The late JOHN BEECHER (1904-1980), a Birmingham, Alabama native and descendent of the abolitionist Beechers, was groomed to take his father’s place as an executive in the steel industry, but when he went into the mills as a young man at the outset of the Great Depression he rebelled and began writing powerful, radical, activist poetry chronicling the economic ills of the 1930s, the steel mill environment, and the evils of Jim Crow segregation. The powerful and spare verse that fills One More River To Cross earned Beecher national recognition as a twentieth-century prophet of protest. His other books include Report to the Stockholders, To Live and Die in Dixie, In Egypt Land, and a 1974 Macmillan edition of collected poems, all out of print. STEVEN FORD BROWN’s translations of Angel Gonzalez (Spain), Pablo de Rohka (Chile), Pere Gimferrer (Catalonia), and Ana Maria Fagndo (Spain) have appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Harvard Review, The Marlboro Review, Poetry, Quarterly West, and Verse. His books include Astonishing World: The Selected Poems of Angel Gonzalez, 1956-1986 (Milkweed Editions, 1993), Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Southern Poetry (University of Virginia Press, 2001), Edible Amazonia: Twenty-One Poems from God’s Amazonian Recipe Book, translations of the poetry of Nicomedes Suarez-Arauz (Bolivia) (Bitter Oleander Press, 2002), and One More River To Cross: The Selected Poems of John Beecher (NewSouth Books, 2002). Excerpts from his translation of Astonishing World were included in The Vintage Anthology of Contemporary World Poetry, edited by J. D. McClatchy (Vintage/Random House, 1996). To support his translation of Astonishing World he received a translation grant from the Ministerio de Cultura, Madrid, Spain. The American Association of University Presses and the University Press Books Committee chose Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Southern Poetry as one of the "Best of the Best from the University Presses" for 2001. He lives in Boston.