Ales Debeljak was a translator, essayist, poet, and cultural critic. He earned his PhD in social thought from Syracuse University and he became the director of the Center for Cultural and Religious Studies at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. He won the Slovenian National Book Award, the Miriam Lindberg Israel Poetry for Peace Prize (Tel Aviv), and the Chiqu Poetry Prize (Tokyo). Read More His books appeared in more than a dozen languages. His publications in English include Reluctant Modernity: The Institution of Art and Its Historical Forms (Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), Twilight of the Idols: Recollections of a Lost Yugoslavia (White Pine, 1994), and three books of poetry: The City and the Child (White Pine, 1999), Dictionary of Silence (Lumen, 1999), and Anxious Moments (White Pine, 1994). Debeljak lived with his wife and three children in Ljubljana until his death in January of 2016.