Eric Olsen and Glen Schaeffer

Photo by Dennis MathisEric Olsen is a journalist and graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. With Glenn Schaeffer, he co-founded in 2000 and then directed the International Institute of Modern Letters. He also created the first American City of Asylum, which provided a safe haven for persecuted writers. He was executive editor of custom publishing at Time Inc. Health, a TimeWarner company. This is his sixth book.

Photo by Geri KodeyGlenn Schaeffer is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He was, for twenty years, president and chief financial officer of Mandalay Resort Group. He is co-founder and CEO of Perpetual Gaming, a slot-machine company based in Las Vegas. Las Vegas Magazine has profiled him as one of the five inventors of modern Las Vegas; Institutional Investor has profiled him as one of America’s top ten corporate financiers; and Liberty Media ranked him the gaming industry’s second most influential executive, after Steve Wynn.

Works by this contributor:

Say Yes! to Everything

Views

The Moving Face (for Roger Ebert)

The first time I ever really thought about Roger Ebert it was because I knew he was warm, dry, and celebrating and I was cold, wet and furious. It was January 2005 in Chicago, and unsurprisingly it was snowing on me and members of Not Dead Yet as we staged a protest outside the Union League Club, surrounded by a row of news trucks.
On the Early English Essay: An Experimental Array

"Essay" enters into English untamed.
The Facts of the Matter

Here is how it happened: The door to the suite was open that night when I walked past and saw her splayed across a couch, one foot on the floor, one leg hooked over an arm rest.
Excerpt from Office Girl

On that Monday at the end of January, Jack Blevins, a questionable young man of twenty-five, rides his blue bicycle beneath the flurry, with tape recorder in hand.

Interviews

Douglas Foster: Interview

"We’re quite rightfully concerned by the level of unemployment in the United States and the ways people were devastated by the financial crisis of 2008, but in the circumstances people face in a place like South Africa, 10 percent unemployment would be heaven."
Stephen Elliott: Interview

“We all change; the things you want from writing, at a certain age, become different from the things you want later. I’ve avoided any obligations, and I still live like a child. I don’t have a wife and kids. I’m on my own. It’s a choice.”
B.J. Hollars: Interview

"Blurring the Boundaries was inspired by my own frustration with facts."
Karen Rigby: Interview

My poetry won’t suit everyone. It has been described as dense; I’m aware of that response, so I wouldn’t say “I hope everyone reads it.”

Reviews

City of the Big Shoulders: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry, edited by Ryan G. Van Cleave

Ryan G. Van Cleave’s new anthology of Chicago poetry, City of the Big Shoulders, succeeds in displaying the essentials as defined and described by a diverse crowd of Chicagoans.
The Game of Boxes by Catherine Barnett

At the heart of this collection, Barnett’s second, is an engagement with Kant’s idea of the sublime, namely that the self experiences both terror and dread in the face of the infinite—whether death or, as the Romantics understood it, the implacable force of Nature.
Whatever is Contained Must be Released: My Jewish Orthodox Girlhood, My Life as a Feminist Artist, by Heléne Aylon

The memoir, like the artist herself, swerves between cutting-edge installation art, the ancient passages of the Bible, and centuries-old Jewish law and tradition.
The Walls Behind the Curtain: East European Prison Literature, 1945-1990 edited by Harold B. Segel

This fascinating book, edited by Prof. Harold B. Segel of Columbia University, presents a rich sampling of writings by people imprisoned in the jails of the former Eastern European Soviet colonies...

Blog Posts

How Poems Move #12

Apr 25, 2013
How Poems Move #11

Apr 23, 2013
How Poems Move #10

Apr 18, 2013
How Poems Move #9

Apr 17, 2013