Steven Ford Brown

Steven Ford Brown in 1983. Photo by Dennis Harper

Steven Ford Brown (born September 11, 1952 in Florence (Lauderdale County)), Alabama, is a journalist, music critic, publisher and translator, currently living in Boston, Massachusetts. He is the founder and Managing Director of The Official Tomas Tranströmer Website, a website dedicated to the life and work of the 2011 Nobel Prize winner for Literature.

Of French and Scottish descent, Brown is the son of Ford Brown (a Marine veteran of World War II and sales executive) and Gloria Peters (a housewife). As a high school student in Birmingham he became interested in the San Francisco Beatnik literature of the 1950s and '60s and music of the British Invasion bands of the era. He completed his bachelor's degree in English and Literature in 1992 at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He has also studied at the University of Houston and Harvard University's Extension School.

In 1973 Brown moved to Birmingham’s Southside, a community just below Red Mountain and ten minutes from the downtown area of Birmingham where the most violent confrontations of the Civil Rights era took place. Not unlike New York City's Greenwich Village and San Francisco's Haight Ashbury during the 1960s, Southside, in stark contrast to the Civil Rights battleground in downtown Birmingham, was home to a tolerant alternative artistic, cultural and lifestyle scene. The Southside community featured an alternative newspaper (The Paperman), a Buddhist styled natural foods store (Golden Temple Health Foods), Society's Child, a folk music oriented coffeehouse, several communes, an alternative culture headshop, a free medical clinic, the Charlemagne Record Exchange, The Garages art studios and the Red Mountain Alternative School.

Brown began his literary affiliations on Southside by joining a loose congregation of artists, writers and musicians who gathered and lived at the Cobb Lane Studios, a collection of apartments and studios above the Cobb Lane Restaurant on 20th Street. He began a writing career in earnest with The Paperman as an occasional journalist, books and literary editor and music reviewer. He created and edited for the paper an original series of features and profiles of American artists and writers that included photographer Diane Arbus, writers John Beecher, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Hugo, Diane Wakoski and Poets against the Vietnam War. During this period on Southside he also met artists Frank Fleming, Dennis Harper and Nall, bookstore owner Joe Simpson, and poet John Beecher and his wife Barbara.

He left The Paperman in 1975 to become editor of Aura Literary Arts Review at The University of Alabama at Birmingham, publishing work by Yukio Mishima (Japan), Diane Wakoski, and features on Robert Bly, Howard Nemerov, the American Prose Poem and Southern culture and literature. 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 and magazines. In 1983, in conjunction with the Birmingham Public Library, he published Contemporary Literature in Birmingham: An Anthology, an edition that included poetry and fiction from Birmingham writers.

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Contemporary Literature in Birmingham, 1983

With Birmingham writer Danny Gamble in 1980, he founded the Old Town Music and Reading series on Morris Avenue off of 20th Street North in downtown Birmingham. The founding of this performance series was the culmination of a number of years of sponsorship by Brown of conferences, readings and music performances by Birmingham artists. Brown and Gamble coordinated with Drew Tombrello, owner of The Old Town Music Hall, to present performances to packed audiences three times a year. Performers included many local musician and writers, such as The Broken Hearts, Johnny Coley, Lolly Lee, Charles Muse, The Ray Reach Group, Dale Short, Michael Swindle and Macey Taylor. There were also periodic performances by such notable musicians as Mose Allison and Larry Jon Wilson and writers Michael Harper, Philip Levine, Larry Levis and Shirley Williams.

In 1983 Brown left Birmingham and moved to Houston, Texas. While in Texas he served as a Board Member of the Houston Poetry Festival and as Director of Research for the George Plimpton interview series, The Writer in Society, that in 1984 appeared on the Channel 8 PBS affiliate in Houston, Texas, and featured interviews with Maya Angelou, John Barth, Donald Barthelme and Bobbie Anne Mason. His own research for the series was on the short fiction and novels of Barthelme. It was during this time that he met poet Vassar Miller and edited Heart's Invention (1988), a book of literary criticism about the poetry of the former Texas Poet Laureate. Heart's Invention included an introductory essay by novelist,screenwriter and Pulitzer Prize winner Larry McMurtry. It was also during this period that Brown began translating the work of Spanish poet Ángel González which resulted in the publication of Astonishing World: The Selected Poems of Ángel González, 1956-1986 (Milkweed Editions, 1992). The The Harvard Review concluded a lengthy review of Astonishing World with a single word of praise: "Bravo".

Brown has contributed writing to The Christian Science Monitor, The Harvard Review, Poetry magazine, Rolling Stone, Jacket and Verse. He edited a volume of poems by John Beecher and co-edited an anthology of contemporary Southern poets.

After moving to Texas, Brown worked as a researcher for a local public television station and began translating the works of Spanish poet Ángel González. His Astonishing World: The Selected Poems of Ángel González, 1956-1986 was published by the non-profit Milkweed Editions in 1992. He followed that with translations of Nicomedes Suarez Arauz, Jorge Carrera Andrade, and Juan Carlos Galeano. He edited two special issues of the Atlanta Review focusing on Latin American and Spanish poetry and has been involved in Alan Cordle's "Foetry" campaign against the institutionalization of American poetry awards.

Now residing in Boston, Massachusetts, Brown worked in the European Equities Department of Wellington Management LLP, an international private investment firm in Boston’s Financial District, from 1998 to 2006. He resigned to resume working as a writer and editor.

He has been a Board member of the New England Poetry Club, an organization founded in 1915 by Conrad Aiken, Robert Frost and Amy Lowell. A featured writer at Boxing Herald.com and Boston Music Spotlight, he has also contributed writing to The Christian Science Monitor, The Harvard Review, Poetry, Rolling Stone, Jacket (Australia) and Verse. His translations of Jorge Carrera Andrade were featured on the BBC’s Radio 4 literary Program The Verb, and Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Southern Poetry(University of virginia Press 2002) was selected as one of the "Best of the Best from the University Presses" and featured on C-SPAN's "Book TV".

He was awarded a residency at the Swedish Writers Union in Stockholm, Sweden in 2006. 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 Cultural Office of the Swedish Embassy in New York City and the Texas Commission for the Arts. In 1982 the Birmingham Festival of Arts awarded him the Silver Bowl for his contributions to the literary arts of Birmingham, Alabama.

Bibliography (Books)

International

• Microgramas, Jorge Carrera Andrade, Orogenia Corporacion Cultural: Quito, Ecuador, 2007

United States

• One More River To Cross: The Selected Poems of John Beecher, New South Books , 2003 (poetry)
• 18 Contemporary Poets from Spain, as editor, The Atlanta Review Special Edition, Atlanta Review Press, 2003 (poetry)
• Century of The Death of The Rose: The Selected Poems of Jorge Carrera Andrade, New South Books , 2002 (poetry)
• Edible Amazonia: Twenty poems from God's Amazonian Recipe Book, Nicomedes Suarez Arauz, Bitter Oleander Press, 2002 (poetry)
• After Neruda, After Paz: 16 Latin American Poets, as editor, The Atlanta Review Special Edition, Atlanta Review Press, 2002 (poetry)
• Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Southern Poetry, University of Virginia Press, 2001 (literary critcism, poetry)
• Astonishing World: The Selected Poems of Ángel González, 1956-1986, MN: Milkweed Editions, 1993 (poetry)
• Heart’s Invention: On The Poetry Of Vassar Miller, Ford-Brown & Co., Publishers, 1988 (literary criticism)
• Contemporary Literature in Birmingham: An Anthology, Birmingham Public Library/ Thunder City Press, Birmingham, AL,1983 (fiction, poetry)

References

• Steven Ford Brown (January 16, 2011) Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia - accessed February 3, 2011
• Steven Ford Brown website
• Steven Ford Brown at New South Books
• Steven Ford Brown at Somerville, MA Arts Council

Related Websites

• "The Saban Way: Alabama Will Defeat Texas In The Rose Bowl" (January 6, 2010)
• Yim Tam Lisa Wong,“Steven Ford Brown in conversation with Y. T. Wong," Jacket magazine (Australia), August 2002
• Louis E. Bourgeois, “Foetry.com And What Academia Doesn't Want You to Know About the Creative Writing Industry, An Interview with Steven Ford Brown," Left Curve magazine, Number 30, 2005
• "An Afternoon with Transtromer in Stockholm," Alabama Writers Forum Blog Archive, October 17, 2011
• Official Website of Tomas Tranströmer
• "Steven Ford Brown remembers Spanish poet Ángel González", NewSouth Books