Contributors' Notes

marjorie agosin is a Chilean-American poet, editor, and human rights activist. She is the Luella Laneer Slain Professor of Latin American Studies at Wellesley College. She has received numerous awards for her poetry and human rights work, and has authored more than forty books of poetry, memoirs, and essays, as well as two plays.

charles baxter is the author of Beyond Plot, forthcoming this summer from Graywolf. He has written four novels and four volumes of stories, and has edited or co-edited several books, including A William Maxwell Portrait. He teaches at the University of Minnesota and lives in Minneapolis.

marianne boruch's most recent work includes Poems: New and Selected (Oberlin, 2004) and a second collection of essays on poetry, In the Blue Pharmacy (Trinity, 2005). She teaches in the M.F.A. program at Purdue University.

david bottoms's most recent book is Waltzing Through the Endtime from Copper Canyon Press. He is Georgia Poet Laureate and holds the Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

clare cavanagh is the Herman and Beulah Pearce Miller Research Professor in Literature at Northwestern University. She has translated ten books of Polish poetry and prose, and is currently working on an authorized biography of Czeslaw Milosz.

yiorgos chouliaras is the author of six volumes of poetry in Greek. Translations and reviews of his work have appeared in Agenda, Grand Street, Harvard Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. Currently he is the director of the Press and Communications office at the Greek Embassy in Washington, D.C.

nicholas christopher has published eight poetry books, including Crossing the Equator: New & Selected Poems, 1972–2004 (Harcourt), just out in paperback; five novels, including The Bestiary (Dial), published in June; and a study of film noir, Somewhere in the Night, reissued in 2006. He is a professor in the School of the Arts at Columbia University.

victoria clausi's publications include a chapbook of poems, Boarding House. Her poems and reviews have also appeared in various journals and anthologies, including Henry Holt's Roots and Flowers; Poems and Plays; Lumina; and Ploughshares. She is Assistant Director of the Writing Seminars at Bennington College.

lyn coffin is a widely published poet, fiction writer, playwright, and translator of Czech literature. She has published seven books, including Human Trappings (Abattoir) and Crystals of the Unforeseen (Plainview). She lives in Seattle.

michael collier's most recent book is Dark Wild Realm (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). A translation of Medea (Oxford) also appeared in 2006, and a collection of essays, Make Us Wave Back (Michigan), will be published in 2007. He teaches at the University of Maryland.

josephine dickinson has two poetry collections in the U.K., Scarberry Hill and The Voice, and her American debut collection, Silence Fell, was published in March by Houghton Mifflin. She lives in Alston, a small Cumbrian town high in the Pennines.

stuart dybek is a past guest editor of Ploughshares. His most recent book of poems is Streets in Their Own Ink (FSG).

robin ekiss is a former Stegner Fellow. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, TriQuarterly, Agni, The Kenyon Review, The Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, the poet Keith Ekiss.

gary fincke's most recent poetry collection is Standing Around the Heart (Arkansas, 2005). Writing Letters for the Blind won the 2003 The Journal/Ohio State University poetry prize, and his most recent collection of stories, Sorry I Worried You, won the Flannery O'Connor Prize and was published in 2004.

chris forhan was recently awarded an NEA fellowship in poetry. He is the author of The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars , which won the Morse Prize and the Washington State Book Award, and Forgive Us Our Happiness , which won the Bakeless Prize. He teaches at Auburn University.

allegra goodman has written two story collections, Total Immersion and The Family Markowitz, and three novels, Kaaterskill Falls, Paradise Park, and Intuition. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award and a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

xiaolu guo studied film at the Beijing Film Academy and has worked as a novelist, essayist, and filmmaker. Her most recent novel in English is A Concise Chinese English Dictionary for Lovers. She also directed and produced How Is Your Fish Today?, which was an official selection at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. The translators for her story, Rebecca Morris and Pamela Casey, live in London.

judith hall is the author of four books, including To Put the Mouth To, selected for the National Poetry Series, and Three Trios, translations of the poet J II. She has received awards from the NEA and the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim foundations and serves as poetry editor of The Antioch Review.

patricia hampl is the author of the memoirs A Romantic Education and Virgin Time. Her most recent book is Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime. This fall, Harcourt will publish another memoir, The Florist's Daughter. She is Regents Professor of English at the University of Minnesota and on the permanent faculty of the Prague Summer Program.

patrick hicks is the author of Traveling Through History, Draglines, The Kiss That Saved My Life, and Finding the Gossamer. He currently lives in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where he teaches creative writing at Augustana College, and is an advisory editor for New Hibernia Review.

bob hicok's fifth book, This Clumsy Living, is just out from University of Pittsburgh Press.

garrett hongo's work includes two books of poetry, three anthologies, Volcano: A Memoir of Hawaii, and The North Shore, a forthcoming volume of poems. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA grants, and the Lamont Poetry Prize, he teaches at the University of Oregon, where he is Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences.

maria hummel is a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford and the author of the novel Wilderness Run. She recently received an award in nonfiction from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and has published poetry in New England Review, PN Review, and Hayden's Ferry Review.

beena kamlani's fiction has appeared in Identity Lessons and Growing Up Ethnic in America (Penguin). She has received fellowships from Yaddo and Ledig House, and won a Tennessee Williams Scholarship at Sewanee and a fiction grant from the Connecticut Arts Commission. She lives in New York, where she is completing her first novel.

maria koundoura's book, The Greek Idea: The Formation of National and Transnational Identities, is forthcoming this year. Currently she is at work on a book on global cities and citizenship, and editing a collection of essays on taste. She teaches literature and cultural theory at Emerson College.

ryszard krynicki is a poet, translator, and editor. His most recent volume is Kamien, szron (2004). He lives in Krakow, Poland, where he and his wife, Krystyna, run the publishing house A5.

philip levine divides his time between Brooklyn and Fresno. Later this year, Sarabande will publish a new version of Tarumba: The Selected Poems of Jaime Sabines, which he co-edited and translated with the Mexican poet Ernesto Trejo.

bronislaw maj is a poet, critic, and essayist. He teaches contemporary Polish literature at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland.

corey marks's Renunciation was a National Poetry Series selection. His recent poems appear in New England Review, Southwest Review, TriQuarterly, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and Legitimate Dangers.

cate marvin's second book of poems, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, is forthcoming from Sarabande this August. She is an associate professor in creative writing at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York.

james mccorkle received the 2003 APR/Honickman Award for his collection Evidences. He is an editor of the Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry (2006); recent poems have appeared in The Colorado Review, Conduit, Crazyhorse, Fiddlehead, and Harvard Review.

michael milburn teaches high school English in New Haven, Connecticut. His book of essays, Odd Man In, won Mid-List Press's First Series Award in Nonfiction and was published in 2005.

eugenio montejo is the author of twelve books of poetry. He has also published two books of essays and four volumes of heteronymic work. He received the Octavio Paz prize in 2005 and was awarded Venezuela's National Prize for Literature in 1998.

laura rocha nakazawa, a native of Montevideo, Uruguay, is a Spanish translator and interpreter working in the Boston area. She has translated some of the poetry of Marjorie Agosin into English, in particular Among the Angels of Memory.

muriel nelson has two collections of poems, Part Song (Bear Star, 1999) and Most Wanted (ByLine, 2003). Her work has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Ploughshares, The New Republic, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The National Poetry Review, Northwest Review, and others.

kirk nesset is the author of two books of short stories, Mr. Agreeable and Paradise Road, as well as The Stories of Raymond Carver (nonfiction). The recipient of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize in 2007, a Pushcart Prize, and grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, he teaches creative writing and literature at Allegheny College.

debra nystrom's most recent book of poems is Torn Sky, from Sarabande Books. Her work has appeared in Slate, APR, The Yale Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at the University of Virginia.

joyce carol oates is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. Author of We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, and The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina, she is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University. Her new novel is Black Girl/White Girl.

jiri orten was one of the great European poets of the twentieth century. In the summer of 1941, he stepped off a street corner in Prague, and was struck by a Gestapo ambulance. He was refused admission to a nearby hospital because he was Jewish and died a few days later. He was twenty-two.

jacqueline osherow's most recent collection of poems is The Hoopoe's Crown (BOA, 2005).

marita over won a Gregory Award in 1992 and is published widely in the U.K. Her publications include Other Lilies (Frogmore, 1997) and Not Knowing Itself (Arrowhead, 2006). She lives in Cockermouth, Cumbria, where she is training to be a psychotherapist.

sue owen taught as the Poet-in-Residence at Louisiana State University and now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her fourth book of poetry, The Devil's Cookbook, is forthcoming this spring from LSU Press. Last fall in Scandinavia, she read her poems that have been translated and published in Stockholm and Helsinki.

elizabeth powell's work is forthcoming or has recently appeared in Post Road, Slope, The Mississippi Review, Green Mountains Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. Her first book of poems, The Republic of Self, was the winner of the 2000 New Issues Book Prize. She teaches at the University of Vermont.

len roberts's ninth book of poetry, The Disappearing Trick, will be published by the University of Illinois Press this summer. BOA Editions published his translations of the great Hungarian poet Sandor Csoori in a volume titled Before and After the Fall: Selected Poems of Sandor Csoori, in 2005.

john rybicki teaches creative writing through Wings of Hope Hospice to children who have gone through a trauma or loss. His first book, Traveling at High Speeds, is available from New Issues Press. A new collection, We Bed Down into Water, is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press this fall.

caroline sanderson was a poet who died several years ago. She previously published poems in The Partisan Review.

philip schultz's most recent book of poems was Living in the Past (Harcourt, 2004). The poem in this issue is from his new book, Failure, due out from Harcourt this fall. He founded and directs The Writers Studio in New York City.

vijay seshadri is the author of two books of poems, Wild Kingdom and The Long Meadow, and many essays, articles, and reviews. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

jim shepard is the author of six novels and two story collections. His fiction has appeared in Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, and The New Yorker, and he is a columnist on film for The Believer. A third story collection, Like You'd Understand Anyway, and a collection of film essays, Heroes in Disguise, will appear in 2007.

jason shinder's poetry books include Every Room We Ever Slept In, Among Women, and a forthcoming collection from Graywolf Press. He teaches at the graduate Writing Seminars at Bennington College, and is founder/director of the YMCA National Writer's Voice and the Gibson International Music Initiative.

ron slate's book of poems, The Incentive of the Maggot (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lenore Marshall Prize. He is the chief operating officer of a biotech startup and lives in Milton, Massachusetts.

ann snodgrass's recent work appears in TriQuarterly, Harvard Review, American Letters & Commentary, and Field. She teaches at MIT. The poem in this issue refers to Cees Nooteboom's poem "Basho" as translated by J. M. Coetzee.

susan stewart is the Annan Professor of English at Princeton University and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent book of poems, Columbarium, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for 2003 and has recently appeared in an Italian translation by Maria Cristina Biggio.

dan stryk's five collections of poems and prose parables include The Artist and the Crow (Purdue). Forthcoming are Dimming Radiance (2007) and Solace of the Aging Mare (2007). Recent work appears in Shenandoah, The Ontario Review, The Mississippi Review, Harvard Review, New York Quarterly, and Witness.

maxine swann's stories have received an O. Henry Award, a Pushcart Prize, and been included in