About

Frances Brent writes prose and poetry often focusing on the strength and fragility of art. She was born in Chicago and educated at Barnard College before doing graduate work at Columbia University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois. Her book, The Beautiful Lesson of the I (winner of the May Swenson Award, Utah State University Press, 2006), is about the way consciousness and imagination preserve what the eye takes in, turning it back into beauty and art.

From 1983-1990 she edited Formations, an international journal of fiction, essays on the arts, and photography, specializing in writing from “the Other Europe,” work produced in the wake of the Holocaust and in response to the Cold War. Much of her teaching at Yale, Northwestern, and Loyola University was informed by those Eastern European and Central European authors and for nearly ten years she wrote book reviews on this subject. With the Slavicist, Carol Avins, she translated Beyond the Limit, Poems by Irina Ratushinskaya (Northwestern University Press, 1987).  Ratushinskaya, a Soviet dissident was in a corrective labor camp when the project began and she was released one day before the famous Reykjavik Summit in 1986.  The book was reviewed and listed in the New York Times Most Noteworthy Books of 1987 and nominated for the 1987 Translation Prize in Poetry from PEN.  Poems from the book were reprinted in the New York Review of Books and Harper’s Magazine as well as many national magazines and newspapers.

Her book The Lost Cellos of Lev Aronson (Atlas & Co., 2009) is a cultural biography about a cellist who survived the Riga Ghetto and the instruments that passed through his hands. It was praised by Elie Wiesel who wrote, “Frances Brent’s wonderful book movingly allows Lev Aronson’s Lost Cellos to sing again of dark times and profound yearning.” Richard Sennett reviewed it in the Wall Street Journal: writing, “Frances Brent gives us a moving account of Aronson’s experience—through war and peace—and a nuanced appreciation of his musical gifts.”

More recently she has written a series of articles for Tablet Magazine about artists and writers who lived in Europe before the Second World War, passing on their gifts to a new generation.  She’s also written extensively about modern and contemporary art and design with a special interest in lives of things that are witnesses and markers of our lives, carrying our fingerprints while experiencing their own fate.