Contributors’ Notes, Vol. 31, #2 (2010)
__________


ALEXEI BAYER is a New York–based author and translator. He writes in English and in Russian, his native tongue, and translates into both languages. His translations have appeared in the journals Readings/Chtenia and Words Without Borders, as well as in such collections as The Wall in My Head, a book dedicated to the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Life Stories, a bilingual literary anthology to benefit hospice care in Russia. Upcoming original short stories will be published in Readings/Chtenia and KR Online.

VICTORIA CHANG 's second book of poems, Salvinia Molesta, was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2008 as part of the VQR Poetry Series. Her first book was published by the Southern Illinois University Press after winning the Crab Orchard Review Open Competition. She lives in Irvine, California, with her family.

MARK DOTY is the author of eight collections of poetry, including Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. He teaches at Rutgers University and lives in New York.

JOHN FORSSEN was awarded the Roanoke Review’s first prize for fiction in 2006; other work has appeared in Minnetonka Review and Gihon River Review. He is a retired English teacher and public affairs writer. His subject areas as a teacher included American literature, journalism, and fiction writing.

ABRAHAM FRANK is a writer and teacher currently living in New York City. He has taught English close to home in America, as well as abroad in Tanzania. A recipient of the Margaret C. Annan Award for Writing from the University of Chicago (2003), he has also been named a No Record Press “Writer to Watch Out For” (2009). His translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses have appeared in a series of gallery shows alongside the work of Washington, DC, artist Micheline Klagsbrun and were published in a small volume this spring.

IAN GANASSI ’s poetry, prose, and translations have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Paris Review, Denver Quarterly, Sawbuck, Octopus, American Letters & Commentary, New Haven Review, and The Journal. His translations of other books of Virgil’s Aeneid have been included in previous issues of NER.

DEBORA GREGER ’s most recent book of poems, Men, Women, and Ghosts, was published by Penguin in 2008. Her new book, By Herself, will appear in 2012.

CATHERINE HALL was born in England and attended art school and university in Manchester, earning a B.A. in art history there before coming to the U.S., where she earned graduate degrees in art history from the State University of New York at Binghamton and in visual art from Vermont College of Norwich University. She works in many mediums, including painting, sculpture, and installation, and has exhibited extensively throughout the eastern U.S. and England. She has received fellowships from the Vermont Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Vermont Studio Center, and the Ucross Foundation, and has completed numerous commissions. In 2005 she co-founded the 215 College Street Artists’ Cooperative Gallery in Burlington, Vermont, and she received the 2006 Barbara Smail Award, in recognition of her artwork and of her service to the community.

MARIA HUMMEL is the author of Wilderness Run (St. Martin’s, 2002), a novel. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Believer, The Sun, and Creative Nonfiction. She lives in San Francisco and teaches at Stanford University.

LAURA KASISCHKE ’s most recent poetry collection is Lilies Without (Ausable Press, 2007), and she has a new book forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2011. She was a Guggenheim Fellow for 2010.

ANDREW LANG (1844–1912) was a Scottish scholar, literary journalist, and anthropological investigator, and the author of many works of history, poetry, and fiction. His numerous and wide-ranging publications include a twelve-volume compilation of fairy tales; prose translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey; collections of his own poetry; historical accounts of Mary Stuart, Joan of Arc, and the development of Scotland; and critical studies of Sir Walter Scott and William Wordsworth.

MAURICE MANNING received the 2009 Hanes Poetry Prize from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. His fourth book, The Common Man, was published this spring by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

SARAH MURPHY lives in northeast Florida, where she is an assistant professor of English at Jacksonville University. Her poem “Letter to the Past After Long Silence,” which first appeared in NER 29.4, will be included in Best American Poetry 2010.

JEFF O'KEEFE ’s fiction has appeared in Epoch, Greensboro Review, Swink, and Fourteen Hills. He is currently the William M. Chace Lecturer in Continuing Studies at Stanford University, where he was a Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer. An ad copywriter, he lives in San Francisco with his wife and son and is at work on a collection of stories.

RICHARD OVERY is a professor of history at the University of Exeter in the U.K. His many books on European history include The Twilight Years: The Paradox of Britain Between the Wars, Why the Allies Won, Russia’s War, and The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, winner of the Wolfson Prize for History.

PATRICK PHILLIP ’s first book, Chattahoochee, won the 2005 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and his second, Boy, was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2008. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the U.S. Fulbright Commission, and his poems have appeared in magazines such as Poetry, Ploughshares, and American Poetry Review. He teaches at Drew University.

EILEEN POLLACK is the author, most recently, of In the Mouth: Stories and Novellas (Four Way Books, 2008), which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award; one of the novellas in that collection, “The Bris,” was selected by Stephen King for the Best American Short Stories 2007. A new novel, Breaking and Entering, will be published late in 2011, also by Four Way Books. Her textbook, Creative Nonfiction: A Guide To Form, Content, and Style, was published last year by Cengage/Wadsworth. She currently directs the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan.

FRANCIS-NOËL THOMAS is at work on a memoir called Why I Learned French, and he maintains a web site on prose style with Mark Turner at classicprose.com. A second edition of their book Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose will be published by Princeton University Press in spring 2011.

JOAN WICKERSHAM’s The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008) was a National Book Award finalist. Her short fiction has appeared in Hudson Review, Ploughshares, Story, Glimmer Train, AGNI, and Best American Short Stories. She is the recipient of a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship.

ROSS WHITE is the editor of Inch, a magazine of short poetry and microfiction, and the publisher of Bull City Press. His work has appeared on Poetry Daily and in Tar River Poetry, Carolina Quarterly, and The Collagist, among other publications. Ross is a graduate of the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program for Writers. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he also works in the School of Education.

LOIS WILLIAMS was a recent Charles Pick Fellow at the University of East Anglia. She teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and is writing a book about the invention of home. Her work has appeared in Granta.

TOM YORI considered titling his story in this issue “Translating” or “In Translation”—to call attention to the process of changing from one form of thinking to another, of learning new idioms and reusing familiar ones. The interest in this might have grown from the author’s experience as a computer programmer, making use of a multiplicity of languages, from Basic through PL/1 to PL/SQL, Unix, and others.