustaining these commitments, and for reminding us to sustain them as well.

Manu Samriti Chander is an associate professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark and the author of Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century (Bucknell UP, 2017). He is currently editing The Collected Works of Egbert Martin (Oxford UP) and The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and Race (Cambridge UP) and writing a second monograph, Browntology, under contract with SUNY Press.

[1] “Manu Samriti Chander’s Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century is the kind of book that Romantic literary studies has needed for a very long time. Brown Romantics examines how and why poets from India, Guyana, and Australia placed themselves into conversation with authors now commonly associated with British Romanticism. The book significantly expands our understanding of canonical Romanticism’s transnational reach and revises critical commonplaces that have defined Romantic aesthetics since the nineteenth century.”
— Papers on Language and Literature

[2] “This book has already provided a focal point for a new direction in Romantic studies, as emerging research clusters around its central claims. There’s no doubt that it will be looked back upon as a landmark work in Romantic studies.”
— Romantic Circles

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Celebrating International Translation Day

Did you know?

The UN’s recently established International Translation Day celebrates the work of language professionals who translate academic and technical works, highlighting their contributions to a global effort to foster inclusivity and togetherness. Language professionals’ hard work and attention to detail is crucial to dissolving language barriers that might otherwise hinder the struggle for world peace and international security.

On May 24th, 2017, the United Nations General Assembly declared September 30th as International Translation Day under resolution 71/288. It chose September 30th as International Translation Day because September 30th traditionally observes the feast of Italian priest St. Jerome. St. Jerome is renowned for using Greek manuscripts of the New Testament to translate much of the Bible into Latin.

Since 2005, the UN has annually invited all of its staff, acclaimed permanent missions staff, and students from partner universities to enter its UN St. Jerome Translation Contest, which “rewards the best translations in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish,” and German. You may find the 2020 winners here. Here at the Bucknell University Press, however, we decided to do something a little different this year. Below, we highlight some of the most recent translated books we published and their translators as tribute to the language professionals’ diligence and intellect.

Mikhail Bakhtin: The Duvakin Interviews, 1973

Edited by Slav N. Gretchev and Margarita Marinova
Translated by Margarita Marinova

In August 2019, Bucknell University Press published the first English translation of twelve hours of transcripts of the interviews Mikhail Bakhtin conducted in Russian of Victor Duvakin 1973. Marinova’s work now allows English readers insight into Russian culture and Bakhtin’s perspective on Western art and thought.

Dr. Marinova is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. She is a translator and the author of Transnational Russian-American Travel Writing.

Beginning and End of the Snow: Début et Fin de la Neige

By Yves Bonnefoy
Translated by Emily Grosholz

Yves Bonnefoy’s book of poems, Beginning and End of the Snow followed by Where the Arrow Falls, combines two meditations in philosophy and religion in which the poet’s thoughts and a landscape reflect each other. Criticism and Reference notes that one reads Grosholz’s work “without the least twinge of regret for what might be lost in translation.”

She is a Liberal Arts Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University, and a member of the research group REHELS / SPHERE at the University of Paris Denis Diderot. Additionally, she has written and published six books of poetry (including Leaves / Feuilles with Farhad Ostovani) and works as an advisory editor for the Hudson Review.

Don’t Whisper Too Much and Portrait of a Young Artiste from Bona Mbella

By Frieda Ekotto
Translated by Corine Tachtiris

Don’t Whisper Too Much  and  Bona Mbella  present love stories between African women in a positive light. In presenting the emotional and romantic lives of gay African women, Ekotto addresses how female sexuality is often marked by violence, and yet is also a place for emotional connection, pleasure and agency. The late Carmen Gillespie described Tachtiris’ translation of Ekotto’s work as “a landmark addition to the canon of Afro-Francophone literature in translation.”

Corine Tachtiris translates literature primarily by contemporary women authors from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Czech Republic. She holds an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa and a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Michigan. Dr. Tachtiris teaches world literature and translation theory and practice.

Two Women

By Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda
Translated by Barbara F. Ichiishi

The first openly feminist novel published in Spanish, Two Women  tells the riveting tale of a tumultuous love triangle among a brilliant, young, widowed countess, her inexperienced lover, and his pure and virtuous wife. This first English translation captures the lyrical romanticism of the novel’s prose and includes a scholarly introduction to the author and her work.

Ichiishi is the author of The Apple of Earthly Love: Female Development in Esther Tusquets’ Fiction, and the translator of many of Tusquets’ major works. She has written articles on Spanish and Latin American women’s literature, and co-translated Edouard Glissant’s historical drama Monsieur Toussaint.

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National Poetry Month with Shanee Stepakoff

To wrap up National Poetry Month, we spoke with Bucknell author Shanee Stepakoff about poetry, publishing, and her forthcoming collection, Testimony: Found Poems from the Special Court for Sierra Leone. A remarkable collection of found poetry, Testimony is derived from public testimonies at a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Freetown and aims to breathe new life into the records of Sierra Leone’s civil war, delicately extracting heartbreaking human stories from the morass of legal jargon. By rendering selected trial transcripts in poetic form, Stepakoff finds a novel way to communicate not only the suffering of Sierra Leone’s people, but also their courage, dignity, and resilience.

As a psychologist and human rights activist, why did you turn to poetry to tell the stories of Sierra Leone? What does the found poetry form offer this difficult work of sharing the testimonies of trauma survivors?

I had lived and worked in the region for several years and was aware that many truths about the civil war of 1991-2002 were not reaching an international audience because most readers from outside of the West African sub-region were not inclined to spend hours poring through lengthy books in subjects such as global history or political science. 

I felt that a collection of poems would be a way to reach people who might otherwise not take an interest in the human impact of a war in a faraway country. In addition, the courtroom procedures and legal jargon that characterized the war crimes trials made it hard to hear the voices of the survivors who had come to testify. Distilling the lengthy trial transcripts into poetic form made it possible to listen to the narratives with greater attentiveness. I was also drawn to poetry as way to sort through my own vicarious traumatization. Of course, my effort to wrestle with the accounts of wartime atrocities was not nearly as arduous as those who were directly targeted, but nevertheless the process of composing poems provided me with a means of structuralizing reports that might otherwise have been overwhelming.  

In the introduction to Testimony, you write that “The survivor must not merely speak but rather must address other people—specifically, those who are not only willing but determined to hear and to know. This is the broader, deeper meaning of testimony. To bear witness does not necessarily imply participating in a legal or juridical proceeding. To bear witness implies the existence of a speaker, a committed listener, and a language.” How might poetry help us become better, more committed listeners?

A poem is a form of expression that arises when a deep chord is struck within the literary artist and ordinary language no longer suffices. A new way of speaking was required, one with greater-than-usual potency. Readers sense that the poem arose from this deep place, and this piques their attention. A poem communicates about a human experience in a highly concentrated manner, thereby fostering recognition of previously-undiscerned realities. Poems tend to move people at the emotional level, not just the cognitive level. Usually a poem is more memorable than other literary genres, because a strong poem has precise phrases and images that leave an imprint in the mind of the reader. Poems can bypass the defenses that many people mobilize when confronted with evidence of human rights abuses because most poems have auditory and rhythmical properties that are paradoxically soothing even when the subject matter is painful. Literary devices such as assonance, alliteration, near-rhyme, and the right combinations of variation and repetition intensify our willingness to bear witness to harsh truths in a sustained manner without flinching. 

Could you speak to the process of editing and publishing a first poetry collection?

I used a nontraditional approach, transforming prose transcripts into poetic structure, and the material was troubling in that it focused on a devastating war. Therefore, I was uncertain about whether any publisher would be open-minded enough to agree to even read the work, let alone commit to bringing it forth. I was extraordinarily lucky to have reached out to Carmen Gillespie, founding editor of the Griot Book Project Series, to ask if she would consider this collection. In 2019 she read some of the poems, then the manuscript, and committed to sending it out for review. She unexpectedly passed away amidst that process, and it seemed like the project might stall, but then Suzanne Guiod, editor-in-chief of Bucknell University Press, generously stepped in to carry it forward. I was given amazing support from a team of professionals, comprising Suzanne as well as two anonymous reviewers, Bucknell’s managing editor, the cover artist, the foreword writer, and later the copyeditor and production editors, with each person contributing their particular expertise. I am humbled and honored by their dedication and conscientiousness.

Who are other poets and writers you look to for inspiration or enjoyment? Who are you reading the most at the moment?

The “Further Resources” section in my book contains a list of writers from Sierra Leone and one from Liberia whose work highlights the wellsprings of creativity and resilience present in the region. For more than thirty years I have used poems in anti-racism training because they have a greater impact than any other genre. I’ve used Claudia Rankine’s 2014 collection, Citizen, which focuses on the insidious ways that anti-Black racism operates in day-to-day life in the US. I’ve also used a poem from Natasha Trethewey’s 2018 collection Monument, which portrays a childhood experience of racist terror. Yusuf Komunyakaa’s poems on the Vietnam War shed light on the legacy of war. Carolyn Forché’s 1981 collection The Country Between Us, about political repression and war in El Salvador, had a strong impact on me in my youth. More recently I read her 2019 memoir, What You Have Heard Is True, which explores the impact that her exposure to human rights abuses in El Salvador had on her writing. I am inspired by Brenda Hillman’s recent poems incorporating elements of found texts to give expression to grief and anger about militarism and hinting at possibilities for resistance. Aminatta Forna’s 2002 memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water, tracing her search for the truth about the politically motivated execution of her dissident father by a corrupt dictatorial regime in Sierra Leone, and her four novels and forthcoming essay collection, inspire me not only because of her literary gifts but also because of her psychological and moral courage and her recognition that sometimes remembrance is the only redemption.

Shanee Stepakoff is a psychologist and human rights advocate whose research on the traumatic aftermath of war has appeared in such journals as Peace and Conflict and The International Journal of Transitional Justice. She holds an MFA from The New School and is completing a PhD in English at the University of Rhode Island.