2026 Annual Dante Reading Participants
Laura Brown is a writer and a business communication consultant. She is the author of How to Write Anything: A Complete Guide (W. W. Norton, 2014) and The Only Business Writing Book You'll Ever Need (W. W. Norton, 2019). She sings with the Cecilia Chorus of New York. Laura holds an MA in Drama from the University of London and a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University.
Elizabeth Castelli is Professor of Religion at Barnard College, where she teaches courses on late ancient Christianity and its afterlives. She is the author of Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture-Making and the translator of St. Paul, the never-produced film script by Italian writer and director, Pier Paolo Pasolini. She serves on the board of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, whose mission is to extend liberal arts education and research beyond the borders of the traditional university.
Edgar Choueiri is Professor of Applied Physics at Princeton University and the Chief Scientist of the University's Electric Propulsion and Plasma Dynamics Lab (where he works on spacecraft propulsion) and of the 3D Audio and Applied Acoustics Lab (where he works on spatial audio).
Michael Connolly is a longtime reader at the Cathedral as well as veteran editor for a global media organization and a psychoanalyst who is president of Harlem's own psychoanalytic-training institute, the Harlem Family Institute, which has just opened the Margaret Morgan Lawrence Center for Family & Child Development in East Harlem. He grew up in an arts and clergy family in Sydney, Australia, where he studied classical singing, and also learned about spoken word from observing his eldest brother, Richard, direct voice actors as head of radio drama & features for the Australian Broadcasting Commission after studies at the Vatican and playing the organs of Rome in the 1940s. Michael first performed at age 9 as a soloist in Gilbert & Sullivan operettas at the Sydney Conservatorium, the city's main classical-music venue until the Sydney Opera House was built in the 1960s & '70s.
Tom Fedorek is a volunteer guide to St John the Divine. He can show you the two images of Dante within the Cathedral.
Carmela Vircillo Franklin is Professor of Classics at Columbia University, and specializes in medieval Latin literature. She was the Director of The American Academy in Rome (2005-10). She is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. She served as President of the Medieval Academy of America (2016-17); and as Chair of the Board of Trustees of The Samuel H. Kress Foundation (2017-2025).
Bishop William Franklin is Assisting Bishop of The Episcopal Diocese of Long Island and IX Diocesan Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Western New York (resigned). He also serves as a member of the faculty of the Episcopal and Anglican Studies Program at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. He has served as Dean and President of the Berkely Divinity School at Yale University and on the faculty of the Harvard Divinity School and the faculty of the General Theological Seminary in New York City. He is married to Carmela Vircillo Franklin who is a Professor of Classics at Columbia University.
Ron Jenkins, a recipient of Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, has facilitated theater workshops inspired by Dante in prisons in Italy, Indonesia, and the U.S. Jenkins is a Professor of Theater at Wesleyan University and teaches courses on Dante as a Visiting Professor at the Yale Divinity School’s Institute of Sacred Music. Jenkins was introduced to Dante by the Italian Nobel Laureate Dario Fo whose plays he has translated and/or directed for productions at Harvard’s American Repertory Theater, the Yale Repertory Theater, and other venues. In recognition of his work teaching Dante in prison Jenkins was awarded an Honorary Membership in the Dante Society of America. His play, “Hell Has an Exit,” created in collaboration with the rap poet BL Shirelle and the Baptist preacher Debra Taylor, compares their journey out of prison to Dante’s journey out of hell. It will be presented by Fordham University’s Curran Center for Catholic Studies on April 30.
Johanna Beale Keller is an award-winning filmmaker, playwright and journalist. Her first film, The Perfect Match, was winner of Best Screenplay and Best Comedy awards from U.S. film festivals; her second film, Birthday Box, stars two-time TONY Award nominee Mary Beth Peil (Dawson’s Creek & The Good Wife) and will be released in fall 2026. Her prize-winning stage plays have been produced in New York, Brooklyn, Houston, Lake Tahoe, Nova Scotia and elsewhere. Her writing on music has been widely published by the NYTimes (ASCAP Deems Taylor Award and Front Page Award), Los Angeles Times, Opera magazine, Hopkins Review, and other publications. Her poems have been published in Southwest Review, Barrow Street, Nimrod, Florida Review, and elsewhere. She is an emerita professor at Syracuse University, a four-time judge of the Pulitzer Prizes (in Criticism), and gardens upstate in Syracuse, NY.
The Reverend Canon Steven Lee is the Vicar of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine.
Charles Martin’s eighth book of poetry, The Khayyam Suite, has just been published by Johns Hopkins University Press. He is former poet-in-residence at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. He is the translator of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (W.W. Norton), Catullus (Johns Hopkins), and Euripides’s Medea (University of Southern California Press). Charlesmartinpoet.com
Stephen Nicholas is an honorary Canon for Mission at Cathedral St. John the Divine and a retired pediatrician.
Michael Palma’s full-length poetry collections are A Fortune in Gold, Begin in Gladness, and the forthcoming Local Colors. He has also published Faithful in My Fashion: Essays on the Translation of Poetry and more than twenty translations of modern Italian poetry, the most recent of which are The Dimension of Loss by Enzo Lamartora (2024) and Bertgang by Luigi Fontanella (2025). His translation of the Inferno was published by Norton in 2002 and reissued as a Norton Critical Edition in 2007 and in the Norton Library series in 2021, and his fully rhymed translation of the complete Divine Comedy was published by Liveright in December 2024. He is the only person to have participated in every one of the annual Dante readings at the Cathedral since they began in 1994.
Joseph J. Portanova is now retired after teaching for forty years at New York University’s Liberal Studies and Global Liberal Studies Program. He has published poetry in Icarus, the West Fourth Street Review, and the American Journal of Contemporary Hellenic Issues. His connection with the Cathedral began in 1975, when he met Canon Edward N. West. Dr. Portanova read his poem “Reading Dante at the Cathedral” in Florence, when he taught at N.Y.U.’s La Pietra campus.
John Simko is a long-time Dante contributor and Cathedral guide.
William Singer is a practicing architect for the City of New York.
T. Shepard Soules; "To my Selectric Poemsand The Book Earth DreamsI strive to add Below (Dante's Inferno as put into rhymed American)."
The Very Reverend Winnie Varghese is the 12th Dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, the world’s largest Gothic cathedral. A national leader in The Episcopal Church, Rev. Varghese is known for her inspired writing, teaching, and preaching. Prior to joining the Cathedral, she was the 23rd Rector of St. Luke’s Atlanta, GA. Before that, Rev. Varghese served as Priest for Ministry and Program Coordination at Trinity Church Wall Street in New York City. Prior to Trinity, she served as Rector and Priest-in-Charge at St. Mark’s in the Bowery in New York and was also Chaplain at both Columbia University and University of California Los Angeles. Rev. Varghese serves on the Board of Trustees of Union Theological Seminary, she chaired the General Convention’s Committee on the State of the Church from 2015 to 2018, and she served on the Board of Trustees of the Episcopal Divinity School from 2013 to 2016. She is also a published author, editor, and podcaster.
The Rev. Varghese is the daughter of Indian immigrants and spent part of her early childhood years in Kerala, India. She attended Agnes Scott College in Decatur, GA and earned her bachelor’s degree from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX. She then graduated from Union Theological Seminary with her Master of Divinity degree in 1999. She was ordained to the diaconate in Los Angeles in 1999 and to the priesthood six months later in 2000.