SEBASTIAN BARRY was born in Dublin in 1955. He is the author of the novels The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (Viking, 1998) and Annie Dunne (Viking, 2002), and his most recent play, Whistling Psyche, premiered at the Almeida in London in 2004. An earlier play, The Steward of Christendom, won many awards and has been seen around the world. He currently lives in Wicklow, Ireland.

FREDERICK BROWN is the author of Zola: A Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995). His biography of Flaubert will be coming out in April 2006 from Little, Brown.

JOAO CABRAL DE MELO NETO (1920–99), one of Brazil’s most original twentieth-century poets, was born and raised in the northeastern state of Pernambuco. A career diplomat, he lived for many years in Spain, the other geographical pole around which his poetry flourished. Suspicious of confessional poetry, João Cabral aspired to make poems the way an engineer makes bridges, and claimed that the writings of the Swiss architect Le Corbusier were the greatest influence on his work.

KENYON COX (1856–1919), an acccomplished artist, was also an influential cultural critic whose works include such collections as The Classic Point of View (1911) and Artist and Public (1914).

TED GENOWAYS is a poet, translator, and editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. His collection Bullroarer (Northeastern, 2001) received the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, the Natalie Ornish Poetry Award, and the Nebraska Book Award. His other honors include a 2003 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. He is the editor of six books, including Papermill: Poems, 1927–35 (University of Illinois Press, 2004), a collection of poems by Joseph Kalar.

DEBORA GREGER’s most recent book of poems, Western Art, was published by Penguin in 2004.

JOSHUA HARMON’s work has appeared most recently in Agni, TriQuarterly, Denver Quarterly, Southern Review, and Verse. He has received a fellowship in fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts for 2004.

JANE HIRSHFIELD, whose Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins, 2001) was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award in poetry, is the recipient of the 2004 Academy Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, as well as a 2005 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her next book will be published by HarperCollins in early 2006. Other recent work appears in The Georgia Review, The American Scholar, TriQuarterly, and The Best American Poetry 2004.

HONOREE FANONNE JEFFERS is the recipient of an award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the Alan Collins Fellowship in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her stories have appeared in Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz and Literature and Indiana Review. A native Southerner, Jeffers now lives in Oklahoma where she teaches English at the University of Oklahoma.

LORRAINE MAVIS LUOP lives in Berkeley with her husband. While this is not her first story in print, it was the first she actually enjoyed writing. The poem quoted in her story is by extra Ruth Roozef and was first published in the January 26, 1935 Hollywood Filmograph.

SARAH MANGUSO is the author of The Captain Lands in Paradise (2002) and Siste Viator (2006), forthcoming from Four Way Books. She teaches in The New School’s M.F.A. program and lives in Brooklyn.

MOLLY MCNETT earned an M.A. in Linguistics at Northern Illinois University, and completed an M.F.A. in fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was awarded a Maytag Fellowship and a Teaching-Writing Fellowship. She has had fiction published in The Missouri Review and has stories forthcoming in Black Warrior Review and Other Voices. She currently teaches English as a second language.

PHILIP METRES is a poet and a translator of Russian poetry, whose work has appeared in numerous journals and in The Best American Poetry 2002. His books include Primer for Non-Native Speakers (a chapbook, 2004), A Kindred Orphanhood: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky (Zephyr Press, 2003), and Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004). He is an assistant professor of English at John Carroll University. Check out www.philipmetres.com for more information.

CARL PHILLIPS’s most recent books are The Rest of Love (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004) and Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry (Graywolf, 2004). He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

F. D. REEVE’s The Return of the Blue Cat, poems with an improv jazz CD, will be out in April from Other Press, to be followed by Lions and Acrobats: Selected Poems by Anatoly Naiman (Zephyr Press), a volume of which Margo Rosen and he are each translating half.

A. J. SHERMAN, an Associate Fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, is Scholar in Residence at Middlebury College. His most recent book is Mandate Days: British Lives in Palestine, 1918–1948 (Johns Hopkins, 2nd ed., 2001).

MANDELIENE SMITH lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, where she serves on the board of Grub Street, Boston’s independent writing center. An earlier story was published in The Massachusetts Review and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

NATASHA TRETHEWEY is author of Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002) and Domestic Work (Graywolf, 2000). She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University.

J. M. TYREE studied English at Middlebury College and was a Keasbey Scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge. His work has appeared previously in NER and is forthcoming in The Believer, Discover, and Bridge. His essay “On the Implausibility of the Death Star’s Trash Compactor” was included in Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans: Best of the McSweeney’s Humor Category (Knopf, 2004).

RICHARD WOLLMAN is the author of A Cemetery Affair, a chapbook from Finishing Line Press, 2004. His first full-length collection, A Possible Son, will be published by Sheep Meadow Press in 2005. Recent work appears in Crazyhorse and American Literary Review, and on the Poetry Daily website. He is associate professor of literature and creative writing at Simmons College in Boston.

JAMES WRIGHT (1927–80) was the author of numerous collections of poetry, including The Green Wall (1957), which was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets series, and Collected Poems (1971), which was awarded the 1972 Pulitzer Prize. Above the River: The Complete Poems came out in 1990.

RICHARD ZENITH’s translations from the Portuguese include works by António Lobo Antunes and Fernando Pessoa. His Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems won the 1999 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. He is the author of a collection of short stories, Terceiras Pessoas [Third Persons], and has published his own poetry in literary reviews. The four translations printed in this issue of NER are from Education by Stone: Selected Poems of João Cabral de Melo Neto, to be published in February 2005 by Archipelago Books. He lives in Lisbon.