Djelloul Marbrook
Djelloul Marbrook began writing poems in Manhattan at age fourteen. In his thirties, he abandoned poetry after publishing poems in small journals but never stopped reading and studying poetry. At age sixty-seven, appalled by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, he began walking around Manhattan with sky-blue notebooks stuffed in his pockets, determined to affirm his beloved home in the wake of the attacks. His 2007 Stan and Tom Wick award winner,
Far from Algiers (
Kent State University Press, 2008), emerged from hundreds of poems composed in the years since. His voice speaks to anyone who has ever had doubts about belonging. Born in French Algiers in 1934 to an American artist and a Bedouin father and arriving in America as a gravely ill infant, he has contemplated this issue throughout his life.
Far from Algiers explores belonging in a society in denial about its own nativism and speaks of the struggle to belonging in a culture that pays lip service to assimilation but does not fully accept anyone perceived as foreign.
The Wick judge, Toi Derricotte, writes, “This superb first book...honors a lifetime of hidden achievement...Sometimes the poems seem utterly symbolic, surreal; they are philosophical, historical, psychological, political, and spiritual. The genius is in the many ways these poems can be read. I kept being rewarded by new awarenesses of the poet's intentions, by the breadth and scope of the manuscript.” His poetry has recently been published in
American Poetry Review,
Barrow Street,
Oberon,
Reed,
The Ledge,
Perpetuum Mobile, and
Attic. His short story, “
Artists' Hill,” won the Literal Latté fiction prize in 2008. His fiction has been published by
Online Originals (London),
Breakfast All Day (London),
Potomac Review, and
Prima Materia, among others. He is a retired newspaper editor (
Providence Journal,
Elmira Star-Gazette,
Baltimore Sun,
Washington Star, among others). He lives in the mid-Hudson Valley with his wife Marilyn.
Posted on January 4, 2010 6:00 AM
