Contributors’ Notes, Vol. 26, #2
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PETER ALTENBERG [Richard Engländer] (1859–1919) was the author of thirteen books of musings, aphorisms, and prose poems—eleven published during his lifetime and two more after his death. Born into a well-to-do, assimilated Viennese Jewish family, he renounced his bourgeois upbringing and cultivated an existence befitting an eccentric bohemian poet. He also pioneered the very notion of loose-fitting leisure attire, designed a line of necklaces, and favored sandals, walking sticks, and slivovitz. His long list of literary admirers included Karl Kraus, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Arthur Schnitzler, and George Bernard Shaw.

DANIEL ANDERSON’s work has appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, Harper’s, The New Republic, The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, The Best American Poetry, and Southwest Review, among other places. His first book of poems, January Rain, was published in 1997 by Story Line Press. His second collection, Drunk in Sunlight, is forthcoming in 2006 from the Johns Hopkins University Press. He edited The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov (Swallow Press), which was listed as a New York Times “Notable Book” in 2003. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bogliasco Foundation, he is currently the Nancy and Rayburn Watkins Endowed Professor of Creative Writing at Murray State University.

DAVID BARBER is the author of two collections of poems: The Spirit Level, which received the Terrence Des Pres Prize from TriQuarterly Books, and Wonder Cabinet, which will be published next fall by Zoo Press.

LILLIAS BEVER’s first book of poetry, Bellini in Istanbul, won the Tupelo Press Judge’s Prize, and is forthcoming in October. She has also received an Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission fellowship and a Seattle Arts Commission award, and her work has appeared in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Pleiades, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle.

NICOLE COOLEY’s first book of poetry, Resurrection, won the 1995 Walt Whitman Award and was published by lsu Press in 1996. Her second collection, The Afflicted Girls, about the Salem witch trials of 1692, was brought out by lsu Press in April 2004. At present she is at work on a book called Stabat Mater. She is an associate professor of English at Queens College–cuny and lives in New Jersey with her husband and two daughters.

DEBORAH CUMMINS is the author of two books of poetry, Beyond the Reach (BkMk Press, 2002) and From the Road It Looks Like Paradise (State Street Books, 1997). The recipient of numerous awards, including a 2005 Illinois Arts Council fellowship in poetry, she currently serves as Chair of the Board of The Poetry Foundation. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Yale Review, TriQuarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, and other journals. She resides in Evanston, Illinois, and Deer Isle, Maine.

ANDREW DAY’s fiction has been published by Pindeldyboz, Eleven Bulls, and elimae. He is working on a novel.

BRIAN KOMEI DEMPSTER’s poems have appeared in The Asian Pacific American Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Fourteen Hills, Green Mountains Review, Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, Post Road, Prairie Schooner, and Quarterly West. His work has been anthologized in Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation (University of Illinois Press, 2004) and Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images (Coffee House Press, 2003). He is the editor of From Our Side of the Fence: Growing Up in America’s Concentration Camps (Kearny Street Workshop, 2001).

JEHANNE DUBROW was born in Italy and grew up in Yugoslavia, Zaire, Poland, Belgium, Austria, and the United States. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in creative writing at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Her work has appeared in Poetry and The Hudson Review, and is forthcoming in Tikkun. 

IAN GANASSI’s work has appeared in numerous literary magazines, including The Yale Review, Denver Quarterly, and American Letters & Commentary. His most recent publications include poetry and prose in current or forthcoming issues of Octopus, The Journal, Slake, and Elixir. Additional excerpts from his translation of the Aeneid (a work in progress) have appeared in previous issues of the New England Review.

RACHEL HADAS is Board of Governors Professor of English at the Newark campus of Rutgers University and the author of over a dozen books of poetry, essays, and translations, most recently Laws (Zoo Press, 2004). Currently she is preparing a book of prose and is co-editing an anthology of Greek poetry in translation from Homer to the present.

JESSE LEE KERCHEVAL is the author of the novel The Museum of Happiness (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003) and the poetry collections World as Dictionary (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1999) and Dog Angel (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004). She teaches at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she directs the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.

JONATHAN LEVY is the author of many plays for adults and children as well as several works of scholarship and criticism. He is Distinguished Teaching Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and a frequent contributor to New England Review.

ROBERT LOPEZ lives in Bridgeport, Connecticut, with his wife, Heather. His fiction has appeared in BOMB, The Chattahoochee Review, American Letters & Commentary, New Orleans Review, Post Road, Confrontation, Hobart, Willow Springs, SleepingFish, and online at Failbetter, Taint, and Word Riot. He teaches an experimental fiction workshop at the New School University and has recently completed a novel.

ROBERT LOWELL [Robert Traill Spence Lowell iv] (1917–77) was born into a prominent Boston family, and studied at Harvard before leaving in 1937 to complete his undergraduate work at Kenyon College. His first book of poems, Land of Unlikeness, was published privately in 1944; Lord Weary’s Castle appeared two years later, and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. In 1959 Lowell published Life Studies, perhaps his most memorable and influential work, which won the National Book Award in 1960. His collection of Imitations (after poems in other languages) appeared that same year, and the volume titled For the Union Dead followed in 1964. He also wrote a trilogy of plays, and his 1973 volume, The Dolphin, earned him another Pulitzer Prize. Just before his death he published the autobiographical collection Day by Day (1977).

KEITH LEE MORRIS is the author of two books, The Greyhound God (a novel) and The Best Seats in the House (a story collection), both published by the University of Nevada Press. Several of his stories have appeared in New England Review, and his work has also been included in such journals as The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, The Sun, and Puerto del Sol. He teaches at Clemson University, where he serves as fiction editor of The South Carolina Review.

ANNE RAEFF lives in Albuquerque where she is co-owner of Two Serious Ladies, an Asian furniture store, and where she teaches world history and Spanish at the high school level. Her first novel, Clara Mondschein’s Melancholia, was published by MacAdam/Cage Publishing in 2002 and her short stories have appeared in Oasis and Side Show.

ELIZABETH ROLLINS has previously published work in The Philadelphia CityPaper, friskmagazine, Washington College Magazine, The Redwood Coast Review, storyglossia, GW Review, PMS (poem/memoir/story) Journal, and Bellevue Literary Review. She is the author of the chapbook The Sin Eater (Corvid Press, 2004), recipient of a prose fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, and a teaching artist for New Jersey Writer’s Project. Currently she is at work on an novel.

MARK RUDMAN has published eight books of poetry, three of prose, and translations of Boris Pasternak’s My Sister—Life and Euripides’ Daughters of Troy. His latest book is Sundays on the Phone (Wesleyan University Press). He is working on a memoir called Out of the Loop.

ROGER SEDARAT has just received his Ph.D. in English from Tufts University. He currently teaches English at Borough of Manhattan Community College.

REBECCA SOLNIT is the author of numerous books, including Hope in the Dark, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, and As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. In 2003, she received a Lannan Literary Award. She lives in San Francisco.

CHRISTOPHER SORRENTINO is the author of a previous novel, Sound on Sound (Dalkey Archive Press, 1995). He has contributed fiction, essays, and criticism to The Baffler, Bookforum, Conjunctions, Fence, and McSweeney’s, among other publications, and is a contributor to Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers: Writers on Comics (Pantheon, 2004). He lives in Brooklyn.

ROBERT THOMAS’s Dragging the Lake is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press. His first book, Door to Door, was chosen by Yusef Komunyakaa as winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize and published by Fordham University Press in 2002, and in 2003 he received a poetry grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in South San Francisco.

MARK TWAIN [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910), the celebrated author of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi, and The Innocents Abroad, was also well-known in his time for his lectures, storytelling, newspaper sketches, satire, autobiographical musings, and pungent epigrams.

MYLES WEBER is the author of Middlebrow Annoyances: American Drama in the 21st Century (Gival Press) and, most recently, Consuming Silences: How We Read Authors Who Don’t Publish (University of Georgia Press), which includes (under a different title) the essay on J. D. Salinger that appears in this issue of New England Review.

SAM WITT lived outside of London until the age of seven, when his family moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Until very recently, Witt has lived in San Francisco, where he’s written journalism for such publications as the San Francisco Chronicle, Wired, Salon, Computer World, CNN.com, and others. His poems have been published in Virginia Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Fence, and have also been anthologized in The New Young American Poets and The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries. His first book, Everlasting Quail (University Press of New England, 2001), was chosen by Carol Frost as the winner of the Katherine Bakeless Nason Award in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Russia for the year 2002 and lived for thirteen months in Saint Petersburg. He currently teaches poetry writing at Harvard University.

VALERIE WOHLFELD’s poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and elsewhere. A recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for her first collection, Thinking the World Visible (1994), she has recently completed a book of poetry and prose entitled The Dreams of an Imaginary Woman.

THEODORE WOROZBYT has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Georgia and Alabama Councils for the Arts. His poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Conduit, Goodfoot, Hotel Amerika, The North American Review, Northwest Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Daily, Smartish Pace, The Southern Review, Spinning Jenny, and Verse Daily.

PETER WORTSMAN is the author of A Modern Way to Die: small stories and microtales (Fromm International, 1991) and two stage plays: The Tattooed Man Tells All (2000) and Burning Words (2004). His short work in multiple modes has appeared in journals and anthologies in the U.S. and Europe. Among his translations from the German are Posthumous Papers of a Living Author by Robert Musil and Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemiel. Wortsman is the recipient of the Beard’s Fund Short Story Award and fellowships from the Fulbright and Thomas J. Watson Foundations.