Julie Ann Ball
Julie Ann Ball is a catalyst for smiles from all who surround her. She grew up in Appleton Wisconson and studied teaching at UofW, Lacrosse. She retired from teaching middle school english and social studies in 2016 after 37 years in the field, 33 of them at the Marshall School in Duluth, MN where she was a founding and influential member of the middle school team. She is revered, respected, and admired by students, colleagues, and administrators alike. In retirement, she lives close to one of her two sons, daughter in-law, and grandson on the Big Island of Hawaii, and continues in her recreational pursuits of writing poetry, watching and listening to birds, enjoying life, and smiling.
Yvonne Elizabeth Strumecki
Yvonne received her MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry from Roosevelt University in Chicago. Her work has appeared both in print and online in magazines across the country. Publications include Red Bird Chapbooks Weekly Read, Fearless Books’ anthology “Touching: Poems of Love, Longing, and Desire”, Another Chicago Magazine Issue 50, Vol 2., Specter Magazine, Scapegoat Review, and Vagabonds among others.
August Strindberg
Translated by Lotta Löfgren
Johan August Strindberg (1849 – 1912) was one of the great innovators of modern drama, as well as a novelist, poet, and master of the Swedish language. He is considered the "father" of modern Swedish literature and his The Red Room(1879) has frequently been described as the first modern Swedish novel. In Sweden, Strindberg is known as an essayist, painter, poet, and especially as a novelist and playwright. Despite being internationally acknowledged as a pioneering realist, expressionist, and surrealist playwright, Strindberg is relatively unknown for his poetry outside of Sweden. In this volume, editor and translator Lotta M. Löfgren has chosen poems from all three volumes of Strindberg’s verse—Poems in Verse and Prose, Sleepwalking Nights on Awake Days, and Word Play and Minor Art—to correct this picture, illustrating to the English-speaking reader the development, strengths, and versatility of Strindberg the poet. Lotta M. Löfgren teaches drama and 20th-century literature in the English department at the University of Virginia. She received the American-Scandinavian Foundation's 2000 Translation Prize for this English translation of August Strindberg's poetry (Published by SIU Press).
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) was an English poet, playwright and actor, widely regarded as both the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His extant works, including collaborations, consist of approximately 39 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.
Richard III is a historical play by William Shakespeare believed to have been written around 1593. It depicts the Machiavellian rise to power and subsequent short reign of King Richard III of England. It is the second longest play in the canon after Hamlet and is the longest of the First Folio, whose version of Hamlet is shorter than its Quarto counterpart.