Contributor

Norman MacAfee

Author, 'The Gospel According to RFK: Why It Matters Now'

Norman MacAfee’s The Gospel According to RFK: Why It Matters Now (Basic Books, 2008) documents Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign with major excerpts from RFK's visionary speeches. MacAfee’s other books include One Class: Selected Poems 1965-2008 (Harbor Mountain Press, 2008), The Coming of Fascism to America, A New Requiem, and The Death of the Forest, opera to music of Charles Ives. MacAfee co-translated a volume of the poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini, two volumes of the letters of Jean-Paul Sartre, Witness to My Life and Quiet Moments in a War, and Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. MacAfee lives in Manhattan.

One Class: Selected Poems 1965-2008 is now available from SPD, Harbor Mountain Press.

“Like history where dates are midnight assignations, like sexual encounters that bristle with political implications, One Class presents a unified social theory of life and art, love and politics and aesthetics, that is fearless and human. When Salman Rushdie forked over his 5 bucks to buy MacAfee’s chapbook ‘The Coming of Fascism to America’ at the Bowery Poetry Club, I saw in his face the same look I get when I read this work—it’s real, it’s unwavering, it’s art in the classical sense that gets dirty as life is in this Horrific Triumph of Capitalism. Somehow MacAfee tells the truth and doesn’t leave you hopeless. Somehow MacAfee gets it right.” —Bob Holman