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.
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. Harvey Blume passed away September 17, 2023.
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 in 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. Paul Dervis passed away on June 13, 2022.
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
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
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.
John R Killacky
Killacky served two terms in the Vermont House of Representatives. As an arts administrator, he worked at Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, San Francisco Foundation, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Walker Art Center, Pew Charitable Trusts, PepsiCo SUMMERFARE, and Trisha Brown Dance Company. Killacky has served as a panelist, lecturer, and consultant for a broad range of arts and funding organizations. He has written numerous publications on the arts and written and directed several award-winning short films and videos. He co-edited the Lambda Literary Award-winning anthology, Queer Crips: Disabled Gay Men and Their Stories and published a compilation of his writing, because art: commentary, critique, & conversation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ed Symkus
Film
Boston native Ed Symkus’ first published film review was of “The Reincarnation of Peter Proud.” He didn’t like it. His first album purchase was The Rolling Stones’ “Out of Our Heads.” His favorite interview (so far) was with Elliott Gould. His favorite concert experience was Day 2 of Woodstock. His favorite relief pitcher was Dick Radatz. He calls “From Russia with Love” the best Ian Fleming novel. His desert island film is “Toute une vie.” He plays a Tokai acoustic guitar, but only in his home office. He and his wife Lisa like to travel. His favorite place in the world is the Lofoten Islands.
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.
Anthony Wallace is a Senior Lecturer in The Arts and Sciences Writing Program at Boston University, where he teaches seminars on writing and literature. Tony Wallace passed away on May 16, 2018.
