Contributors’ Notes, Vol. 30, #4 (2009/2010)
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ROBERT ALTER has taught Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1967. The author of more than twenty books, he has also published four volumes of Bible translation, most recently The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary (Norton, 2007). In 2009, Alter received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for lifetime contribution to American letters.

HOWARD ALTMANN’s second book of poetry, In This House, is forthcoming from Turtle Point Press in spring 2010. His poems have appeared in a number of journals, including Ploughshares and Poetry. He is the author of the play The Johnsons & the Thompsons and lives in New York City.

LARRY BRADLEY ’s work has appeared in the New Republic, Paris Review, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Southwest Review, Western Humanities Review, and online at VerseDaily and Poets Against War. His manuscripts have been finalists for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, the Walt Whitman Award (twice), and the National Poetry Series. He has received the Morton Marr Poetry Prize and the Reginald Shepherd Memorial Prize, and was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at Sewanee. He lives in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.

JEAN ANTHELME BRILLAT-SAVARIN (1755–1826) was a French lawyer, politician, and author of Physiologie du goût (The Physiology of Taste). He published several works on law and political economy before his pioneering work on gastronomy appeared in 1825, with the full title Physiologie du goût, ou méditation de gastronomie transcendante, ouvrage théorique, historique et à l’ordre du jour, 8 vol. (The Physiology of Taste, or Meditation on Transcendent Gastronomy, a Work Theoretical, Historical, and Programmed). The book went through several French editions in the nineteenth century, and portions of it were first translated into English in 1852.

FREDERICK BROWN ’s most recent book is For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus (Knopf, 2010). He is also the author of Flaubert: A Biography (Little, Brown, 2006) and Zola: A Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995), among other works. In September 2010 Yale University Press will release his translation of Tocqueville’s letters from America.

DAVID CAPLAN is associate professor of English at Ohio Wesleyan University and the author of Questions of Poetry: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form (Oxford University Press, 2004) and In the World He Created According to His Will, which the University of Georgia Press/VQR Poetry Series will publish this March. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing, Virginia Quarterly Review, and the Antioch Review. His current scholarly project is Rhyme’s Challenge, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

EDUARDO C. CORRAL ’s poems have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Ploughshares, Post Road, and Quarterly West. His work has been honored with a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, a Bread Loaf tuition scholarship, and residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and Yaddo.

THOMAS E. GILSON is the author of the The New England Farm, a highly praised book of photographs. He has worked as managing editor and photographer for The New England Farmer, a monthly farm magazine, and taught black-and-white photography in Vermont at Lyndon State College for seventeen years. His photographs have been published and exhibited throughout the United States and England. He lives with his wife in Pine Bush, New York.

WILLIAM GILSON is an American living permanently in northwest England with his wife and two children. He is a past fellow of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and has published poetry, short stories, and essays in America and England.

THOMAS GOUGH is the pen name of Thom Conroy, an American teaching creative writing at Massey University in New Zealand. Gough is the winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction and the 2009 People’s Choice Winner in New Zealand’s Sunday Star Times Short Story Competition. His fiction has appeared in Quarterly West, Alaska Quarterly Review, Connecticut Review, Agni Online, and Kenyon Review Online. He is currently at work on a novel set in 1839 in New Zealand.

JOSHUA HARMON is the author of Scape, a collection of poems, and Quinnehtukqut, a novel. His recent work is published or forthcoming in Agni, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, and Typo. An earlier essay on music, “The Records,” appeared in NER Vol. 25, #4, and his story “The Passion of Asa Fitch” appeared in Vol. 28, #4.

DREW JOHNSON was raised in Mississippi. His fiction has appeared in Harper’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, Swink, and StoryQuarterly. He lives with his wife in Carlisle, Massachusetts, and is at work on a novel.

YASUNARI KAWABATA (1899–1972) is widely regarded as one of the twentieth century’s greatest authors. He was Japan’s first recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he was awarded in 1968. Yukiguni (1948; Snow Country), Sembazuru (1952; Thousand Cranes), and Yama no oto (1949–54; The Sound of the Mountain) are considered to be his best novels. A collection of his stories written between 1923–72 was translated and published as Palm of the Hand Stories (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988). “Lyric Poem” was first published in Japanese in 1934.

JOANN KOBIN ’s short fiction has appeared in the Antioch Review, Massachusetts Review, North American Review, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, New Letters, and other journals and anthologies. She is the author of a novel-in-stories, Woman Made of Sand (Delphinium, 2002).

GEORGE LOONEY ’s books include The Precarious Rhetoric of Angels (White Pine Press Poetry Prize, 2005), Attendant Ghosts (Cleveland State University Press, 2000), Animals Housed in the Pleasure of Flesh (Bluestem Award, 1995), and the novella Hymn of Ash (Elixir Press Fiction Chapbook Award, 2008). In addition, Open Between Us, a new book of poetry, is due out from the Turning Point imprint of WordTech Communications early in 2010. He is chair of the B.F.A. in Creative Writing Program at Penn State, Erie, editor-in-chief of the international literary journal Lake Effect, translation editor of Mid-American Review, and co-director of the Chautauqua Writers’ Festival.

IGOR LUKES is University Professor and Professor of History and International Relations at Boston University. He has written about Europe between the world wars and about contemporary developments in East Central Europe, Russia, and the Balkans. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Lukes has systematically worked in the newly opened archives in Central Europe. This work provided the foundation for his book, Czechoslovakia Between Stalin and Hitler: The Diplomacy of Edvard Benes in the 1930s. Published by Oxford University Press in 1996, the book won the Boston Authors Club Award as well as the Kahn Award. He is also a co-author and/or co-editor of The Munich Conference, 1938: Prelude to World War II (1999), Inside the Apparat: Perspectives on the Soviet Union (1990), and Gorbachev’s USSR: A System in Crisis (1990).

PAUL MARSTON is an author, translator, and lawyer. He lives in Tokyo with his wife.

SHARA MCCALLUM has published two books of poems, Song of Thieves (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003) and The Water Between Us (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999, winner of the 1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize), as well as personal essays in the Antioch Review, Creative Nonfiction, Witness, and elsewhere. Her poems appear in literary journals in the U.S. and abroad, have been reprinted in more than twenty anthologies of American, African American, Caribbean, and World poetry, and have been translated into Spanish and Romanian. Originally from Jamaica, she currently lives in Pennsylvania with her family; she directs the Stadler Center and teaches creative writing and literature at Bucknell University.

MATTHEW OLZMANN is a Kundiman Fellow and the poetry editor of The Collagist. His poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Margie, Minnesota Review, Salt Hill, and elsewhere.

GLEN POURCIAU ’s short story collection, Invite, won the 2008 Iowa Short Fiction Award and was published by the University of Iowa Press. In addition to appearing in New England Review, his stories have been published in the Antioch Review, Cimarron Review, Mississippi Review, New Orleans Review, Paris Review, TriQuarterly, and other magazines.

MARTHA RHODES, a founding editor and the director of Four Way Books, is the author of three collections of poetry: At the Gate (Provincetown Arts, 1999), Perfect Disappearance (winner of the Green Rose Prize; New Issues Poetry Press, 2000), and Mother Quiet (Zoo Press, 2004). She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and at the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program for Writers.

JENNIFER RILEY is a painter and arts writer who lives and works in New York City. In addition to exhibiting her work regularly, she has reviewed art for the New York Sun, Brooklyn Rail, and ArtCritical.com and is the co-director of the Rome Program for Harvard Graduate School of Design. She has also taught at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Pratt Institute, and Montserrat College of Art. In 2004 she was recipient of the Award in Painting from the Massachusetts State Cultural Council. She is represented in New York by Allegra LaViola and in Boston by Carroll & Sons.

FAYETTE ROBINSON’s date of birth is uncertain, but it is known that he was born in Virginia and died in New York City in March of 1859. In addition to translating Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du goût (Physiology of Taste) and several French novels, he published a romance, Wizard of the Wave, in 1853, and was the author of Mexico and Her Military Chieftains, From the Revolution of Hidalgo to the Present Time (1847), an Account of the Organization of the Army of the United States, with Biographies of Distinguished Officers (1848), The Cardinal, a Tragedy in Five Acts (1848), California and the Gold Regions (1849), and a Grammar of the Spanish Language (1850).

CHAITI SEN has been an elementary school teacher for fifteen years. Her work has appeared in Kartika Review, Brink Magazine, and the Asian Pacific American Journal. She holds an M.F.A. from Hunter College (City University of New York) and now lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband and stepson.

CHRISTINE SNEED teaches in the English department at DePaul University. Her first story collection, Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry, won AWP’s 2009 Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction and will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press in late 2010. Her stories have appeared in past issues of New England Review and in Best American Short Stories 2008, Meridian, Greensboro Review, and New Ohio Review. She lives in Evanston, Illinois.

DAN STRYK has published a number of collections of poems and prose parables, including The Artist and the Crow (Purdue University Press, 1984) and Solace of the Aging Mare (The Mid-America Press, 2008). His most recent crosscultural volume, Dimming Radiance: Poems and Prose Parables —a fusion of Far Eastern and Western concepts and writing forms—was released by Wind Publications in 2008. His individual works continue to appear in such journals as the Antioch Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, Commonweal, Alaska Quarterly Review, and in anthologies such as Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets of Virginia (University of Virginia Press) and A Year in Poetry (Crown). He has held an NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry.

ALEXIS [CHARLES HENRI MAURICE CLEREL] DE TOCQUEVILLE (1805–59) was a French historian and political writer whose most important works include Démocratie en Amérique (Democracy in America, 1835–39)—a celebrated study that in many ways remains definitive—and L’Ancien Régime et la Revolution (The Old Regime and the Revolution, 1856). He served as a member of the Constituent Assembly and the Legislative Assembly, and as minister of foreign affairs under Louis Napoleon until the coup d’état of December 2, 1851, after which he was deprived of political office; retiring to his estate, he continued work on his history of the French Revolution and its aftermath, a project left unfinished at his death.

NATASHA TRETHEWEY is the author of three collections of poetry, Domestic Work (Graywolf, 2000), Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002), and Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. At Emory University she is Professor of English and holds the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry.

J. M. TYREE currently works as a Jones Lecturer in Fiction in Stanford University’s Creative Writing Program and is a writer-at-large for Film Quarterly. His essays on place and literature have appeared in several previous issues of New England Review.