Veils, Halos & Shackles

All over the world, girls and women are victims of violence, oppression, and discrimination. No country, no community, no religious or ethnic group is immune. Too often, women's voices are stifled, ignored, or trivialized—and as a result, other victims feel alone and unsupported.Veils, Halos & Shackles, the first-ever anthology of international poetry specifically addressing the oppression and empowerment of women, includes more than 250 extraordinary poems from every continent, contributed by some of the world's most accomplished living poets. Many are themselves survivors of rape and other gender-based crimes; others are grandmothers, mothers, daughters, friends, and teachers of victims and survivors. Still others write out of empathy and concern, having been moved deeply by the fate of those who suffer and die just because they are female. They offer heartfelt testimony of what they have experienced and witnessed.Veils, Halos & Shackles, is an important and timely contribution to the cause of women's empowerment and freedom; it speaks to a global audience and gives a voice to the millions whose outcries have been silenced.

Charles Adès Fishman is an award-winning poet, known for his memorable imagery and sensitivity to the depth of human experience. He completed a Doctor of Arts degree in contemporary American poetry and poetry-writing at SUNY Albany in 1982, and received a Fellowship in Poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 1995.

Fishman co-founded the Long Island Poetry Collective in 1973, and created the Visiting Writers Program at Farmingdale State College in 1979. He was the founder and coordinator of the Paumanok Poetry Award competition, and series editor for the Water Mark Poets of North America Book Award. He is currently poetry editor of PRISM: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Holocaust Educators.

His poems, essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in more than 350 journals, and in such major anthologies as The Sorrow Psalms: A Book of Twentieth Century Elegy (Iowa University Press, 2006); Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust (Northwestern University Press, 1998); and Carrying the Darkness: The Poetry of the Vietnam War (Avon, 1985).

His books include In the Path of Lightning: Selected Poems (2012), Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust (2007), and Chopin's Piano (2006), all from Time Being Books; Country of Memory (Uccelli Press, 2004); and The Death Mazurka (Texas Tech University Press, 1989), an ALA/Choice "Outstanding Book of the Year" that was nominated for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. His two most recent collections are Water under Water (2009) and In the Language of Women (2011), both from Casa de Snapdragon.

Among his awards are the 2014 Aesthetica Creative Writing Award for Poetry; Paterson Awards for Literary Excellence in 2007, 2010 and 2012; the New Millennium Prize for Poetry in 2012; the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize of the Southern California Anthology in 1996; and the 1987 Gertrude B. Claytor Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America.

Dr. Fishman is widely known for his brilliance as a teacher and editor, and for his powerful readings. He has appeared with Robert Creeley, Carolyn Forché, David Ignatow, Stanley Kunitz, Alicia Ostriker, Marge Piercy, William Stafford, C. K. Williams, and other writers in the vanguard of American poetry.

Smita Sahay is an Indian English-language writer whose works have appeared in Celebrating India, Muse India, the Pedestal Magazine, the Cha Journal, and Kitaab, among others. She has read her poetry 'at 100-1000 Poets for Change in Pune and Mumbai, the Prakriti Poetry Festival in Chennai, and Pen at Prithvi in Mumbai.

She co-conceptualized 'and served as associate editor of 'Veils, Halos & Shackles: International Poetry on the Oppression and Empowerment of Women. She is a member of the founding team of Cappuccino Readings, a poetry-reading initiative in Mumbai. '

Smita grew up in the states of Bihar and Jharkhand in India; and customs, traditions and culture from her childhood are recurring themes in her work, as are social prejudices and injustices. Her parents, with two daughters, were often questioned by pitying friends, relatives and neighbors about not having a third child and not "trying for" a son. As a little girl confronted by this belittling of her gender, she felt inadequate in an otherwise happy, healthy, love- and imagination-filled childhood. Standing up to gender inequality, particularly its innocuousness and iniquitousness, became, and remains, an integral part of her consciousness.

She believes in art as a powerful, universal medium that communicates to thinking and feeling humans. English and Hindi fiction and poetry have provided her with escape and bearable realities since her childhood; today they give her words to disagree with, to protest with, and to dream in.

Sahay attended a poetry-writing workshop and a fiction-writing residency, and during this period, she discovered Charles Adè s Fishman's luminous, justice-demanding, contemporary American poetry. These experiences led her closer to finding her own voice, both as a writer and as a human being.

Smita knows the ease with which voices can be silenced and people discredited, the tragic effortlessness with which dignity can be stripped away. Thus, after completing her MBA from the 'Indian School of Business, she is currently setting up an entrepreneurial venture to improve mental-healthcare delivery through the use of technology.