Editors and Contributors
Editorial Staff
Contact: info@artsfuse.org
617-718-0328
Bill Marx
Editor-in-Chief
Theater, Books, Film
For well over two decades, Bill Marx has written about arts and culture for print, broadcast, and online. In 2002, Marx created and edited WBUR Online Arts, a cultural zine that, along with arts reviews and commentaries, presented multimedia features, blogs, a podcast, and a calendar. WBUR Online Arts was a finalist for an Online Journalism Award for Specialty Journalism that year, and won the award in 2004. In 2005, Marx’s weekly column on the website was named a finalist for the Online Journalism Award for Online Commentary.
Marx has regularly reviewed theater for National Public Radio Station WBUR and has contributed features on stage, books, and film to NPR programs “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered,” WBUR’s “Here and Now,” NPR.org, and the WGBH/BBC co-production “The World.” He has hosted a podcast for World Books, an online feature for “The World” dedicated to coverage of international literature that he also writes for and edits.
He has also written about the arts for a number of print publications. Marx regularly critiqued books and theater for the Boston Globe and the Boston Phoenix and contributed essay-reviews to a variety of national publications, including Parnassus, Ploughshares, Washington Post Book World, the Nation, the Boston Review, The Los Angeles Times, the Columbia Journalism Review, and the Village Voice.
Marx has won United Press International and Associated Press awards for his radio reviews of Boston theater. He has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Reviewer’s Citation three times.
He currently teaches full-time at Boston University, where he created the class Arts Criticism: From E. A. Poe to the IPod. His most recent publication on criticism and culture is an essay-review in the Nov/Dec 2010 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review on the Library of America’s two-volume edition of H. L. Mencken’s Prejudices series.
In November 2009, Marx and Douglas McLennan of Arts Journal spoke about the future of arts criticism on the Web at MIT’s Communications Forum. Here’s the video of that discussion.
In July 2012, Marx was interviewed about the future of arts criticism.
J. R. Carroll
Webmaster and Technical Editor
Jazz
Back in the 1970’s, J. R. (the “J” is for James/Jim) served as Jazz Director and then Program Director for Columbia University’s WKCR-FM (one of the shows he launched, “Jazz Alternatives,” is still on the air almost forty years later), and reviewed jazz, classical, world, roots and rock music for Crawdaddy and other long-departed publications.
Following a lengthy hiatus involving graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin and MIT and many years working as a research librarian and then as a software developer and integrator, in the past decade he returned to writing as a contributor to the late, lamented WBUR Online Arts site and subsequently to the Arts Fuse. He is responsible for much that you don’t (and shouldn’t) see on the Arts Fuse, and is also working on a major redesign of the Arts Fuse website. He has no connection with the Boston Globe editorial page or The Basketball Diaries.
Harvey Blume
Books, Culture and Politics
Blume has published reviews, interviews and essays in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Wired, and Agni, among other venues. He coauthored Ota Benga: The Pygmy At The Zoo.
Jonathan Blumhofer
Classical Music, Literature
Jonathan Blumhofer is a composer and violist living in Worcester, Massachusetts. His music has been performed and recorded by ensembles including the Camerata Chicago, the Kiev Philharmonic, Xanthos Ensemble, and Juventas New Music Ensemble. Active in the academic community, he has presented papers at several conferences, contributed to the Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd Edition, and periodically reviews books for Notes: Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association.
Blumhofer holds degrees from Wheaton College (IL), the Boston Conservatory, and Boston University. He currently lectures at Clark University and online for the University of Phoenix, and teaches music privately in central Massachusetts. Please visit his website for more information on his activities and research interests, and to view scores and hear his music.
Joann Green Breuer
Film, Theater
Founder and Artistic Director of the Cambridge Ensemble, Breuer was faculty advisor to the student Experimental Theatre at Harvard University. She is now an independent theater director and an Artistic Associate with the Vineyard Playhouse on Martha’s Vineyard. Recipient of an Eliot Norton award for Continued Excellence in Directing, She is the author of The Small Theatre Handbook.
Debra Cash
Dance, Books, Design
Cash has reported, taught and lectured on dance, performing arts, design and cultural policy for print, broadcast and internet media. She regularly presents pre-concert talks, writes program notes and moderates panels and events sponsored by World Music/CRASHarts, Wesleyan Center for the Arts and venues throughout New England. A former Boston Globe and WBUR dance critic, she now serves as the Executive Director of Boston Dance Alliance.
Playwright, entrepreneur, journalist Cohen holds degrees from Princeton and Harvard. It was at Harvard, at age thirty-one, that he had his break-through with the non-fiction novel The Gospel According to the Harvard Business School; the book became a bestseller with the New York Times filling an entire page with excerpts.
In May of 2009 a new play, To Pay the Price, got a full production Off Broadway; Bob Kalfin, a veteran of Broadway, directed. That same play was part of OnStageIsrael theater-festival at Chicago’s Victory Gardens Theater in 2008; before that it got a work-shop production at Shakespeare & Company, Lenox, MA.
Among Cohen’s recent works: Only a Complete Disaster Can Save Us Now – the latter about the economy; a subject familiar to Cohen from his days at the Harvard Business School.
Some of Cohen’s plays have been produced by prominent European theaters such as: Schauspielhaus Zurich (in cooperation with Swiss National Radio); Kulturfabrik Kampnagel, Hamburg; Hackesches Hof Theater, Berlin; Theaterhaus Gessnerallee, Zurich and Theater Freiburg, Freiburg i.B., Germany.
Cohen’s play with music, A Ship to Zion, was produced by a Kingston, Jamaica, company, with an all-star Jamaican cast. It won its lead actor the Jamaican Oscar for best male actor; the original production was subsequently invited to Zurich, Switzerland, and to the Caracas International Theater Festival.
Cohen passed away 2016. Arts Fuse remembrance
Czyz is the author of the short story collection Adrift in a Vanishing City, to which Paul West devoted a chapter of Master Class. He received two fellowships from the NJ Council on the Arts and won the Faulkner Prize for Short Fiction. His stories have appeared in Shenandoah, AGNI, Louisiana Literature, the Double Dealer Redux, and the Massachusetts Review, which nominated his work for a Pushcart Prize. One his stories was translated into Turkish for an anthology that published in Turkey in 2010.
Paul Dervis is a playwright, theater, and film director, and educator. His films include The Righteous Tithe, Pokey, and Man in a Box. He is just completing a short film, Mostly Sunshine with Highs in the 90s. He has been the Artistic Director of five theater companies. He presently holds that title at Portland, Maine’s Storm Warnings Repertory Theatre. Dervis is also the host of the Cable television show In the Belly of the Beast. He taught playwriting and production at Algonquin College in Ottawa, Ontario for fifteen years.
Franklin Einspruch
Visual Arts
Einspruch is an artist and writer in Boston. His fifteenth solo exhibition, “The Talk That Walked,” took place at Main Library, Downtown Branch in Miami in November 2010. Over the last year his writings have appeared in The New Criterion, the Weekly Dig, Big Red & Shiny, and two gallery catalogs, and his comics have been featured in three issues of Inbound, the anthology of the Boston Comics Roundtable. He produces a weekly journal on his website and a webcomic, The Moon Fell On Me. He was recently been selected as a member of AICA USA.
Elman’s thirty-three years in public radio included ten years as a jazz host, five years as a classical host, a short stint as senior producer of an arts magazine, and thirteen years as assistant general manager of WBUR. He was jazz and popular music editor of the Schwann Record and Tape Guides from 1973 to 1978 and wrote free-lance music and travel pieces for The Boston Globe and The Boston Phoenix from 1988 through 1991.
He is the co-author of Burning Up the Air (Commonwealth Editions, 2008), which chronicles the first fifty years of talk radio through the life of talk-show pioneer Jerry Williams. He is a member of the board of directors of the Massachusetts Broadcasters Hall of Fame.
Helen Epstein (cultural reporter and reviewer)
Books, Classical Music, Theater, Visual Arts
Helen Epstein is the author of six books of literary non-fiction. They include the ground-breaking Children of the Holocaust; the biography Joe Papp: An American Life; and the memoir Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for Her Mother’s History. As a translator from the Czech, Helen’s work includes Heda Margolius Kovály’s Under A Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968 and Vlasta Schönová’s Acting in Terezín. Her journalism has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, New York, The New Yorker, ARTnews and other magazines. She now writes regularly for the New England online magazine The Arts Fuse.
Iris Fanger
Dance
Iris Fanger is a theater and dance critic based in Boston. She has written reviews and feature articles for the Boston Herald, Boston Phoenix, Christian Science Monitor, New York Times, and Patriot Ledger as well as for Dance Magazine and Dancing Times (London).
Former director of the Harvard Summer Dance Center, 1977-1995, she has taught at Lesley Graduate School and Tufts University, as well as Harvard and M.I.T. She earned her doctorate in Theater History at Tufts University and was a Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe. She received the 2005 Dance Champion Awards from the Boston Dance Alliance and in 2008, the Outstanding Career Achievement Award from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts. She lectures widely on dance and theater history.
Justin Grosslight is a scholar and entrepreneur interested in examining the intersection between science and business. He holds degrees in history and mathematics from Stanford, and a history of science degree from Harvard. Though Justin is published in mathematics, his most important work to date concerns the seventeenth century mathematician Marin Mersenne and is currently under peer review. Over the last year Justin has become especially interested in forming a dialogue between academia and industry.
Robert Israel
Theater, Books
Robert Israel, a contributing writer since 2013, reports on theater, literature and the arts. His work appears in numerous online and print publications, including Harvard University Divinity School Bulletin. He is the recipient of the Hibakusha Award to report on the lives of atomic bomb survivors in Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Tokyo, Japan.
Tim Jackson is an assistant professor at the New England Institute of Art in the Digital Film and Video Department. His music career in Boston began in the 1970’s and includes some 20 groups, many recordings, national and international tours, and contributions to film soundtracks. He studied theater and English as an undergraduate and has also has worked helter skelter as an actor and member of SAG and AFTRA since the 1980’s. He has directed two documentaries Chaos and Order: Making American Theater about the American Repertory Theater, and Radical Jesters, which profiles the practices of 11 interventionist artists and agit-prop performance groups. He is currently finishing a third documentary titled A Woman’s Voice about the Boston singer/songwriter Robin Lane with whom he has worked for 30 years. You can read more of his work on his blog.
Jim Kates is a poet, feature journalist and reviewer, literary translator and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press, a non-profit press that focuses on contemporary works in translation from Russia, Eastern Europe and Asia.
Lewis is an essayist and translator who writes frequently on European literature. She was recently awarded a PEN Translation Fund grant and an NEA grant for her translation of the Austrian writer Alois Hotschnig’s short stories.
Marble is a burgeoning film critic currently dividing his time between contributing for ArtsFuse and watching as many films as his hectic schedule will allow. He is a recent graduate of the Boston University College of Communication’s Magazine Journalism program and hopes to soon enter graduate school in pursuit of a film studies or comparative literature degree.
Some of his favorite film directors include Yasujiro Ozu, Ingmar Bergman and Frank Capra. He can be reached at justin.marble@gmail.com.
Grace Dane Mazur
Visual Art, Books
Grace Dane Mazur is a fiction writer whose most recent book is the non-fiction work, Hinges: Meditations on the Portals of the Imagination. After studying painting and ceramics at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, she went to Harvard for her BA and PhD in Biology. She was a postdoc at Harvard working on micro-architecture in the silk moth when she hinged into literature. She now teaches fiction in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson and is the fiction editor at Tupelo Press. She lives in Cambridge and Westport, Massachusetts, with her husband, the mathematician Barry Mazur. She can be found at www.gracedanemazur.org
Charles McEnerney is a Principal at Layers Marketing, a full-service agency handling traditional, web, and mobile marketing based in Boston, Massachusetts. Charlie has worked in marketing roles at media and entertainment companies for more than 24 years, including at ArtsBoston, Fast Company magazine, HBO, MovieMaker magazine, the Seattle International Film Festival, WGBH Boston, and in film, audio, and music production. Charlie teaches the “Marketing & The Internet” course at Emerson College as well as workshops and seminars about marketing and social media. Since 2002, he has been the Host + Producer of Well-Rounded Radio, a music interview audio podcast series.
Photo: Vernon Doucette
David retired from the Boston Globe in 2009 after 33 years as editor and writer. In 2011 he received a PhD in editorial studies, with a dissertation in the writings of Alistair Cooke, from the Editorial Institute at Boston University.
At the Globe, he was a copy editor, magazine editor and writer, general news reporter, and business reporter. In the 1990s, he was editor of the Boston Globe book review section, and in his last nine years at the paper he was a writer in the Arts section, specializing in books, authors, bookselling, and publishing, during which time he interviewed and profiled such authors as Nadine Gordimer, Joseph Heller, Henry Roth, John Banville, Alice Sebold, Charles Simic, Billy Collins, Elif Shafak, and John McGahern.
He is a member of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers and vice president of the Board of Trustees of the Hingham, Mass., Public Library. He is married and has three children and three grandchildren.
Susan Miron
Classical Music, Theater
Miron, a harpist, has been a book reviewer for over twenty years for a large variety of literary publications and newspapers. Her fields of expertise were East and Central European, Irish and Israeli literature. Susan covers classical music for The Arts Fuse and The Boston Musical Intelligencer. She is part of the Celtic harp and storytelling duo A Bard’s Feast with renowned storyteller Norah Dooley, and plays the Celtic harp at the Cancer Center at Newton Wellesley Hospital.
Steve Mossberg is a composer, jazz pianist, and music educator living in Somerville, MA. He holds an MMEd. From Boston Conservatory and has taught jazz piano at Clark University. In addition to teaching music in the Cambridge Public Schools, he performs regularly with many of Boston’s top musicians.
Christopher M. Ohge
Books
Ohge is a Ph.D. candidate at the Editorial Institute at Boston University doing his dissertation on the American composer and writer, Paul Bowles. He also contributes to World Books, as well as various projects on Herman Melville, including work for Melville scholar Hershel Parker, Melville’s Marginalia Online, and the Melville Electronic Library.
Other obsessions (which are many) include Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Samuel Beckett, Norman Mailer, David Ferry, Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Mingus, and Bob Dylan. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, he also enjoys frequent escapes to his hometown of Seattle, the islands and peninsulas around the Puget Sound, and southern/central Idaho.
Melanie O’Neill
Classical Music, Opera
Melanie O’Neill is currently working towards an undergraduate Music degree with a minor in Journalism at Boston University. Her interests include music of all kinds and the performing arts. Melanie is particularly passionate about opera and promoting its appreciation in people of all ages.
Anthony J. Palmer
Classical Music
Anthony J. Palmer was a Visiting Scholar at Boston University. He had a BA in vocal/choral studies and MA in composition from California State University, Los Angeles; he earned a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. He taught at the University of Tennessee, and University of California, Los Angeles, then was at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, retiring in 1998.
He was engaged in 2000 by Boston University, retiring in May 2009. He was Director of the 40th anniversary celebration of Tanglewood 1967, which was held in June of 2007 as a weeklong symposium. He had extensive public school experience; his areas in music education were world musics, practical and philosophical courses, aesthetics and philosophy of music and music education, choral conducting, and student teaching supervision and seminars.
Palmer published articles in major national and international journals. He penned about 30 choral compositions and arrangements. His music is available for purchase at this website. Formerly active in the College Music Society and the Society for Ethnomusicology, he was also a member of the American Choral Directors Association, MENC, and ASCAP. He was a founding member of the International Society for the Philosophy of Music Education. Tony Palmer passed away on February 1, 2013.
Razumnaya is a freelance translator and a doctoral student at the Editorial Institute at Boston University. Her translations of two poems by Osip Mandelstam appeared in Pusteblume.
Emily Rudofsky is currently pursuing her degree at Boston University, where she studies Dramaturgy and Playwriting.
Thomas Samph
Popular Music, Film
Samph is a recent graduate of Boston University with a degree in Magazine Journalism and a concentration in French. He has written for the Boston University Daily Free Press, the Improper Bostonian Magazine, the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts and Inventor’s Digest. Tom will be living in Orleans, France this year where he will be teaching English to elementary school students and will continue to write on a freelance basis.
After having lived in Boston for four years, Tom has realized two things about the city: 1) The T works sometimes 2) Boston is windy. Because of number one, Tom rides his bike as much as possible. However, because of number two, with the addition of rain, snow, ice, and other meteorological phenomenon, Tom is forced to take his chances with number one. Despite this dilemma, Tom still rides his bike a lot. Tom loves Boston and hopes to continue to live, write about, and ride his bike around this sometimes-temperamental, always-delightful city.
Gary Schwartz (Schwartzlist)
Visual Arts
Schwartz was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1940. In 1965 he came to the Netherlands with a graduate fellowship in art history and stayed. He has been active as a translator, editor, and publisher; teacher, lecturer, and writer; and as the founder of CODART, an international network organization for curators of Dutch and Flemish art.
As an art historian, he is best known for his books on Rembrandt: Rembrandt: all the etchings in true size (1977), Rembrandt, his life, his paintings: a new biography (1984) and The Rembrandt Book (2006).
His Internet column, now called the Schwartzlist, appeared every other week from September 1996 to April 2007 and has been appearing since then irregularly. His most recent book on Rembrandt is one of the six titles nominated for the Banister Fletcher Award for the most deserving book on art or architecture of that year.
In November 2009 Schwartz was awarded the coveted tri-annual Prize for the Humanities by the Prince Bernhard Cultural Foundation of Amsterdam. Please address reactions to Gary.Schwartz@xs4all.nl
Photo: Anna Summers
George Scialabba is an editor of The Baffler and the author of What Are Intellectuals Good For? and The Modern Predicament, both from Pressed Wafer (Boston MA). His work is archived here.
A recipient of both Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships for fiction, Roberta Silman has published Blood Relations, a collection of short stories, and three novels, Boundaries, The Dream Dredger and Beginning the World Again, as well as a children’s book, Somebody Else’s Child. Her awards include Honorable Mention for the PEN Hemingway Prize and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize (twice), the Child Study Association prize, and two Pen Syndicated Fiction prizes. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, McCall’s, The American Scholar, The Virginia Quarterly Review and many other magazines here and abroad. Two have been read on Selected Shorts and NPR.
As a critic, she has published reviews and essays in The New York Times, PRI’s World Books, The American Scholar and Virginia Quarterly review.She also writes regularly for The Boston Globe. A graduate of Cornell (BA) and Sarah Lawrence (MFA), Ms. Silman has three grown children and several grandchildren and lives with her husband, structural engineer Robert Silman, in Ardsley, NY. She can be reached at rsilman@verizon.net.
Smith comes to the Arts Fuse as a Boston University freshman. While currently enrolled as an International Relations and Film/TV double major, she changes her aspirations for her future daily. All she remains sure of is her affinity for classic rock, coffee, cheap sunglasses, and Woody Allen.
Sally Levitt Steinberg (Food Muse)
Culture of Food, Books
Steinberg is a writer, journalist, and oral/personal historian. She has written several books, including The Donut Book, the world’s definitive book of everything-you-need-to-know about donuts. It was chosen twice as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, it has been featured in all the media, including NPR, the Martha Stewart radio shows, and the film Donut Crazy for the Travel Channel, and its materials form The National Donut Collection at the Smithsonian Museum.
She has written a biography, The Book of Joy, as well as several personal histories and a book on interior design. Her essay, “Coffin Couture,” was cited as the best piece in the recent anthology of personal history, My Words Are Gonna Linger. She has written articles for many publications, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The New Yorker. She lives in Boston.
Ian Thal is a performance artist and theatre educator specializing in mime, commedia dell’arte, and puppetry, and has been known to act on Boston area stages from time to time, sometimes with Teatro delle Maschere. He is also an aspiring playwright working on his second full length play; his first, though as-of-yet unproduced, was picketed by a Hamas supporter during a staged reading. He blogs irregularly at the unimaginatively entitled From The Journals of Ian Thal. Ian is a member of the Small Theatre Alliance of Boston.
Caldwell Titcomb
Classical Music
Caldwell Titcomb played a key role in sustaining The Arts Fuse — as a writer, critic, friend, and guiding spirit. He passed away in June, 2011. Here is the Fuse’s remembrance of a remarkable man.
Brigitte TournierAfter receiving an Art History degree from George Washington University, Tournier moved to Paris, where she remained from 1967 to 1986 during which time she married and had her two children, Emilie and Edouard. She has been teaching French at Buckingham Browne & Nichols school in Cambridge, MA since 1990.
Anthony Wallace is a Senior Lecturer in The Arts and Sciences Writing Program at Boston University, where he teaches seminars on writing and literature.
Wallach is a writer and musician who also enjoys reviewing books. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in such journals as McSweeney’s, Tin House, Salon, Wired, and the Huffington Post. His music has earned him a record deal with Decca Records, and his music videos have been featured on the front page of YouTube. Check out his website.