Poet Mohammed al Ajami released from Qatar prison

After more than four years in prison, Qatari poet Mohammed al Ajami has been pardoned and released. The poem that got him imprisoned wasn’t even published. Someone filmed al Ajami reciting a poem at a private gathering at his home and then posted the footage online, where it was picked up by Qatari authorities. The…

Review: “Frantz Fanon – The Militant Philosopher of Third Word Revolution” – by Leo Zeilig

Jean-Paul Sartre described Che Guevara as “the most complete man of our time.” Like Martin Luther King, Guevara was martyred by the forces of conservatism at the age of thirty-nine. But before Guevara there was Fanon. Frantz Fanon was a revolutionary. A protean figure and a qualified doctor, he combined his interests in psychiatry, philosophy,…

Ted Hughes Biographer Gets Mauled by Reviewer

Talk about red in tooth and claw. Even Ted Hughes, the great nature poet who wrote without an ounce of sentimentality about those wild things out there, might have winced at the mauling dished out to his biographer in February’s The New York Review of Books.                 American…

Prizes and kudos

Several author friends have recently won awards for books I’ve either endorsed or reviewed on this blog. I’m taking all the credit. Well done to … drum roll … the fabulous four: Denise Chávez, who won a 2015 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for her comic tour de force The King and Queen of Comezón. Read…