Bio: Gail Holst-Warhaft.
website: www.gailholst-warhaft.com
Besides being a poet, Gail Holst-Warhaft has been a journalist, broadcaster, prose-writer, academic, musician, and translator. Among her many publications are Road to Rembetika, Theodorakis: Myth and Politics in Modern Greek Music, The Collected Poems of Nikos Kavadias, Dangerous Voices: Women’s Laments and Greek Literature, The Cue for Passion: Grief and its Political Uses, I Had Three Lives: Selected Poems of Mikis Theodorakis, and a collection of her own poems: Penelope’s Confession. She has published translations of Aeschylus and a number of Greece’s leading novelists and poets. Her poems and translations of Greek poetry have appeared in journals in the US, UK, and Australia. She was Poet Laureate of Tompkins County for 2011 Her Kavadias translations won an award from Columbia University in 2012. The Fall of Athens, a collection of poetry, essays and stories about Greece, was published in November 2015 by Fomite Press.
Gail was born in Australia and made her first trip to Greece in the mid-196o's where she fell in love with Greece, its music and its poetry. In the 1970's, while researching her first book on the Greek "blues" called rembetika, Gail played in the orchestra of the legendary composers Mikis Theodorakis (known for his score for Zorba the Greek and Z) and Dionysis Savvopoulos. In the 80's her first book was made into a documentary film, Rebetika: The Blues of Greece, narrrated by Anthony Quinn. She directs the Mediterranean Studies Initiative in the Institure for European Studies. In the 1990's she published two books about Greek laments and the politics of grief. More recently she has been engaged in the isssue of water scarcity on the Aegean islands. She was appointed an adjunct professor in the department of Biological and Environmental Engineering at Cornell.
Gail is married to Zellman Warhaft, emeritus professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. They have two children, Zoe and Simon.
