Margaux Cowden

Margaux Cowden is Visiting Assistant Professor in Women’s Studies & American Studies at Temple University, where she also serves as Coordinating Advisor of LGBT Studies. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Irvine in December 2009. She has been named an Exemplary Diversity Scholar by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity and held the James Harvey Dissertation Fellowship in Gay and Lesbian Studies at UC Irvine. She is currently working on a book manuscript that explores the relationship of early twentieth-century academic geography to mid-century theories of sexuality, with a particular focus on late modernism’s satiric literary appropriations of these quasi-scientific fields.

Karim Debbagh

Karim Debbagh is a Moroccan film producer. In 1997 he went to Germany to study Film Production at the Film Academy Baden-Wuerttemberg and in 2002 he finished his study with diploma. He worked for a few years as Line producer and Unit production manager in Germany, and returned to his hometown Tangier, in 2003. There he founded his Production Company, Kasbah-Films s.a.r.l, which produced and coproduced several international films including The Objective, Kronos, Tangerine, and The Two Lives of Daniel Shore. He started his film production career with “Paul Bowles – Halfmoon”, directed by Frieder Schlaich and Irene von Alberti and directed an exciting documentary about the American author entitled “Creating a Legend” (2007).
kasbah-films.com

Millicent Dillon

Novelist and biographer, Millicent Dillon has written a biography of Jane Bowles, A Little Original Sin, (1983, Henry Holt, currently in print with the University of California Press) and a book-length portrait of Paul Bowles, You Are Not I, (1998, University of California Press). She edited two other Bowles books: Out in the World (1995, Black Sparrow Press, now available through David Godine) and The Viking Portable Jane and Paul Bowles (1996, The Viking Press, now out of print). Her novels include Harry Gold (The Overlook Press, 2000, finalist for the PEN/Faulkner fiction award) and A Version of Love, (2003, W.W. Norton) among others. She is a past Guggenheim Fellow and has received two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities for independent research and scholarship. Five of her short stories have been given O. Henry Awards. Ms. Dillon recently completed a book-length memoir, The Absolute Elsewhere, an account of the time (1947) when she worked in Oak Ridge, Tennessee on the NEPA project, (Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft) She just completed a novel, The Evicted.

Sara Driver

Sara Driver adapted, produced and directed the film version of Paul Bowles’ short story, You are not I (1982, 48 min.). It premiered in the U.S. at Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre in New York City and was featured at many international film festivals, and museums. In their end-of-the-decade critic’s survey, Cahiers du Cinéma declared it to be one of the best films of the ‘80s. She directed the award winning feature film Sleepwalk (1986). Sara with a producing partner spent years developing and polishing a screenplay based on Jane Bowles’ novel Two Serious Ladies. She was unable to procure financing for the film and went on to direct her next feature, When Pigs Fly (1993). She also wrote and directed the short documentary, The Bowery-Spring (1994), for French television.

Driver’s other film credits include producing Jim Jarmusch’s feature films, Permanent Vacation (1979), and Stranger Than Paradise, (1984) as well as the Tom Waits music video, “It’s All Right With Me” (1990). She taught directing at New York University’s Graduate Film School (1996-98), where she received her Master of Fine Arts degree in 1982. Driver was a juror at many international film festivals, the latest one being Emir Kusturicas’ Kustendorf Film and Music Festival (2010).

For the past several years Sara has been writing and developing feature film projects, the original screenplays — Deaf, Dumb and Blonde, Gone With the Mind and They Live Among Us.

Brian T. Edwards

Brian T. Edwards is associate professor of English and comparative literature studies at Northwestern University, where he is director of graduate studies of English and co-chair of the Middle East and North African studies group. He is the author of Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express (Duke University Press, 2005), which examines American representations of the Maghreb from 1942 through 1973 – including two chapters on Paul and Jane Bowles – and Moroccan responses, including by Mohammed Mrabet. In addition to extensive scholarly publications, he has published essays in magazines and literary journals such as The Believer, McSweeney’s, A Public Space, and Foreign Policy. His essay “American Studies in Tehran” was chosen as a notable essay in the 2008 Best American Essays. In 2009, he edited a portfolio of work by the next generation of Cairo writers for the New York literary journal A Public Space (issue 9), which featured new translations of work not yet published in English. His most recent book is Globalizing American Studies, co-edited with Dilip Gaonkar, which was published in December by the University of Chicago Press.

Jimmy Fazzino

Jimmy Fazzino is a PhD candidate in Literature and a lecturer in the Writing Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is completing a dissertation on Beat writing in world contexts and has recently contributed an essay on African-American Beat surrealism to a forthcoming collection on “the transnational/global Beats” (ed. Jennie Skerl and Nancy Grace). His presentation deals with Bowles’s longstanding interest in what would today be called “world music” and how it shapes his fiction and legacy among Beat and other writers.

Irene Herrmann

Irene Herrmann, accompanist and lecturer at UCSC, is executor of the Paul Bowles music estate. She studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned degrees in both German Literature and Music. In 1993 she received a Master Degree in Performance Practice from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with an emphasis on American Vernacular Music and 20th-century piano repertoire. As an artist she has performed with the New Music Works of Santa Cruz as well as with various independent ensembles.

Since her musical acquaintance with Bowles in Tangier, in 1992, which quickly grew into a lively friendship of discussing music and the New York artistic scene in the 30s and 40s, she has been editing, disseminating, and performing his music throughout the world. Her CD of Bowles music named Paul Bowles: A Musical Portrait (Koch International Classics, 1995), includes chamber music and solo and duo piano works and features several performance premieres, including unpublished works.

These unusual and theatrical recitals often use a lecture/performance format and have been part of Bowles festivals in Berlin, Lisbon, New York City, and at the University of Delaware. In addition to performing Bowles’s music, Professor Herrmann co-edited with Timothy Mangan the book Paul Bowles on Music (2003).

Allen Hibbard

Allen Hibbard is Professor of English and Director of the Middle East Center at Middle Tennessee State University. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington in 1989. From 1985 to 1989, he taught in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the American University in Cairo, and was a Fulbright lecturer in American literature at Damascus University from 1992-94. He travels frequently to Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.

Hibbard’s research has involved a sustained exploration of the history of interactions, interpenetrations and cross-pollinations between the U.S. and the Arab world, revolving around considerations of modernism, postcolonialism, globalization, genre, transnational movement, and translation. He is particularly interested in what happens to people, ideas, and things as they move from one place to another. He has written two books on Paul Bowles (Paul Bowles: A Study of the Short Fiction, 1993, and Paul Bowles, Magic & Morocco, 2004), edited Conversations with William S Burroughs (2000), and published a collection of his own stories in Arabic. His current projects include a volume on the great modern Arabic poet Adonis, a translation (from Arabic) of Syrian writer Haidar Haidar’s novel A Banquet for Seaweed, and a biography of the fascinating, wickedly talented Jewish American writer Alfred Chester.

Timothy Mangan

Timothy Mangan has been the Orange County Register’s classical music critic since 1998 and is now also its People columnist. He is a contributor to Opera News and has written for the Los Angeles Times, the Baltimore Sun, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and Gramophone, among other publications. In 1999 he won an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for his writing on classical music. He is co-editor of Paul Bowles on Music, published by the University of California Press. He studied at the University of Southern California and the Peabody Conservatory of Music, taking degrees in trombone performance and music criticism.

Jeffrey Miller

Jeffrey Miller was born in San Francisco and educated at UC Berkeley and Harvard. He worked for a decade at the Gotham Book Mart & Gallery in New York cataloging literary archives and then began Cadmus Editions in Santa Barbara. He compiled Paul Bowles’ bibliography, Paul Bowles, A Descriptive Bibliography, for Black Sparrow Press and collected and edited Paul Bowles’ letters, In Touch, The Letters of Paul Bowles for Farrar, Straus & Giroux. In Touch was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review and was also selected as one of the 100 significant books of the year.

Cadmus published Mohamed Choukri’s Tennessee Williams in Tangier, translated by Paul Bowles, gathered and published Bowles’ short translations in She Woke Me Up So I Killed Her and published both the 2 lp recording and CDs of Paul Bowles Reads a 100 Camels in the Courtyard. Cadmus also published Allen Hibbard’s memoir and hommage, Paul Bowles, Magic & Morocco.

Photo of Jeffrey Miller and Paul Bowles by Cherie Nutting.

Tyrus Miller

Tyrus Miller is Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies and Professor of Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He is author of Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (U of California P, 1999); Singular Examples: Artistic Politics and the Neo-Avant-Garde (Northwestern UP, 2009); and Time Images: Alternative Temporalities in 20th-Century Theory, History, and Art (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009). He is editor of Given World and Time: Temporalities in Context (Central European UP, 2008) and translator / editor of György Lukács, The Culture of People’s Democracy: Hungarian Essays on Literature, Art, and Democratic Transition (Brill, 2011).

Timothy Murray

Timothy Murray is the Head of the Special Collections Department at the University of Delaware Library, which houses the largest extant collection of Paul Bowles’s books and manuscripts. He has written, taught, and lectured extensively on Paul and Jane Bowles and related authors, including Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Charles Henri Ford. He curated the first major exhibition devoted to the work of Paul Bowles, “Paul Bowles at 80” (1990) and wrote the catalog which accompanied the exhibit. He served as co-curator of the exhibition “Paul Bowles 1910-1999” (2000) and co-authored the accompanying catalog.

Francis Poole

Francis Poole is Head of the Film and Video Collection at the University of Delaware Library. He first traveled to Morocco in 1973 where he stayed with a tribe in the Rif Mountains near Ketama. He returned to Morocco in 1975 during the Green March, a move by the Moroccan government to gain sovereignty over the Spanish Sahara. In 1979 he met and became friends with Paul Bowles while teaching at the American School of Tangier. In the 1980s he lived in Portugal and taught at the Universidade de Evora and the American Language Institute in Lisbon. He co-edited with Kevin Lacey, Mirrors on the Maghrib: Critical Reflections on Paul and Jane Bowles and Other American Writers in Morocco. He has written on film for Salem Press and Dow Jones News Retrieval. His essay on Hollywood’s depiction of Moroccan Moulay Ahmed al-Raisuli in The Wind and the Lion, was published in The Arab-African and Islamic Worlds: Interdisciplinary Studies. His interview with Paul Bowles in September, 1999, shortly before Bowles died, was published in the literary journal, Five Points. His homage to Tangier’s legendary Dean’s Bar (Everybody Comes to Dean’s) was published in 2009. He has had prose published in the Village Voice and Exquisite Corpse. His poetry has appeared in the Bukowski Review, New York Quarterly, Poema Convidado, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is also the founding editor and publisher of Blades Ze Magazene.

Rodrigo Rey Rosa

Rodrigo Rey Rosa was born in Guatemala in 1958. After finishing his studies in his country, he lived in New York and later in Tangier, Morocco. Rey Rosa has translated several books by Paul Bowles into Spanish, along with the works of other authors such as Norman Lewis, Paul Léautaud, and François Augiéras. He’s also the author of several novels and short story collections, including The Beggar’s Knife, The Pelicari Project, The Good Cripple, La orilla africana, Caballeriza, and most recently, The Human Material.

Frieder Schlaich

Frieder Schlaich debuted as a director with Paul Bowles – Halbmond, which garnered him the Spielfilmpreis der deutschen Filmkritik 1995 and the Deutscher Kamerapreis 1996, whilst his Otomo, with Isaach de Bankolé and Eva Mattes, also gained several plaudits, including the Vancouver 2000: Diversity in Spirit Award. Frieder Schlaich together with Irene von Alberti founded their production company Filmgalerie 451 in 1991 to jointly and separately realise projects close to their hearts. Their latest Morocco project is Tangerine coproduced by Karim Debbagh’s Kasbah films. For its already priceless contribution to contemporary German cinema culture, Filmgalerie 451 was awarded the fittingly titled Film Culture Award Mannheim-Heidelberg 2009.

Philip Schuyler

Philip Schuyler is Associate Professor of Music at the University of Washington. A specialist in the music of North Africa and the Middle East, he has carried out extensive research in Morocco and Yemen over the past forty years. Among his publications are an ethnographic film (The Master Musicians of Jahjouka), field recordings for UNESCO and various American labels, articles in scholarly journals, and a New Yorker profile of the nuclear sculptor, James L. Acord, jr.. He previously collaborated with John R. Hall and Sylvaine Trinh on Apocalypse Observed (Routledge, 2000). He is also founder and CEO of the art-food conglomerate, Pipposterous Enterprises, LLC.

Edmund White

Edmund White has written some 25 books including novels, travel books, biographies, essays, plays and memoirs. He interviewed Paul Bowles in Tangier and has written a novel, The Married Man, that ends in Morocco, a book that was obviously inspired by The Sheltering Sky. White spent sixteen years in Paris but now lives in New York. He teaches writing at Princeton.

Rob Wilson

Rob Wilson is a western Connecticut native who was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, where he was founding editor of the Berkeley Poetry Review and received undergraduate and doctoral degrees in English and American literature. He taught for over twenty years at the University of Hawai’i in Manoa; he has been a Fulbright Professor to Korea University and Visiting Research Professor in Cultural Studies at Korea National University of the Arts as well as National Science Council Research Professor to National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. He serves as Advisory Editor to the international journals Comparative American Studies, Cultural Studies, boundary 2, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and Cultural Studies Review.

Michael Wolfe

Michael Wolfe is a poet, author, and Executive Producer at Unity Productions Foundation, a nonprofit documentary and media organization. He has owned a bookstore in Bolinas, California, operated a book bindery in Oakland, and directed a small press publishing company, Tombouctou Books. He has occasionally taught writing and literature at Phillips Exeter Academy, Phillips Andover Academy, the California State Summer School for the Arts, and at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Wolfe graduated in Classics from Wesleyan University. He was an Atlantic Monthly Younger Poet and a MacDowell Colony resident in 1968. In 1969, his work won an award of recognition from the Academy of American Poets. In 1970, he traveled to Africa on an Amy Lowell Traveling Poets Scholarship, where he remained until 1973. In 1974, he settled in Northern California. His first books of poetry How Love Gets Around and World Your Own, a book of short fiction Invisible Weapons, and a travel narrative In Morocco date from this period. In the 1980s, he returned to North Africa several more times, renewing his acquaintance with Paul Bowles, Mohammed Mrabet, and Larbi Layachi, and publishing small press volumes of their works along with other American poets and authors including Jim Carroll, Lucia Berlin, and Bill Berkson. As an author, he has published ten titles in various genres including three books of poetry, two books of travel related to the pilgrimage to Mecca, an essay collection, and other works. He has produced numerous documentary films for ABC Nightline, PBS, and National Geographic International.