Steven Ford Brown

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Steven Ford Brown is a boxing journalist, rock music critic, writer, publisher and translator in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

Brown grew up in Birmingham, Alabama and attended the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the University of Houston and Harvard University's Extension School. For almost a decade he worked in the European Equities Department of a private investment firm in Boston's Financial District. He resigned his position in January of 2006 to travel in Europe and pursue a career as a music critic and journalist.

He began his literary affiliations by joining a loose congregation of artists, writers and musicians who hung out at the Cobb Lane Studios on Birmingham's Southside. He began writing career in earnest in 1973 with The Paperman, an alternative newspaper in Birmingham, as an occasional journalist, books and literary editor and music reviewer. He created and edited for the paper a series of features and profiles of American artists and writers, including Diane Arbus, John Beecher, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Hugo, poets against the Vietnam War and Diane Wakoski. As a rock music critic and journalist he was among the first to champion Buckingham Nicks, the debut album by Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks (who later joined Fleetwood Mac). Following a successful turn as a reviewer of over 100 albums by such recording artists as the Allman Brothers, Blondie, Bob Dylan, The Eagles, Marvin Gaye, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Gram Parsons, Jimmy Spherris, Michael Stanley, Alex Taylor, Steve Winwood and Warren Zevon, he became editor of Aura Literary Arts Review at the University of Alabama in 1975, publishing work by Yukio Mishima (Japan), Dave Smith, and features on Robert Bly, Howard Nemerov, the American Prose Poem and Southern Poetry. The same year he also founded a small literary press, Thunder City Press, which eventually became Ford-Brown & Co., Publishers, and continued to publish books until 1995. Over a twenty year period his two publishing houses published anthologies, broadsides, chapbooks books magazines that included John Beecher, Richard Brautigan, Pier Giorgio DiCicco, Bei Dao (China), Mark Doty, Odysseus Elytis (Greece), Charles Gaines, Andrew Glaze, Enrique Anderson Imbert (Argentina), Carolyn Kizer, John Logan, Vassar Miller, Gerald Stern, Georg Trakl (Austria), Tomas Transtromer (Sweden), Yevgeny Yevtushenko (Russia) and Paul Zimmer.

His own creative work, including essays, interviews, poetry and translations, have appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, The Harvard Review, Poetry, Rolling Stone, Jacket, Verse and on the BBC Radio UK literary program The Verb. Brown is also a translator of Spanish poetry. His translations include Ángel González' Astonishing World, Nicomedes Suarez Arauz' Edible Amazonia, Jorge Carrera Andrade's Century of the Death of the Rose and Microgramas, and Juan Carlos Galeano's Amazonia. He has also edited a book of poems by John Beecher, One More River to Cross, and co-edited Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Southern Poetry with David Rigsbee, which was selected as one of the "Best of the Best from the University Presses" and featured on C-SPAN's "Book TV". He has also edited two special issues of the Atlanta Review on poetry from Latin-America and Spain (the Spanish issue included poets from Basque Country, Castillia, Catalonia and Galicia). He served as Director of Research for the George Plimpton interview series, The Writer in Society, which appeared on the PBS affiliate in Houston, Texas, and featured interviews with Maya Angelou, John Barth and Donald Barthelme. His own research for the series was on Barthelme. He has been active with the website Foetry.com in criticizing the incestousness of the American MFA literary programs and corruption in literary contests, particularly at the University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series, University of Iowa literary contests and University of North Texas Vassar Miller Prize contest.

His translations and other publications have been supported by grants from the Spanish Cultural Ministry (Madrid, Spain), the National Endowment for the Arts, the Linn-Henley Charitable Trust, the Swedish Embassy in New York City and the Texas Commission for the Arts. The Birmingham Festival of Arts awarded him the Silver Bowl for his contributions to the literary arts of Birmingham, Alabama.

He currently lives in Boston, while frequently traveling in Europe, particularly Amsterdam, Barcelona and Stockholm. He was recently in residence at the Swedish Writers Union in Stockholm. He is a featured writer at Boxing Herald.com, and in addition to writing feature articles on the contemporary boxing scene also interviewers boxers and provides ringside reports. He is also a staff writer for Boston Music Spotlight and publishes interviews and writes articles on the history of the Boston rock music scene, particularly focused on the Boston-Cambridge folk-rock music era of the 1950s through the punk rock era of the 1970s. His most recent book, Microgramas, by Jorge Carrera Andrade was published in 2007 in an exclusive limited bilingual Spanish-English edition by Orogenia Corporacion Cultural in Quito, Ecuador, with distribution limited to South America. In 2009 he will participate in a conference at the Université Paul Valéry in Montpellier III, France, on the life and work of John Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Contents

[edit] External links

[edit] Boxing Columns

[edit] News

[edit] Music Reviews

[edit] Professional Website and Interviews

[edit] Jorge Carrera Andrade

[edit] Bibliography

  • Amazonia, prose poems by Juan Carlos Galeano (as translator), forthcoming
  • Microgramas, Jorge Carrera Andrade (as translator), Orogenia Corporacion Cultural: Quito, Ecuador, 2007
  • One More River To Cross: The Selected Poems of John Beecher, preface by Studs Terkel (as editor) New South Books, 2003
  • Century of The Death of The Rose: The Selected Poems of Jorge Carrera Andrade (as translator). New South Books, 2002
  • Edible Amazonia: Twenty poems from God's Amazonian Recipe Book, Nicomedes Suarez Arauz (as translator) Bitter Oleander Press, 2002
  • Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Southern Poetry (as co-editor with David Rigsbee), University of Virginia Press, 2001
  • Astonishing World: The Selected Poems of Ángel González, 1956-1986 (as translator), Milkweed Editions, 1993
  • Heart’s Invention: On The Poetry Of Vassar Miller, introduction by Larry McMurtry (as editor), Ford-Brown & Co., Publishers, 1988
  • Contemporary Literature in Birmingham: An Anthology, Birmingham Public Library, 1983
Persondata
NAME Brown, Steven Ford
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION literary figure
DATE OF BIRTH 1952
PLACE OF BIRTH Florence, Alabama, United States of America
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH