Contributors’ Notes, Volume 28, #1
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AKUTAGAWA RYUNOSUKE (1892–1927) was a prolific Japanese short-story writer, known especially for his works based on twelfth- and thirteenth-century Japanese tales, which he imbued with a modern psychological sensibility. Later in his short life Akutagawa wrote autobiographical stories, which remain lesser known. The film classic Rashomon by Kurosawa is based on Akutagawa’s work, and a prestigious Japanese literature prize is awarded semiannually in his name.

STEVE ALMOND is the author of two story collections, My Life in Heavy Metal (Grove, 2002) and The Evil B. B. Chow (Algonquin, 2004). His next book, a collection of essays entitled (Not That You Asked), will come out this fall. He lives outside Boston with his wife and baby daughter, Josephine.

MISCHA BERLINSKI was born in New York in 1973. He studied classics at Columbia University and at the University of California at Berkeley. Among other jobs, he has worked as a journalist in Thailand. He lives in Rome.

ROSA ALICE BRANCO has published five collections of poetry. She teaches at the Escola Superior de Arte è Design in Porto, Portugal, and is the organizer of an annual poetry festival in her hometown of Aveiro. Her work has been translated into numerous languages, including French, Spanish, Italian, and Arabic. Translations of her poems have appeared in various U.S. magazines, including Artful Dodge, Green Mountains Review, Gulf Coast, Marlboro Review, Metamorphosis, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Seneca Review, and The Temple.

ERIC BREITBART is a filmmaker and freelance writer living in New York City.

JERICHO BROWN holds the C. Glen Cambor Fellowship at the Univeristy of Houston Ph.D. Program in Creative Writing and Literature, and he has an m.f.a. from the University of New Orleans. He is also a Cave Canem Fellow and recipient of the 2006 James A. Michener Fellowship, two travel fellowships to the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, and two Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference scholarships. He is poetry editor of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Art, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, AGNI, and Callaloo.

FRANCES CALDERON DE LA BARCA (1804–82), who was born in Edinburgh, wrote a collection of letters titled Life in Mexico (1843) in which she described her two years living there as the wife of the Spanish Minister to the new Republic of Mexico. She later wrote The Attaché in Madrid, while her husband, Don Angel Calderón de la Barca, was Minister of Foreign Affairs in Spain. She died in Madrid.

CHARLES DE WOLF has lived in the United States, Europe, and Asia. He is a professor at Keio University in Japan and a scholar of both historical linguistics and classic Japanese literature. De Wolf also translated Naoko Matsubara’s short story collection Tales of Days Gone By (Tuttle, 2004), and he has published a handbook, How to Sound Intelligent in Japanese: A Vocabulary Builder (Kodansha, 1993).

STEPHEN DIXON’s story “The Fool” will be included in a book of fiction called Meyer, to be published by Melville House this fall. Melville House recently brought out his thirteenth novel and twenty-fifth book of fiction, Phone Rings, and in 2004 his novel Old Friends. McSweeney’s Books published his novel End of I in the spring of 2006, and in 2002 published his novel I. Dixon teaches in the writing seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

ANDRE FURLANI is an associate professor in the English Department at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada.

CHRIS FORHAN, recently awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, is the author of two collections of poetry: The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars (Northeastern University Press, 2003), which won the Morse Prize and a Washington State Book Award, and Forgive Us Our Happiness (Middlebury College/upne, 1999), which won the Bakeless Prize. He teaches at Auburn University.

IAN GANASSI’s prose and poetry appear or are forthcoming in Caketrain, Elixir, Skidrow Penthouse, Boulevard, and The Gettysburg Review. His translations of Books 2 and 4 of the Aeneid appeared previously in NER. Completion of Book 6 was facilitated by a grant from the St. Botolph Foundation.

ROB HARDY is a writer and teacher from Minnesota, currently living in Kenilworth, England.

ELIZABETH HAUKAAS’s recent poems have appeared in The William and Mary Review, Agenda, Tiger Tail, New Millennium Writings, and Buffalo Bones. She is the recipient of a Rocky Mountain Women’s Association grant for poetry, and contest awards from New Millennium Writings and New Letters. She lives in New York City.

LAWRENCE JACKSON is associate professor of English and African American Studies at Emory University. He is the author of Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius (Wiley, 2002). His current project is a narrative history of black writers and critics between 1934 and 1960. The essay “To Danville” is part of a larger memoir called Black Like Nobody I Know.

A. VAN JORDAN is the author of Rise (Tia Chucha Press, 2001), M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A (W. W. Norton, 2004), and Quantum Lyrics, forthcoming from W. W. Norton this summer.

ROY KESEY has recently published stories in The Kenyon Review and The Florida Review, among other magazines. A short-short called “Scroll,” first published in Prism: International, was selected for inclusion in the upcoming New Sudden Fiction anthology, to be published by W. W. Norton. Also, a novella called “Nothing in the World” won the 2005 Bullfight Media Little Book Prize and was published in May 2006. His first collection of stories, All Over, will be published in October by Dzanc Books.

JOANN KOBIN’s short fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, The Literary Review, The North American Review, New Letters, Boston Globe Magazine, and other journals and anthologies. She is the author of a novel-in-stories, Woman Made of Sand (Delphinium, 2002).

ALEXIS LEVITIN has published translations in more than two hundred literary magazines, including American Poetry Review, Chelsea, The Kenyon Review, Partisan Review, Prairie Schooner, and New England Review. His twenty-two books in translation include Clarice Lispector’s Soulstorm (New Directions, 1989), Forbidden Words: Selected Poetry of Eugénio de Andrade (New Directions, 2003), News from the Blockade and Other Poems by Egito Gonçalves (Guernica Editions, 2001), and Guernica and Other Poems by Carlos de Oliveira (Guernica Editions, 2004). He has won two NEA Translation Awards, along with support from the Witter Bynner Poetry Foundation, the Columbia University Translation Center, the Wheatland Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts.

ERIC PANKEY is the Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University and is the author of seven poetry collections. His New and Selected Poems is forthcoming from Ausable Press in 2008.

PETER PLAGENS is a painter and critic who lives in New York. A contributor to many magazines, he also served for a long time as the regular art critic for Newsweek. His books include Sunshine Muse: Art on the West Coast, 1945–1970 and Time for Robo, a novel.

FRED REDEKOP is a psychotherapist living in New Hampshire. His work has appeared in The Florida Review, Salon, Pindeldyboz, The Paumanok Review, 100 Words, Mississippi Valley Review, The New Quarterly, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and Iowa City Magazine.

PAISLEY REKDAL is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee (Pantheon, 2000), and three books of poetry, A Crash of Rhinos (University of Georgia Press, 2000), Six Girls Without Pants (Eastern Washington University Press, 2002), and The Invention of the Kaleidoscope, just out from the University of Pittsburgh Press.

SUZANNE RIVECCA is a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University. Her fiction is forthcoming in Best New American Voices, 2008 and has appeared in StoryQuarterly, Fence, ACM, Third Coast, The Journal, and Artful Dodge. She lives in San Francisco.

BRIAN SWANN’s most recent books are Autumn Road (Ohio State University Press, 2005), Snow House (Pleiades Press/lsu Press, 2006), and Algonquian Spirit (University of Nebraska Press, 2006).

MARJORIE VECCHIO is Director of the Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery, University of Nevada, Reno, where she teaches MFA candidates in Theory and Criticism. She is also summer faculty at Transart Institute, a low-residency m.f.a. program in Austria. From 1995 to 2005, Vecchio was an exhibiting photographic installation artist, independent curator, gallery president, and photography teacher in Chicago and New York. One day she plans to return to art-making.

ERIKA WILLIAMS has previously appeared in Zoetrope All-Story Extra and The Massachusetts Review. She grew up in both Germany and the Midwest and currently lives in Kansas City with her husband and two daughters.

DAVID YEZZI is the author of The Hidden Model (TriQuarterly, 2003). His libretto for a chamber opera by David Conte, Firebird Motel, received its world premiere in 2003 and was recently released on disk from Arsis. His poems have appeared most recently in Southwest Review, The Yale Review, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, and The Best American Poetry 2006.