Contributors' Notes

ANNE ATIK's two books of poems are Words in Hock (1974) and Offshore (1991), both from Enitharmon Press. She also authored the memoir How It Was, about her friendship with Samuel Beckett. Other work has appeared in APR, The Partisan Review, Literary Imagination, Pequod, and The Nation, among others.

AMY BEEDER's first book is Burn the Field (Carnegie Mellon, 2006). She received a "Discovery"/ The Nation Award in 2001, and her poems have appeared in Poetry, Agni, Poetry Daily, The Nation, Pleiades, American Letters & Commentary, and elsewhere. She teaches poetry at the University of New Mexico.

JOHN BENSKO's books of poetry include Green Soldiers (Yale), The Waterman's Children (Massachusetts), and The Iron City (Illinois). Sea Dogs, a collection of stories, was published by Graywolf Press. He teaches in the M.F.A. program at the University of Memphis.

FRANK BIDART's most recent book of poems is Star Dust (FSG, 2005). He also co-edited Robert Lowell's Collected Poems.

MICHAEL BORICH has an M.F.A. in Writing from the University of California-Irvine and is the author of two novels and a poetry collection, The Black Hawk Songs (Illinois). He is a professor of English at Qingdao University in the People's Republic of China.

J. BOYER teaches in the creative writing program at Arizona State University.

PEG BOYERS is Executive Editor of Salmagundi and author of a book of poems, Hard Bread. Her second book of poems, Honey with Tobacco, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in March 2007.

JOHN CASEY is the author of five books of fiction, two translations from Italian, and numerous essays and stories. His novel Spartina won the National Book Award. "Rapunzel" is one of the Rhode Island stories to be included in a trilogy, of which Spartina is the centerpiece.

JOHN CASTEEN is a designer and builder of custom furniture. He also teaches fiction, nonfiction, and poetry workshops through University of Virginia's School of Continuing Education, and serves on the editorial staff of The Virginia Quarterly Review. His work has appeared recently in The Iowa Review, Shenandoah, and Meridian.

CLARE CAVANAGH is the Herman and Beulah Pearce Miller Research Professor in Literature at Northwestern University. She is currently working on two books, Poetry and Power: Russia, Poland, and the West (Yale) and Czeslaw Milosz and His Age: A Critical Life (FSG).

DAN CHIASSON is the author of two books of poetry, The Afterlife of Objects (Chicago, 2002) and Natural History (Knopf, 2005), and a book of criticism, One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America. He teaches at Wellesley College.

HENRI COLE's fifth collection, Middle Earth, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. His new book, Blackbird and Wolf, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in April.

PETER COOLEY's books include The Company of Strangers, The Room Where Summer Ends, Nightseasons, The Van Gogh Notebook, The Astonished Hours, Sacred Conversations, and A Place Made of Starlight. He is a professor of English at Tulane University.

STEVEN CRAMER's fourth collection, Goodbye to the Orchard (Sarabande, 2004), won the New England Poetry Club's Sheila Motton Award, and was named a 2005 Honor Book in Poetry by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. He directs the low-residency M.F.A. program in creative writing at Lesley University.

STEPHEN CUSHMAN has published three volumes of poetry: Blue Pajamas (1998), Cussing Lesson (2002), and Heart Island (2006). He teaches at the University of Virginia, where he is Robert C. Taylor Professor of English.

W. S. DI PIERO's Chinese Apples: New and Selected Poems will appear from Knopf in early 2007. He writes frequently about the visual arts and lives in San Francisco.

BRYAN D. DIETRICH has won The Paris Review Poetry Prize, the "Discovery"/ The Nation Award, and a Writers at Work Fellowship. His poetry has appeared in Harvard Review, The Yale Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and many other journals. Author of two books, Krypton Nights (2002) and Universal Monsters (2007), he teaches at Newman University in Wichita, Kansas.

MAGGIE DIETZ is a lecturer in creative writing at Boston University and assistant poetry editor for Slate. Her awards include fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, Phillips Exeter Academy, and the New Hampshire State Arts Council. Her first book of poems is Perennial Fall (Chicago).

LANDIS EVERSON was born in 1926 in Coronado, California, and now lives in San Luis Obispo. His Everything Preserved: Poems 1955–2005 (Graywolf, 2006) is the debut winner of the Emily Dickinson First Book Award from the Poetry Foundation. "Winter Park" is from a new collection in progress, Book of Valentines.

RICHARD FEIN's latest collections are Mother Tongue and Reversion. An earlier collection, Kafka's Ear, won the Maurice English Award. He has also published a memoir, The Dance of Leah; translations, Selected Poems of Yankev Glatshteyn; and a critical study, Robert Lowell. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

BRENDAN GALVIN's Habitat: New and Selected Poems 1965–2005 was a finalist for the National Book Award. He lives in Truro, Massachusetts.

MEGAN GANNON graduated from Vassar College and the University of Montana. Her work is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Third Coast, Pleiades, and The Best American Poetry 2006. She and her husband, the poet Miles Waggener, are newly Nebraskans.

LINDA GREGERSON's new book of poems, Magnetic North, will be published by Houghton Mifflin this coming March. She teaches poetry and Renaissance literature at the University of Michigan.

JANIS HALLOWELL is the author of The Annunciation of Francesca Dunn (2004). Her second novel will be published by William Morrow in 2008. A faculty member at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop, she has received support from the MacDowell Colony, Colorado Endowment for the Humanities, the Boulder Arts Commission, and the Rocky Mountain Women's Institute.

JEFF HARDIN teaches at Columbia State Community College in Columbia, Tennessee. His first collection, Fall Sanctuary, received the 2004 Nicholas Roerich Prize from Story Line Press. Recent and forthcoming poems appear in Mid-American Review, Zone 3, Puerto del Sol, Smartish Pace, Poem, Potomac Review, The Café Review, and others.

JEFFREY HARRISON's fourth book of poems, Incomplete Knowledge, was published by Four Way Books in November 2006. In addition, The Waywiser Press brought out The Names of Things: New and Selected Poems in England last June. His chapbook, An Undertaking (2005), is available on Amazon.com.

TODD HEARON's recent poems and articles appear in Poetry, Slate, Parnassus, and Harvard Review. He lives in Exeter, New Hampshire.

SCOTT HIGHTOWER's third book, Part of the Bargain, received Copper Canyon Press's 2004 Hayden Carruth Award. He lives and works in New York City.

BRENDA HILLMAN has written seven collections of poetry, all published by Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which is Pieces of Air in the Epic. She teaches at Saint Mary's College in Moraga, California.

JANE HIRSHFIELD's most recent book is After (HarperCollins, 2006). She is the recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the NEA, and the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, and her work has appeared in multiple editions of both The Best American Poetry and The Pushcart Prize anthologies .

MICHAEL HOFMANN edited the anthology 20th Century German Poetry, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in November. He is the author of several books of poems, and one of criticism.

TONY HOAGLAND won the 2005 Mark Twain Award from the Poetry Foundation. A book of craft essays, Real Sofistikashun, was released in October by Graywolf Press. He teaches at the University of Houston, and in the Warren Wilson M.F.A. program.

JOHN HOLLANDER's nineteenth book of poetry was Picture Window, published by Knopf in 2003, and he has most recently edited the Selected Poetry of Emma Lazarus and an anthology of Poems Haunted and Bewitched. He is Sterling Professor Emeritus of English at Yale.

FANNY HOWE's most recent publications include The Lives of a Spirit, Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken (Nightboat) and On the Ground (Graywolf). A collection of her novels, Radical Love, was released this fall.

SUSAN HOWE's most recent books are The Midnight (New Directions) and Kidnapped (Coracle). A CD called Thiefth (Blue Chopsticks), a collaboration with the musician/composer David Grubbs, has recently been released. She holds the Samuel P. Capen Chair in Poetry and the Humanities at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

COLETTE INEZ has published nine books of poetry and has won Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and two NEA fellowships and Pushcart Prizes. She teaches in Columbia University's Undergraduate Writing Program. Her memoir, The Secret of M. Dulong, has recently been released by the University of Wisconsin Press.

MARCIA KARP has poems and translations in The Partisan Review, Republic of Letters, Literary Imagination, The Guardian, Seneca Review, Agenda, Harvard Review, Penguin's Catullus in English and Petrarch in English, and forthcoming in the TLS.

MAURICE KILWEIN GUEVARA was born in Belencito, Colombia, and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His most recent book is Autobiography of So-and-so: Poems in Prose. He is a former president of AWP and currently a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

JENNIFER L. KNOX's first book of poems, A Gringo Like Me, is from Soft Skull Press. She is a three-time contributor to The Best American Poetry, and her work has appeared in Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to Present and Free Radicals: American Poets Before Their First Books.

LAURIE LAMON is Associate Professor of English at Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The New Criterion, Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture, Ploughshares, and elsewhere . Her collection, The Fork Without Hunger, was published by CavanKerry Press.

RIKA LESSER is the author of three books of poems and the translator of many works of Swedish and German belles-lettres. "Possession," part of a series based on the works of the Swedish painter, sculptor, and graphic artist Lena Cronqvist, is from a new collection, Questions of Love.

JEFFREY LEVINE is the author of Rumor of Cortez (Red Hen, 2005), nominated for a 2006 Los Angeles Times Literary Award in Poetry, and Mortal, Everlasting, winner of the Transcontinental Poetry Prize from Pavement Saw Press (2002). He is Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Tupelo Press, an independent literary press.

GAIL MAZUR's Zeppo's First Wife: New & Selected Poems (Chicago, 2005) won the Massachusetts Book Award and was a finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize. Her earlier books are Nightfire, The Pose of Happiness, The Common, and They Can't Take That Away from Me, a 2001 National Book Award finalist. She is Writer in Residence at Emerson College.

ASKOLD MELNYCZUK's new novel, House of Widows, will appear next year. His previous novels include a Best Book of 2002 from The Los Angeles Times and a Notable Book from The New York Times. Founding editor of Agni, he is currently publisher of Arrowsmith Books, and teaches at University of Massachusetts, Boston, and at Bennington College.

W. S. MERWIN's many awards include the 2005 National Book Award for Migration: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon), the Pulitzer Prize, the Tanning Prize, the Bollingen Award, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. He is the author of dozens of books of poetry and prose, most recently Present Company (Copper Canyon, 2005). For the past thirty years he has lived in Hawaii.

IDRA NOVEY's chapbook The Next Country was selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2005 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Her book of selected translations of Brazilian poet Paulo Henriques Britto received a PEN Translation Fund Award and is forthcoming from BOA Editions. She teaches writing at Columbia University.

ED OCHESTER's most recent book is The Land of Cockaigne (Story Line, 2001). Forthcoming is Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New (Autumn House, 2007) and American Poetry Now (Pittsburgh, 2007), an anthology of contemporary American poetry. He edits the Pitt Poetry Series and the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, both from University of Pittsburgh Press, and co-edits the magazine 5 AM.

LINDA PASTAN's twelfth book of poems, published in October 2006, is Queen of a Rainy Country. She received the 2003 Ruth Lilly Prize.

RICARDO PAU-LLOSA's sixth poetry title will be published by Carnegie Mellon, as were his last three books. He is also a widely published art critic. His website is www.pau-llosa.com.

ED PAVLIC's second book of poems, Labors Lost Left Unfinished, appeared in 2006 from Sheep Meadow Press. He is also the author of Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue ( APR/Copper Canyon) and the critical book Crossroads Modernism (Minnesota, 2002). He directs the M.F.A./Ph.D. program in creative writing at The University of Georgia.

JOHN PECK's most recent books are Collected Shorter Poems 1966–1996 (Northwestern, 2004) and Red Strawberry Leaf: Selected Poems 1994–2001 (Chicago, 2005). He lives in southeastern Connecticut.

JOYCE PESEROFF's two new books are Eastern Mountain Time (Carnegie Mellon) and Simply Lasting: Writers on Jane Kenyon (Graywolf). She directs the creative writing program at University of Massachusetts, Boston, which will offer an M.F.A. degree beginning September 2007.

ROBERT PINSKY recently published The Life of David, a prose account of the Biblical figure, and a chapbook of poems, First Things to Hand. A new full-length collection, Gulf Music, will appear in fall 2007.

LIA PURPURA's new collection of essays, On Looking, has just been published by Sarabande Books. New poems are forthcoming in The Southern Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. She is Writer-in-Residence at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland. In spring 2007, she will be Bedell Visiting Writer in the Nonfiction Program at the University of Iowa.

MAURICE RIORDAN was born in County Cork, Ireland. The Holy Land, a new book of poems, will be published in the U.K. by Faber and Faber in February. He lives in London, where he teaches at Imperial College, and is editor of Poetry London.

J. ALLYN ROSSER's most recent book is Misery Prefigured. Last year she received the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from Poetry. Her work has appeared recently in Slate, The Georgia Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The Kenyon Review, and The Best American Poetry 2006. She teaches at Ohio University.

MARK RUDMAN is the author of seven volumes of poetry and three of prose. He received the Max Hayward Award for his translation of Boris Pasternak's My Sister-Life, and he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Rider. A section of his new book, the last of the Rider quintet, can be heard as a radio play on drunkenboat.com, with the actress Martha Plimpton in the role of the poet's mother.

TOMAZ? ?SALAMUN is widely recognized as one of the leading Central European poets and has had books translated into most of the European languages. He lives in Ljubljana and occasionally teaches in the United States. His recent books in English are Blackboards and The Book for My Brother.

SHEROD SANTOS is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Perishing (2004). In 2005 he published Greek Lyric Poetry: A New Translation. In 1999 he received an Award for Literary Excellence from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

AMY SCATTERGOOD has published one book of poetry, The Grammar of Nails. She lives with her two daughters in Los Angeles, where she teaches poetry at UCLA's Extension program and is a staff writer for the food section of The Los Angeles Times.

LLOYD SCHWARTZ is Frederick S. Troy Professor of English at The University of Massachusetts Boston, Classical Music Editor of The Boston Phoenix, and a regular commentator for NPR's Fresh Air. His most recent book of poems is Cairo Traffic (Chicago), and he is currently co-editing the collected works of Elizabeth Bishop for the Library of America.

DON SHARE is Poetry Editor of Harvard Review and Curator of the Poetry Room at Harvard University, where he teaches, and is now also Editor in Chief of Literary Imagination. His books include Union; Seneca in English; translations of Miguel Hernández, I Have Lots of Heart; and the forthcoming critical edition The Poems of Basil Bunting.

HEDDI SIEBEL has received a Fulbright Scholar Award and a National Geographic Expeditions Council grant for a project in the Arctic Circle. Her prints and paintings are in private collections and the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, the DeCordova Museum, the Boston Public Library, and the Yale Art Gallery. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

ELIZABETH SPIRES, a past guest editor of Ploughshares, is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Now the Green Blade Rises (Norton, 2002). Her books for children include The Mouse of Amherst, the tale of a small mouse who lives in Emily Dickinson's bedroom. She teaches at Goucher College in Baltimore.

MARK STRAND lives in New York and teaches at Columbia in the Department of English and Comparative Literature.

JULES SUPERVIELLE was born in Montevideo to French parents in 1884. He wrote prolifically during his lifetime, authoring twenty-nine volumes of poetry, and was admired by many of his contemporaries, including Valéry and Rilke. He died in 1960.

DEBORAH TALL has published four collections of poems, most recently Summons. Her latest book is A Family of Strangers, a memoir of secrecy and lost history in the form of a lyric essay, just out from Sarabande Books. She teaches at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where she is editor of Seneca Review.

PIMONE TRIPLETT is the author of The Price of Light (Four Way Books, 2005) and Ruining the Picture ( TriQuarterly/Northwestern, 1998). She holds an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. Currently, she teaches at the University of Washington and the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program for Writers.

KATE WALBERT is the author of a collection of stories , Where She Went, and the novels The Gardens of Kyoto and Our Kind, which was a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award. She lives in New York City with her family.

DAVID WEISS's first novel, The Mensch, came out in 1998. "Cry Baby" is the first section of a new novel of the same title. He is a poet whose work has recently appeared in Literary Imagination and Narrative Theory. He teaches at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

CHARLES WRIGHT lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, and teaches at the University of Virginia. He is the author most recently of Scar Tissue. The poem in this issue is from a book-length sequence entitled Littlefoot, which is forthcoming in 2007.

FRANZ WRIGHT's Walking to Martha's Vineyard received the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. His new collection is God's Silence (Knopf, 2006). He is currently the visiting poet-in-residence at Brandeis University.

ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI received the 2004 Neustadt Prize in Literature. His most recent volume, Music I Have Heard with You, translated by Clare Cavanagh, is forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. He divides his time between Krakow and Houston, where he teaches in the writing program at the University of Houston.