Alen Pol Kobryn

Kobryn was born in Utica, New York, known at the time as 'Sin City' for the extent of its political corruption and mob control. He attended local parochial schools and then Johns Hopkins, NYU, and the City University of New York, where he studied with John Ashbery. Having worked in finance at the Bank of New York, Hayden Stone, and Tudor Hedge Fund, and in the Medical division of Springer Verlag, and represented by Kurt Hellmer as his first literary agent, Kobryn then found his way to what the New York Times referred to at the time as 'The Anarchists Circus' of WBAI in New York during that station's 'Golden Era' of considerable innovation and influence in the arts, literature, and politics - as well as its enormous influence in free-form radio. At WBAI Kobryn hosted 'Big Al's Literary Salon & Pool Hall', and also directed and produced any number of independent productions, as well as functioning as an announcer, audio engineer, and lending his voice to such outside efforts as PBS's 'Nova'. 'Attica State', a verse cycle with the Attica State Prison Riots and their repression as its theme, an anarchist shcrei or manifesto, was circulated underground in the early 1970s, as well as presented at readings in New York, and ultimately found its way to the air on WBAI in the late 1970s - and Kobryn with it. When Kobryn was asked by an agent if he had anything in prose, as Attica State was considered commercially untouchable at the time, he produced '. . . and other prisons', a novella clearly derived from autobiographical experience with respect to the effects of his father's paralysis and its catastrophically destructive effects on family and in which, ironically and perhaps typically, he had written himself out. The publication of 'Poseidon's Shadow', a consideration of the themes of the Iliad in the form of a contemporary cold war thriller, is thought to contain en passant the first explicit references to stealth and advanced sonar technologies, and as such was noted in the course of Ronald Reagan's electoral campaign. Following this period Kobryn, always somewhat private if not secretive, appears to have entered some form of stealth mode, active in investments of various forms and in whatever literary work may be in process. A recent glimpse of contemporary work was his collaboration with composer Wang Jie on the translation of poems from their original Chinese. He appears also to be involved in commercial voice work, though the precise form and extent of this is also at present unclear. Kobryn, having been in a marriage or two, a divorce or two, a relationship or two, is at present single and the father of one son, Tristan Aidan Kobryn.