Arts InFusers: 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.

Twitter, Facebook

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.

Christopher Jones
Strategy and Development Director

Chris Jones has been a classical musician, a university administrator, and arts administrator while living in the Boston area for over 25 years. He holds Bachelor degrees in music and anthropology and a Master of Science in Arts Administration from Boston University. He lives just outside Boston with his wife and young daughter.

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.

Alyssa Hall
Copy Editor
Theater

Hall is a graduate of Emerson College’s Writing, Literature, and Publishing program and Boston University’s Book Publishing certificate program. A Massachusetts native, she is a long-time theater aficionado especially interested in musical theater.

Yumi Araki
Visual Arts

Raised closely alongside her grandmother, a Japanese painter and sculptor, Araki enjoys writing about the fine arts. She is also a production assistant at Boston Science Communications, where she helps produce science documentaries.

Jim Ball
World Music, Jazz

Jim Ball is co-founder and communications director of the Boston Jewish Music Festival. He has been practicing public relations, marketing, journalism and strategic communications in the Boston area for nearly 30 years, including stints in state and local government, the Harvard University News Office, press secretary at the MBTA, Cambridge School Department, various private sector positions, and currently has his own consulting business, Mouthpiece Communications. A music and English major with a degree from Ithaca College. He is an avid choral singer and a lover of (almost) all things musical.

Richard Bunbury
Classical Music

Richard Bunbury is a Lecturer in Music Education and Musicology at Boston University, having also served as and interim Chair of the Department of Musicology and Ethnomusicology. His teaching experiences also include ten years teaching at the Boston Conservatory and a number of years as a K-12 music teacher.

He has presented at professional conferences and his articles appear in several journals and standard reference works including New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, New Grove Dictionary of American Music. A career organist and choral conductor too, his most recent work is as organ soloist on the album, Unchanging Love: Brass and Organ Music of Larry Thomas Bell (Albany Records).

Harvey Blume (Short Fuse)
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.

Daniel Bosch
Poetry, Literature

Poet Daniel Bosch’s book Crucible appeared from Other Press in 2002. His poems and translations have been published in The New Republic, Poetry, Slate, The TLS, The Paris Review, and many other journals. He teaches expository writing at Tufts University and verse composition at Walnut Hill School for the Arts.

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.

Joseph Burke
Books

Burke is educated in philosophy, politics and sociology at universities in Ireland, the UK and the US. He has worked as an independent political researcher in East Africa and the Middle East. His work has appeared in a variety of academic and cultural publications.

Debra Cash
Dance

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, this summer she returns as Scholar in Residence to the Bates Dance Festival.

Peter-Adrian Cohen
Theater

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 lives in the greater Boston area.

David Cooper
Music

Born in the San Francisco Bay Area, Cooper is a sophomore at Boston University. He’s studying psychology and history although his dream job is to be the first skate video historian. In his spare time, he likes to skateboard, listen to music and chill. Write to him at davidcooper@artsfuse.org.

Maryann Corbett
Books

Maryann Corbett lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, and works for the Minnesota Legislature. She holds a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota and is the author of Breath Control, forthcoming in 2012 from David Robert Books, and the chapbooks Gardening in a Time of War (Pudding House) and Dissonance (Scienter Press).

Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in River Styx, Atlanta Review, Rattle e-issues, The Evansville Review, Measure, Literary Imagination, The Dark Horse, Mezzo Cammin, Linebreak, Subtropics, and many other journals in print and online, as well as The Able Muse Anthology and Hot Sonnets (Entasis Press). Her poems have been finalists for Best of the Net and the Morton Marr Prize competition and have won the Lyric Memorial Award and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize.

Vincent Czyz
Books

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.

Nora Delaney
Books

Delaney is a Ph.D. candidate at Boston University’s Editorial Institute and works as a writing advisor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Currently living in Boston, she has traveled the world and enjoys translating prose and poetry from Dutch. Her own poems, translations, and critical reviews have been published or are forthcoming in Fulcrum, The Critical Flame, Literary Imagination, Absinthe: New European Writing, Jacket, and other publications. Her poetry chapbook Tiles Kissing Close was published by the Pen & Anvil Press in 2010.

Michael de Zayas
Books

Michael de Zayas lives in Brooklyn and Vermont. He has contributed to dozens of Fodor’s travel guides over the past decade as well as founding the clothing brand Neighborhoodies, which he sold last year. He’s soon opening a wine bar in Crown Heights, Brooklyn loaded with books and typewriters.

Maureen Dezell
Arts Coverage

Maureen Dezell covered arts and culture for the Boston Globe, politics and urban life for the Boston Phoenix, and politics and health care for Boston Business Journal. Author of the critically acclaimed Irish America: Coming Into Clover (Doubleday/Anchor, 2002) and a freelance contributor to a range of print and online media, she is a senior editor in the Boston College Office of Marketing Communications.

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.

Steve Elman
Jazz

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 (Culture Vulture)
Books, Classical Music, Theater, Visual Arts

Helen Epstein is the author of six books of literary non-fiction. She reviews and lectures on memoir and is now putting most of her work up on Kindle/Amazon.

Lucien Flores
Music

Lucien Flores hails from New York, New York and is a rising Sophomore at Boston University, majoring in Film/TV and minoring in Anthropology. However, music is his biggest passion and he is Music Editor for BU’s The Daily Free Press, co-runs a music website and radio show with fellow Fuse contributor Michela Smith, frequently attends concerts for the duty of journalism, and is in love with his vintage Rogers drum kit named Roger. He is also an avid New Jersey Devils fan, fluent in sarcasm, and has yet to recover from the premature death of Arrested Development.

Ken George
Visual Arts

Justin Grosslight
Books

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.

Joe Harrington
Photographer

Harrington, a self taught photographer, has worked for the Boston Phoenix since 2007. Photographing local and mainstream bands for the Phoenix and his own website, he has also extensively covered Mixed Martial Arts fighting. A Jazz lover since he first listened to a cassette tape of John Coltrane while a young boy, he looks forward to covering the local Jazz community for The Arts Fuse.

Tim Jackson
Film, Theater

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.

Molly Jay
Television

Jay was born and raised in the Boston area, and graduated from Clark University in 2007 with a degree in Art History. Over the past four years, she has written for a custom news agency and has had her writing appear in various publications, including City Living Magazine. Jay currently lives in Brookline, working as a freelance writer with a particular passion for television analysis and criticism. Her favorite current television shows include Saturday Night Live, Californication, and Parks and Recreation. While she loves spending time at the MFA and walking down Newbury Street, she will always consider Fenway Park the greatest place in Boston. You can email her at mollyjay.boston@gmail.com and follow her on Twitter at @jaymolly.

Jim Kates
Books, Theater

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.

Liza Katz
Books

Liza Katz is a poet, translator, and critic whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Critical Flame, the Quarterly Conversation, Clarion, Exit 13, and North Central Review.

Tess Lewis
Books

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.

Justin Marble
Film

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
Music

McEnerney has been Host + Producer of Well-Rounded Radio since 2002. Since moving to Boston his day job has included handling marketing at OurStage.com, ArtsBoston, WGBH, and Fast Company magazine.

David Mehegan
Books

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.

Chantal Mendes
Music, Theater

Chantal has lived in two states for most of her life but now mostly resides in the lovely city of Boston and is a full-time employee of Tufts University and a part time Journalist. She attributes her fear of rattlesnakes and love of hot weather to her childhood in North Carolina and her fondness for maple syrup and granola to an adolescence spent in Vermont. As a writer Chantal has a deep and abiding interest in the arts which she satisfies by freelancing for The Arts Fuse and the South End News.

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. Recently she has been enjoying writing about classical concerts and theater for Artsfuse and Boston Musical Intelligencer

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 is presently a Visiting Scholar at Bos