Contributors’ Notes, Vol. 29, #1
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STEVE ALMOND is the author of two story collections, My Life in Heavy Metal (Grove, 2002) and The Evil B. B. Chow (Algonquin, 2004); the novel Which Brings Me to You (with Julianna Baggott, Algonquin, 2006); and the nonfiction book Candyfreak (Algonquin, 2004). His new book is a collection of essays entitled (Not That You Asked), published by Random House. He lives outside Boston with his wife and daughter, Josephine, who can now make the noises of seven different farm animals. His online home is www.stevenalmond.com.

RICK BAROT’s second collection of poems, Want, was recently published by Sarabande Books. His essays on poetry have appeared in The Yale Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Pleiades, and The Gettysburg Review. He teaches at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, and also serves on the faculty of the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

JOEL BROUWER is the author of three books of poems, Exactly What Happened (Purdue University Press, 1999), Centuries (Four Way Books, 2003), and the forthcoming And So (Four Way Books, 2009). He lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and teaches at the University of Alabama.

CHARD DE NIORD is the author of three books of poetry, Night Mowing (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), Sharp Golden Thorn (Marsh Hawk Press, 2003), and Asleep in the Fire (University of Alabama Press, 1990). His poems and essays have appeared recently in Harvard Review, Poetry International, The American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, and The Pushcart Prize anthology. An associate professor of English at Providence College, he is cofounder of the low residency M.F.A. program in poetry at New England College, where he served as program director from 2001 to 2007. He lives in Putney, Vermont, with his wife.

LAVINIA GREENLAW, who lives in London and is a lecturer at Goldsmiths College, has published two novels—An Irresponsible Age (Fourth Estate, 2007) and Mary George of Allnorthover (Houghton Mifflin, 2001), which won France’s Prix du Premier Romans—in addition to three books of poetry, including Night Photograph (Faber, 1993) and Minsk (Harcourt, 2005).

MARK HARMAN, a native of Dublin, is currently Chair of Modern Languages and Professor of English and German at Elizabethtown College. He is a literary translator and Kafka scholar, and his translation of The Castle was nominated for the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club prize and won the MLA’s first Lois Roth Award. In addition to his work on Kafka, he has written extensively about modern German and Irish literature, and has translated Hermann Hesse’s selected letters, various works by contemporary German-language authors, and (with Walter Arndt) the volume Robert Walser Rediscovered, which he also edited. Schocken Books will publish his new translation of Kafka’s novel Amerika: The Missing Person in the fall of 2008.

KARL HARSHBARGER ’s stories have appeared in more than fifty magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Antioch Review, and Prairie Schooner. Two of his stories have been selected for the list of “Distinguished Stories” in Best American Short Stories and nine of his stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He has finished one novel, An Addison Man, and is working on two others. He lives in Germany with his wife.

BENJAMIN IVRY is author of biographies of Ravel, Poulenc, and Rimbaud, as well as the poetry collection Paradise for the Portuguese Queen (Orchises Press, 1998). He has translated more than two dozen books into English, by authors including Gide, Balthus, and Jules Verne.

FRANZ KAFKA (1883–1924) was born and raised in a German-Jewish enclave of Prague, the city where he spent most of his life. His works were published posthumously by his friend Max Brod, despite Kafka’s orders that all his writings be burned. Best known are his unfinished novels The Castle (Das Schloss, published 1926) and The Trial (Der Prozeß, published 1925), and his short stories “The Judgment” (“Das Urteil,” 1913) and “The Metamorphosis” (“Die Verwandlung,” 1915).

SUBHASHINI KALIGOTLA holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from Columbia University and is the recipient of a 2006–07 Fulbright fellowship to India for literary translation. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Catamaran, Crab Orchard Review, Western Humanities Review, Sixty Indian Poets, and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets. At present, she is a doctoral student in art history at Columbia University.

SAYZIE KOLDYS holds degrees from Skidmore College, the University of New Hampshire, and Boise State University. Her short fiction has appeared in The North American Review, Mid-American Review, and Short Story. She has recently begun editing for a nonprofit science publisher in the San Francisco Bay Area.

ERIC LEIGH received his M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Michigan, where he was honored with Hopwood Awards in both poetry and nonfiction. His recent awards include a “Discovery”/The Nation Prize, the New Letters Prize for Poetry, and the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Nation, New Letters, Third Coast, Salt Hill, and Passages North, and has been featured on the website Poetry Daily. He lives in San Francisco.

WILLIAM LOGAN’s new book of poems, Strange Flesh, will be published this fall by Penguin. He won the National Book Critics Circle award for criticism in 2006.

BRUCE MILLS teaches in the English department at Kalamazoo College. He has published research in antebellum American Literature, including Poe, Fuller, and the Mesmeric Arts: Transition States in the American Renaissance (University of Missouri Press, 2005). His essay “Sleeping with Jacob” is part of a book manuscript exploring autism, memory, and imagination. The title essay of the book, “An Archaeology of Yearning,” has appeared in The Georgia Review.

P. J. MURPHY’s stories have been included most recently in Other Voices, Tampa Review, The South Carolina Review, and Sou’wester. He has published a collection of short stories, Way Below E (White Pine Press, 1995), and has a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Florida State University and a Master of Divinity from San Francisco Theological Seminary. Over the course of his career, he has worked for NASA as an electronics engineer and taught English and creative writing at Florida State, Eastfield College, and the University of Texas. While continuing work on a novel, he is currently employed in law enforcement, building cases against corrupt officers.

RICARDO PAU-LLOSA’s sixth book of poems, Parable Hunter, was just published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, as were his previous three titles. His website is www.pau-llosa.com.

LYNN PEDERSEN ’s poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in Poet Lore, Southern Poetry Review, The Palo Alto Review, The Comstock Review, and Cider Press Review. She is a graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts M.F.A. in Writing Program.

MARTHA RHODES is the author of three poetry collections: At the Gate (Provincetown Arts, 1999), Perfect Disappearance (New Issues, 2000), and Mother Quiet (Zoo, 2004). She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and in the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program, and serves as the director of Four Way Books, a literary press in New York City.

SUSAN RICH, who lives in Seattle, is the author of Cures Include Travel (White Pine, 2006) and The Cartographer’s Tongue: Poems of the World (White Pine, 2000), which won the PEN USA Award and the Peace Corps Award for Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, New Orleans Review, and Witness.

RACHEL RICHARDSON teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A recent Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, she has published poems in The Southern Review, PN Review, Shenandoah, Blackbird, and other journals.

CHRISTINA SAJ is a painter who lives and works in New Jersey. She holds a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and an M.F.A. from Bard College. Early in her career, she mastered the technique of Byzantine icon painting, which has had a profound influence on her work. Her contemporary interpretations of icons have been widely exhibited and can be found in public and private collections in the United States and abroad. She is currently Artist in Residence at the New Brunswick Theological Seminary. More of her work can be seen at www.christinasaj.com.

JASON SCHNEIDERMAN is the author of Sublimation Point, a Stahlecker Selection from Four Way Books. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Tin House, The Best American Poetry 2005, The American Poetry Review, and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. He has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. A Chancellor’s Fellow in the Doctoral Program in English at CUNY’s Graduate Center, he teaches literature at Hunter College.

ELIZABETH SEARLE has three books of fiction: Celebrities in Disgrace (Graywolf, 2001), a novella and stories which has been optioned for film; A Four-Sided Bed (Graywolf, 1995), a novel nominated for an American Library Association Book Award; and My Body to You, a story collection that won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize. Her most recent work is the libretto for Tonya & Nancy: The Opera, an original opera based on the Harding/Kerrigan skating scandal. The show drew national media attention when it premiered in 2006; a new expanded Rock Opera production is forthcoming in 2008. Searle teaches at the Stonecoast M.F.A. program.

DAVID SHIELDS is the author of eight previous books, including Black Planet (Crown, 1999/Three Rivers, 2000), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote (Knopf, 1996/University of Wisconsin, 2003), winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Dead Languages (Knopf, 1989/Graywolf, 1998), winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is a professor in the English department at the University of Washington.

CHARLES SIMIC is a poet, essayist, and translator. Born in Yugoslavia in 1938, he immigrated to the United States in 1954. In 1961 he was drafted into the U.S. Army and in 1966 earned his Bachelor’s degree from New York University. Since 1967, he has published twenty books of poetry, seven books of essays, a memoir, and numerous books of translations of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian poetry for which he has received many literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, the MacArthur Fellowship, and the Wallace Stevens Award. The Voice at 3:00 a.m., a volume of his selected later and new poems, was published by Harcourt in 2003, and a new book of poems, That Little Something, will be out in the spring of 2008. Simic is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and the poetry editor of The Paris Review. He is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the University of New Hampshire and is currently the Poet Laureate of the United States.

ELIZABETH SPIRES’s sixth collection of poetry, The Wave-Maker, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton in July 2008 and will include the two poems printed here. A book for children, I Heard God Talking to Me: William Edmondson and His Stone Carvings, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in January 2009. She lives in Baltimore and is a professor at Goucher College.

NOVICA TADIC was born in 1949 in a small town in Montenegro. He has published fourteen books of poetry and is the recipient of all the major Yugoslav and Serbian literary prizes. His work has been translated into many languages. A book of his selected early poems, Night Mail, was published by Oberlin College Press in 1992, and another, Dark Things, from which the poems in this issue of NER are taken, will be published by BOA Editions in 2009. Both of these poetry collections were translated by Charles Simic.

J. T. TYREE is the co-author, with Ben Walters, of BFI Film Classics: The Big Lebowski, published by The British Film Institute and distributed in the United States by University of California Press. His essays about unhappy writers in New York have appeared in several previous issues of NER, with other work in The Believer, Film Quarterly, The Nation, and Sight & Sound. He is currently a Truman Capote Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University’s Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program in Creative Writing.

REBECCA WEST (pseudonym of Cicily Isabel Andrews, née Fairfield; 1892–1983) was an English novelist, critic, and political journalist. Her novels include The Judge (1922), The Thinking Reed (1936), The Fountain Overflows (1957), and The Birds Fall Down (1966). Her criticism, for which she is generally better known, includes Henry James (1916), St. Augustine (1933), and The Court and the Castle (1958). Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1942), a two-volume study of Yugoslavia, is a widely respected work of sociopolitical journalism that examines Balkan politics, culture, and history. Her later pieces of reportage covered treason trials in the wake of World War II and are included in The Meaning of Treason (1947; revised as The New Meaning of Treason, 1964). Her reports on the Nurenberg trials were collected in A Train of Powder (1955). She was created Dame in 1959. The novelist and critic Anthony West, born in 1914, is her son by British novelist H. G. Wells.

DAVID YEZZI’s second collection, Azores: Poems (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press) will be published in April 2008.