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Paul Hoover is the author of a novel, a collection of literary essays, and eleven collections of poetry, most recently Edge and Fold, Poems in Spanish, and Winter Mirror. He serves as curator of a new poetry series at the M.H. de Young Museum, an art museum in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. He is the recipient of the Jerome J. Shestack Award for the best poems to appear in American Poetry Review, the Carl Sandburg Award, and the 1984 General Electric Foundation Award for Younger Writers.

Hoover edited Classroom Guide to Accompany Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (1994), a selection which starts chronologically with Charles Olson (1910-1970) and ends with poets born in the early to mid-1950s, and which along the way includes many poets who have read at Hallwalls over the years: Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, Jackson Mac Low, Amiri Baraka, Harry Mathews, Clarence Major, Anne Waldman, Nathaniel Mackey, Eileen Myles, Dennis Cooper, former UB Poetics Program director Charles Bernstein, and Hoover himself.

Hoover's translations (with Maxine Chernoff) of German lyric poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) is forthcoming from Omnidawn.

$25*

Ariel Dorfman (born May 6, 1942 in Buenos Aires) is an Argentine-Chilean novelist, playwright, essayist, academic, and human rights activist. Dorfman, who is Jewish, was born in Argentina, but his family moved to the United States shortly after his birth, and then moved to Chile in 1954. He attended and was later a professor at the University of Chile, and adopted Chilean Citizenship in 1967. From 1970 to 1973, Dorfman was part of the administration of president Salvador Allende. He was forced into exile following the CIA-planned and U.S.-funded military coup in which General Augusto Pinochet came to power. Since 1985 he has taught at Duke University, where he is currently Walter Hines Page Research Professor of Literature and Professor of Latin American Studies.

Hallwalls is pleased to welcome Dorfman back to Buffalo after twenty years, this time in collaboration with Just Buffalo. Hallwalls first presented a reading and talk by the author on April 8, 1987. Dorfman also contributed the preface, entitled "Beyond Satan and a Siesta," to Hallwalls' 1987 landmark film text Reviewing Histories: Selections from New Latin American Cinema, edited by Coco Fusco. The following year he contributed a piece of fiction to Hallwalls' anthology Blatant Artifice 2/3 (1988). His contributor's note then read: "Ariel Dorfman is widely known as a tireless and outspoken critic of the [then] present government of Chile, as the author of several highly-regarded books of fiction, criticism, and poetry, as well as numerous articles on Chilean politics, American popular culture, and the condition of exile. His books (originally published in Spanish) include How to Read Donald Duck and The Empire's Old Clothes, the novels Widows [reissued in paperback in 2002 with Stephen Kessler] and The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, and the [then] recently published collection of poems about the disappeared, Last Waltz in Santiago. His own stage adaptation of Widows premiered [in August of that year] at the Williamstown (Massachusetts) Theatre Festival."

Since the restoration of democracy in Chile in 1990, Dorfman has divided his time between Santiago and the United States. Dorfman's work often deals with the horrors of tyranny and, in later works, the trials of exile. In 1999 he published Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey. His most famous play, Death and the Maiden, describes the encounter of a former torture victim with the man she believes tortured her; it was made into a film in 1994 by Roman Polanski starring Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley. In 2003 his 1995 novel Konfidenz was reissued by Dalkey Archive Press, with an introduction by Andrei Codrescu, and in 2004 his 1988 novel Mascara was reissued by Seven Stories Press, with an afterword by South African-born novelist, 2003 Nobel Prize Laureate, and former UB English professor (and Vietnam war protestor) J.M. Coetzee. As a journalist and commentator, Dorfman wrote extensively about Pinochet's extradition case as it unfolded for the Spanish newspaper El País and other publications, material later collected and adapted in his 2002 book Exorcising Terror: The Incredible On-going Trial of Augusto Pinochet (Seven Stories Press). His 1983 novel Widows—the first of his novels translated into English—was also reissued in 2002 by Seven Stories.

In 2005, Dorfman was commissioned by Kerry Kennedy Cuomo—co-author with photojournalist Eddie Adams of the documentary book Speak Truth to Power: Human Rights Defenders Who Are Changing Our World—to write the play Speak Truth to Power: Voices from Beyond the Dark. Kennedy Cuomo asked Dorfman to write something that would celebrate and memorialize the efforts and sufferings of the defenders documented in her book, transforming them from reports of campaigns mounted and atrocities endured into aesthetic moments felt. Given hundreds of pages of transcripts from her interviews with the defenders, Dorfman was charged with weaving the stories into a dramatic structure. A staged reading of the play debuted at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC, with parts read by Hector Elizondo, Giancarlo Esposito, Kevin Kline, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, John Malkovich, Rita Moreno, Sigourney Weaver, and Alfre Woodard. Very recently he wrote the afterword to Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak (edited by Marc Falkoff, U. of Iowa Press, August 15, 2007). Dorfman himself is also the subject of a feature-length documentary, A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman, directed by Peter Raymont. The film had its world premiere at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2007, and will be screened at Hallwalls on January 19, 2008.

Besides major grant support from The John R. Oishei Foundation, the organizers of Babel thank Artvoice, Buffalo Spree, & WBFO 88.7 for their media sponsorship; Righteous Babe Records for the use of Asbury Hall at Babeville; Talking Leaves…Books; The Mansion; and New York State Council on the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, and Erie County, for their support of Just Buffalo's and Hallwalls' programs.

*$25 is the single-event price. Partial season subscriptions are still available for $60 for the remaining three readings in season 1 of Babel (2007­-2008): Ariel Dorfman (12/7/07), Derek Walcott (3/13/08), and Kiran Desai (4/24/08).

Peg Boyers is Executive Editor of Salmagundi, the literary and humanities quarterly published at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, and author of two books of poems, Hard Bread and Honey With Tobacco. Her poems, translations, and essays have appeared in Paris Review, The New Republic, Raritan, Sewanee Review, Southern Review, Ontario Review, Slate, and other magazines. She currently teaches Creative Writing at Skidmore.

Hard Bread—Boyers' debut collection of verse spoken in the imagined voice of the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg—was widely praised for its inspired ventriloquism and brilliant lyricism. In Honey with Tobacco, Boyers' own intensely personal voice emerges in three strikingly distinctive variants. The first part of the book is the most explicitly autobiographical, bringing together poems that explore the poet's Cuban-American experience and a childhood marked by travel, the tropics, and varieties of disenchantment. The middle sequence of poems concerns a mother, father, and son-a postmodern Holy Family-whose ordeals are evoked in a terse, terrifying narrative. In familiar tableaux drawn from the Bible that have also inspired great works of visual art—the Annunciation, the Pietà, and Judgment Day—Boyers explores what it means in contemporary America to be "blessed among women," and whether and how art can contain grief. The final section of the book confronts age, desire, and regret in a series of personal poems that plumb baser human instincts and the speakers' determination to dwell in darkness, when necessary, without abandoning the sacred.

Kathleen Betsko Yale is an actor who has performed on and Off-Broadway, in regional theatre and national road tours, and locally at Irish Classical Theatre Company, Kavinoky Theatre, Buffalo United Artists, and Theatre of Youth. She was last seen this season in Blithe Spirit at ICTC, and whenever she can joins Mary Kate O'Connell and the gang at Café in the Square on Wednesday nights in the long running Diva by Diva.

Betsko Yale was born in Coventry, England. She has lived just about everywhere (including NYC for many years), and earned a living at almost everything—textile worker, meter calibrator, bartender, Vista volunteer, gardener, churner—out of TV series ideas for Paramount in Hollywood, and dramatic writing teacher at UB and ECC. Somewhere along the way, she became an award-winning, published playwright whose work has been performed at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, England, and on some of America's most prestigious regional stages, including Yale Repertory, Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, and New York Shakespeare Festival. Betsko Yale adapted her play Johnny Bull to an ABC-TV Movie of the Week starring Kathy Bates, Colleen Dewhurst, Jason Robards, and Peter McNicol. Her own screen adaptation of that play won the Luminas Award for Excellence from the Women's Committee of the Directors Guild of America in Los Angeles. She has received numerous awards and grants, including a CAPS grant for her play Beggars Choice, a Foundation for the Arts grant for her play Stitchers and Starlight Talkers, and the ABC Theatre Award for Johnny Bull. She is also a three-time winner of fellowships at the Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference, where the late Lloyd Richards—legendary theatre director, producer, and Chair of Drama at Yale—was her guide and mentor. In addition, Betsko Yale was founding mother and steering committee member of the First International Women Playwrights Conference, held first at UB in 1988, and now, almost 20 years later, an ongoing event taking place every three years in different world cities. She was co-author (with Rachel Koenig) of Interviews With Contemporary Women Playwrights (William Morrow & Co., 1987), and writes the occasional poem thanks to the Women of the Crooked Circle poets' collective and their beloved founder and poetry guide, Jimmie Margaret Gilliam. Last but not least, Betsko Yale has a daughter in Oklahoma, a son in Ohio, four grandkids, and two great-grand babies. She is wont to say at the drop of a theatrical cap: "I am proud to live and garden in the City of Buffalo with its fabulous architecture, rich cultural life, and dynamic theatre community. It is, by far, the friendliest city I've ever encountered in my lifetime of travel, adventure, and curious mishaps."

Earth's Daughters magazine—the oldest continuously published feminist literary arts periodical in the U.S.—is currently celebrating its 36th year. Its publication is made possible by a Decentralization grant from the Arts Council in Buffalo & Erie County, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts. Earth's Daughters magazine presents The Gray Hair Series, a monthly reading series hosted by Hallwalls and co-sponsored by Just Buffalo that spotlights primarily local or formerly local writers who have long contributed to the literary life of Buffalo and upstate New York.