Contributors' Notes, Volume 23, #4
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STEVE ALMOND is the author of the story collection My Life in Heavy Metal (Grove/Atlantic, 2002). His stories have appeared previously in New England Review, as well as in Playboy, Zoetrope, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, and many other publications. (read Shotgun Wedding)
DEBORAH CUMMINS has published a collection of poems, Beyond The Reach (BkMk Press, 2002), and a chapbook of poems, From the Road It Looks Like Paradise (State Street Press, 1997). She is currently the president of the Modern Poetry Association (publishers of Poetry). Her numerous awards include a James Michener Fellowship, the Headwaters Literary Prize, and various fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council. Recent work has appeared in Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, and Gettysburg Review. She resides in Evanston, Illinois and Deer Isle, Maine. (read If Not Moonless)
ANDREW FELD's poetry has appeared in The Yale Review, Poetry, The Nation, Agni, The Americn Scholar, and other journals. (read To Adam)
CAROL FROST's new book of poems, I Will Say Beauty, will be published in the spring of 2003 by Northwestern University Press. Her poems and essays have appeared in previous issues of New England Review, and her work may be found in the latest Pushcart anthology, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, and TriQuarterly.
JENNIFER GROTZ's collection, Cusp, is winner of the 2002 Bakeless Prize, and will be published by Houghton Mifflin. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, and Best American Poetry 2002. The author of Not Body, a limited edition letterpress chapbook (Urban Editions, 2001), she is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston.
PENELOPE HUGHES-HALLETT, who lives and writes in England, was brought up in Jane Austen's Steventon. The author of My Dear Cassandra: Illustrated Letters of Jane Austen and Home at Grasmere: The Wordsworths and the Lakes, she has also edited Childhood: A Collins Anthology.
KIMBERLY JOHNSON's book Leviathan with a Hook was published in 2002 by Persea Books. Her work has recently appeared in Verse and is forthcoming in Xantippe.
JOHN KINSELLA's next book is Peripheral Sight: Selected and New Poems, selected and introduced by Harold Bloom, and due out from W. W. Norton in fall 2003. He is Professor of English at Kenyon College and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University.
KARL KIRCHWEY's fourth book of poems, At the Palace of Jove, has just been published by Marian Wood Books/Putnam. His verse play based on the Alcestis of Euripides is entitled Airedales & Cipher. A recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature and of grants from the NEA and the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim foundations, Mr. Kirchwey is Director of Creative Writing and Senior Lecturer in the Arts at Bryn Mawr College. From 1987-2000, he served as Director of the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center in New York.
P. F. KLUGE, a journalist and novelist, is writer-in-residence at his alma mater, Kenyon College.
JOAN LEEGANT's first collection of stories will be published by W. W. Norton in 2003. She lives in Newton, Massachusetts and teaches writing at Harvard University.
NORMAN LOCK, a recipient of the Aga Kahn Prize from The Paris Review, regularly publishes fiction in the U. S., Canada, Europe, and Australia. His stage plays have been widely produced in the U. S. and Germany, and at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival. Lock's radio plays have been broadcast in Germany, and he has also written for film. A History of the Imagination, a collection of linked fictions, will be published in March 2004 by Fiction Collective Two. Two short-prose collections--Émigrés and Joseph Cornell's Operas--are available in a single volume from Elimae Books [www.elimae.com]. The texts published in this issue are from a new collection titled Grim Tales. (read Grim Tales)
WILLIAM LOGAN's new book of poetry, Macbeth in Venice, will come out next summer. His new book of criticism, Desperate Measures, will be published by the University Press of Florida this fall, and he edited and wrote the introduction for the expanded edition of Randall Jarrell's Poetry and the Age, which appeared last year. He is on the faculty of the University of Florida.
MICHAEL LOWENTHAL's second novel, Avoidance, will be published this fall by Graywolf Press. His previous novel, The Same Embrace, is available from Plume; short stories have appeared in Tin House, Southern Review, Kenyon Review, and in numerous anthologies. The recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, he teaches writing at Boston College.
PHILIP METRES's poems and translations of Russian poets have appeared in a variety of journals and in the anthologies Best American Poetry (2002), In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era (Zephyr, 1999), and Dialogue Through Poetry (2001). "A House Without," his first book manuscript, has been a semifinalist for the Walt Whitman and Crab Orchard Review awards. An assistant professor at John Carroll University in University Heights, Ohio, he has a translation of A Kindred Orphanhood: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky forthcoming from Zephyr in 2003.
KEITH LEE MORRIS's fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in such publications as Georgia Review, The Sun, Quarterly West, StoryQuarterly, Puerto Del Sol, Manoa, and South Carolina Review. His story "The Children of Dead State Troopers" appeared in the Winter 2002 issue of New England Review. A novel, The Greyhound God, and a short story collection (in which "Geraldine Loves" is included) are forthcoming from the University of Nevada Press. He is a professor of creative writing at Clemson University.
PAUL MULDOON was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and educated in Armagh and at the Queen's University of Belfast. From 1973 to 1986 he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is now Howard G. B. Clark '21 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University; in recent years he has also been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf School of English. In 1999 he was elected Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, where this lecture was given in a series offered under the general title "The End of the Poem."
SUSAN NEIMAN is director of the Einstein Forum, Potsdam, and a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. She studied philosphy at Harvard University and at the Freie Universität&endash;Berlin, and has taught at Yale University and Tel Aviv University. Her works include Slow Fire: Jewish Notes from Berlin and The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant. The text in this issue of NER is taken from her latest book, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, published by Princeton.
CORNELIUS PARTSCH is Assistant Professor of German Studies at Mount Holyoke College. His research interests include popular culture, literature and music, the historical avant-gardes, and various genres of popular fiction. He recently published Schräge Töne: Jazz und Unterhaltungsmusik in der Kultur der Weimarer Republic, a cultural history of jazz and popular music in 1920s and 1930s Germany.
MARK RUDMAN, whose poems and critical essays have appeared previously in NER, is the author of seven books of poetry and three books of prose. His poetic trilogy includes The Millennium Hotel, Provoked in Venice, and Rider, which received the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award. The Couple (2002) is his most recent book of poems.
LADISLAV SMOCEK is a native of Plzeò, the Czech Republic. A founder of the Drama Club Theater (Èinherní Klub) in Prague in 1965&emdash;and associated with it ever since&emdash;he has been a leading Czech playwright and director for decades. Starting in the 1960s, audiences around the world, in England, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, Belgium, Austria, Finland, and Scandinavia, as well as in the Phillipines and the United States, have become acquainted with his work as a director and with his plays, including Piknik (1965), Dr. Burke's Strange Afternoon (1966), The Maze (1966), and Cosmic Spring (1970). The Noose (1972), written in English, first appeared in print in the Summer 2001 issue of NER.
CHRISTINE SNEED's poems have been published or are forthcoming in Poetry East, Pleiades, Columbia Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Poet Lore, Mudfish, Cimarron Review, River Styx, Laurel Review, Puerto del Sol, Calyx, and other journals. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Greensboro Review, River Styx, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Laurel Review, and Third Coast; the story in Third Coast was short-listed for the 2001 O. Henry Prize. She lives in Chicago and works at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
PIMONE TRIPLETT is the author of Ruining The Picture, published by Northwestern University Press. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Agni, The Paris Review, Poetry, TriQuarterly, and many other publications. A winner of the Hazel Hall Award in poetry, she has had work featured in several anthologies, including New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology and Carnegie Mellon's American Poetry: The Next Generation. She has an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon.
NATASHA TRETHEWEY is author of Bellocq's Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002) and Domestic Work (Graywolf, 2000). She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Alabama State Council on the Arts, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Currently she is at Emory University, where she serves as an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing.