A great man is one who collects knowledge the way a bee collects honey and uses it to help people overcome the difficulties they endure - hunger, ignorance and disease!
- Nikola Tesla

Remember, remember always, that all of us, and you and I especially, are descended from immigrants and revolutionists.
- Franklin Roosevelt

While their territory has been devastated and their homes despoiled, the spirit of the Serbian people has not been broken.
- Woodrow Wilson

Stephen Stepanchev

Dr. Stephen Stepanchev has inspired several generations of writers who have taken his creative writing classes from 1949 to 1985 at Queens College.

As Professor Emeritus of English, he now spends his time writing and reading poems in public places all across the City, and all the more so with his title as the first Poet Laureate of the borough of Queens, an appellation assigned for the period of 1997 through the year 2000.

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Stepanchev is a consummate poetic craftsman. He arises every day at four a.m. to struggle with a few phrases and polish a few lines before his morning walk through Flushing. His poems, like his life, reflect the rich immigrant experience so familiar to our neighborhoods.

Stephen Stepanchev was born in Mokrin, Yugoslavia, in 1915. His mother brought him to Chicago when he was seven, where he quickly picked up English in his immigrant neighborhood. On a scholarship, he went to the University of Chicago, received his bachelor's and master's degrees and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army, working in the Adjutant General's Office in London, Paris and Frankfurt. He received a Bronze Star Medal at the end of the War.

He has published a major critique of American poetry - American Poetry Since 1945 - ten collections of poems, and appears regularly in such venues as The New Yorker and Poetry magazines. He recently appeared in The Bedford Introduction to Literature, a major College anthology.

Biographical sketch by Robert C. Weller
Photograph by Nancy Bareis


СТЕФАН (СВЕТОЗАР) СТЕПАНЧЕВ, песник из Мокрина (Банат). Магистрирао је на Универзитету у Чикагу и докторирао америчку књижевност на Универзитету у Њујорку. 1949. Почео је да предаје на Одељењу за енглески на Квинс Колеџу, где је остао све до пензионисања 1985. Објавио је девет књига поезије, писао за Американски Србобран. Песме су му објављивање у престижним часописима Poetri, Modern poetri stadis, Njujork Kvarteli а два броја часописа Sperou посвећена су његовим делима.

Раша Попов је 1977. превео његове песме на српски, објављене су у Вршцу у збирци Голубица на багрему.

Познат је и као аутор књиге Америчка поезија од 1945. године која се користи у средњим школама и на колеџима широм САД.


SA

 

People Directory

Biljana D. Obradović and John Gery

Biljana D. Obradović, a Serbian-American poet, translator, and critic has lived in Greece, India, and the United States. She is associate professor of english at Xavier University of Louisiana, in New Orleans.

She has two collections of poems, Frozen Embraces and Le Riche Monde. Her poems also appear in Three Poets in New Orleans and in anthologies and magazines, such as Like Thunder: Poets Respond in Violence in America, Key West: A Collection, Poetry East, Bloomsbury Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Plum Review.

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Publishing

The Thunderbolt of Ever-Living Fire

by archimandrite Vasileios of Iveron

The present book consists of Elder Vaileios' talks, discussions and dialogues in various venues mostly in the United States during his visit in 2011, along with excerpts from his writings selected to complement the themes of his talks.  The themes dealt with by Fr. Vasileios so eloquently in this book are extraordinarily wide-ranging; he handles complex and difficult issues in theology, spirituality, liturgics, parish life and monasticism with amazing clarity and insight.  He quotes with equal facility from figures as diverse as Heraclitus, Dostoevsky, St. Isacc the Syrian, St. Maximus the Confessor, Stefan Zweig, Andrei Tarkovsky, Vladimir Lossy, Georges Florovsky and St. Nicholas Cabasilas.  Above all, there is an exhilarating sense of freedom and innocence in his thought.  It is the freedom and innocence of profound faith and spiritual knowledge and childlike simplicity.  HIs wisnow is expressed via the "hyperlogic" of a hesychastic spriti, which makes for surprising connections and illuminating insights.

The appearance of this new book by Archimandrite Vaileios is truly a cuase for celebration.

143 pages
ISBN: 978-1-936773-16-9