Christopher Carlisle is a professor & the Episcopal chaplain at the University of Massachusetts.   He created the popular course BELIEF, which explores the interdisciplinary study of religion & science in the 21st century, & is the co-founder of The God & Science Project, which brings together scientists & others to explore the common ground between science & religion.   (2007)

We’re pleased to announce the publication of a new volume of essays in honor of the recently retired University of Massachusetts philosophy professor Vere Chappell.   Edited by Paul Hoffmann, David Owen & Gideon Yaffe, Contemporary Perspectives on Early Modern Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Vere Chappell is a collection of essays dedicated to Chappell, one of the most respected scholars in the field of early modern philosophy.   Seventeen distinguished scholars have contributed essays to this collection on topics including dualism, identity & essence, causation, theodicy, free will, perception, abstraction, & the moral law.   Contributors include University of Massachusetts professor Gary Matthews, as well as Lisa Shapiro, Nicholas Jolley, Martha Brandt Bolton, Margaret Atherton, Stephen Voss, & Paul Guyer. (2008)

Dan Chelotti has a new chapbook, The Eights, which won the Poetry of Society of America’s Chapbook prize for 2006.   His poems have appeared in the Boston Review, Tarpaulin Sky, Mary, Kulture Vulture & other journals.   He holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, where he spent three years working as an Assistant Managing Editor for Verse Press.   In the summer of 2006, he received a fellowship from the Slovenian Arts Council to live, write & translate in Ljubljana for one month.   He teaches at the University of Masschusetts.   (2007)

Anne Ciecko, professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts, has a new book: Contemporary Asian Cinema: Popular Culture in a Global Frame.   Each chapter in the book—which ranges across the Asian cinematic landscape—describes the cultural aspects of popular film production, analyzing key films in the context of the national, the regional & the global.   Topics covered include: film theory & Asian cinema, popular film genres, major industry figures, the “art film”, connections between the state & commercial interests, cultural policies, representations of national identity, trends in international co–production, transnational & diasporic dimensions of Asian filmmaking & viewing, the politics of language choice, the impact of emerging technologies on filmmaking practice, & modes of exhibition.   (2006)

Amherst resident & professor of Russian at Amherst College Catherine Ciepiela has a new book due to be published in September 2006—The Same Solitude: Boris Pasternak & Marina Tsvetaeva.   Honor Moore wrote, “Married to others & barely meeting in their temporal lives, Boris Pasternak & Marina Tsvetaeva, two of Modernism’s great poets of desire, carried on in poems & letters an enduring & passionate love affair.   One stayed in Russia, committed for a while to the Revolution; the other emigrated to Paris then returned.   One was a survivor, the other, eventually, a suicide.   Disentangling the correspondences encrypted in their poems, Catherine Ciepiela achieves a remarkable & moving work of criticism & biography that illuminates a crucial relationship in twentieth-century literary history.”   Ciepiela is also co-editor of At the Stray Dog Cabaret: A Book of Russian Poems.   (2006)

Amherst’s own Eva Claeson has just published To Catch Life Anew: 10 Swedish Women Poets.   It features work by Sonia Åkesson, Kristina Lugn, Barbro Dahlin, Margareta Ekström, Johanna Ekström, Elisabet Hermodsson, Katarina Frostenson, Eva Ström, Marie Lundquist, & Elisabeth Rynell.   Claeson is translator of many books from the Swedish, including The Serious Game by Hjalmar Söderberg & Reflections on Nature in a Stockholm Park: A Diary by Margareta Ekström.   (2007)

University of Massachusetts English professor John Clayton is author of two new books, a collection of short stories, Wrestling with Angels: New & Collected Stories, & a novel (for which, see below).   Since publishing his first collection in the eighties, Clayton has, as Fredrick Busch observes, continued to write “powerful stories of urban life in America, of life often enough among Jews who carry their exile & their wilderness within them.   The prose is powerful, an impressive mixture of sinuous sentences—which one reads as if one overhears thoughts.   All of these characters are bruised.   They are often enough triumphant, though, even if locked into mortal flesh, because they have an astonishing belief in the spirit.”   (2007)

John Clayton (see above), has a new novel, Kuperman’s Fire.   From the jacket copy: “Hi-tech entrepreneur Michael Kuperman discovers the illegal sale of chemical weapons abroad by a powerful American corporation.   What does he do with this knowledge?   Ultimately, the Kuperman family must flee Boston & hide their identity.   Dealing with danger changes their life as a family.   This is a novel about family.   The many ways of being Jews in contemporary American society play themselves out in the tensions within Michael’s family, a family at the edge of divorce.   Kuperman struggles with his complex heritage as a Jew.   He’d like to hide in a sentimental version of his heritage, but becomes aware of its many real strands, including a passion for justice as well as religious faith.” (2007)

Conway resident, John Crowley, is author of many books, inlcuding the highly-acclaimed Aegypt series: Ægypt, Love & Sleep, Dæmonomania.   The fourth, & last, in the series, Endless Things: A Book of Æ is out, & will be followed by new editions of the long out-of-print earlier volumes, beginning this Fall, with The Solitudes: Ægypt: Book One   The Ægypt series, & Little, Big (which Harold Bloom said was one of the five best novels written by a living writer), were cited when Crowley received the prestigious American Academy of Arts & Letters Award for Literature.   (2007)

Conway resident, John Crowley, author of The Translator; Little, Big; Engine Summer; & Aegypt, among others, has a new book—Lord Byron‘s Novel: The Evening Land.   Crowley's novel intertwines the search for Byron's novel after documents discovered in a rotting old trunk in an English storage room prove that the manuscript of a novel by Byron once existed, & that it was saved from destruction, read, & annotated by Byron's daughter, Ada, Countess of Lovelace,—with the novel itself.   (2005; paper, 2006)