Stanley Kunitz and Friends

Stanley Kunitz, recently chosen as Poet Laureate of the United States, served as advisor to The Human Experience, a Quaker-inspired collection of poetry and fiction by Soviet and American writers that was jointly edited and published in the United States and the Soviet Union in 1989. In May, 1987, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Kunitz gave a benefit poetry reading on behalf of the project, where he observed: "One of the discoveries that I've made in the course of my life is that there is a deep and touching solidarity and friendship among all writers and artists on this planet. Poets, in particular, constitute an international community of souls. I know that wherever I travel, whenever I'm among poets, I will be in the company of friends. This gies me hope because they are the ones who are instruments for fashioning greater harmony among peoples."

Kunitz has translated into English such major poets as Anna Akhmatova, Yevgeni Yevtushenko, and Andrei Voznesensky.

--From "The Human Experience: A Literary Bridge for Peace" by Anthony Manousos, Soviet Life, May, 1989. Manousos is the editor of Friends Bulletin (the official publication of Western unprogrammed Quakers) and A Western Quaker Reader, a collection of writings by and about Quakers in the Western USA, 1929-1999. Anthony Manousos' poetry can be found at All the Time in the World. Janet Riley has continued to work on joint Russian-American book projects, the most recent being Lighting Candles in the Dark.