Contributors’ Notes, Vol. 31, #4
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AMIN AHMAD was born in Calcutta, India, and now lives in Washington, DC. Formerly an architect specializing in the restoration of old houses, he is now a full-time writer. His work has been published in Harvard Review, Narrative Magazine, the Sun, Utne Reader, and the Good Men Project. He was a finalist in Glimmer Train’s short story contests in 2009 and 2010. As A. X. Ahmad, he just completed a thriller in which an Indian protagonist battles a world in the grip of American political intrigue.

LINDA MIEKO ALLEN was born in Osaka, Japan. She received her B.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and attended the Rhode Island School of Design. She has received painting residencies from the Bogliasco Foundation in Italy, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the Djerassi Resident Artists program, the MacDowell Colony, the Roswell Foundation, the Ucross Foundation, and Weir Farm Trust. She is also the recipient of a Pollock–Krasner Award.

KELLAM AYRES was raised in Ohio. She is a librarian at Middlebury College and a graduate of the Bread Loaf School of English. This is her first publication.

BRADLEY BAZZLE’s writing appears in Opium, Cold Mountain Review, Indiana Review, and Critical Insights: Benjamin Franklin (Salem Press, 2009). He also makes comedy with Trophy Dad, whose videos appear on YouTube (search words “Trophy Dad”). Right now he’s hard at work in Bloomington, Indiana, on his first collection of stories. Feel free to e-mail him at bradleybazzle@yahoo.com with questions or concerns.

REGINALD DWAYNE BETT’s first poetry collection, Shahid Reads His Own Palm, was published by Alice James Books (2010) and won the Beatrice Hawley Award. His memoir, A Question of Freedom, won a 2009 NAACP Image Award and was published by Penguin Books. A Soros Justice Fellow, Betts is also a founding member of the poetry collective The Symphony. He’s currently working on being a better man to some people he cares about.

PAULA BOHINCE, who lives in Pennsylvania, is the author of two poetry collections, both from Sarabande Books: Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods (2008) and The Children (2012). Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, the Nation, and elsewhere. She has received a 2009 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the 2010–2011 Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship.

MICHAEL COHEN wrote academic books before retiring; his last was Murder Most Fair: The Appeal of Mystery Fiction (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000). Now he writes personal essays, two of which recently appeared in Missouri Review and Kenyon Review. He and his wife, Katharine, live on Kentucky Lake when they’re not in the Tucson Mountains.

MICHAEL COLLIER’s most recent collection of poems is Dark Wild Realm (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). In 2009, he was given an Award in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Maryland and is director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

STACEY D'ERASMO is the author of the novels Tea (Algonquin, 2000), A Seahorse Year (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), and The Sky Below (Houghton Mifflin, 2009). She is the recipient of a 2009 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Fiction. Her essays, features, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Boston Review, Bookforum, and Ploughshares, among other publications. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Writing at Columbia University, and in the spring of 2011 will be in residence at the American Academy in Rome as the 2010–11 Sovern/Columbia Affiliated Fellow. At present, she is at work on her fourth novel, Wonderland.

DENIS DONOGHUE teaches English, Irish, and American Literature at New York University. His latest book, Irish Essays, comes out from Cambridge University Press this year. The essay that appears in this issue was first presented in the form of a lecture at the Yeats International Summer School in Sligo, Ireland, 26 July 2010.

GERI DORAN’s second book of poems, Sanderlings, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2011. Recent work has appeared in Poetry International, Image, Southern Review, and Ninth Letter. She currently teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Oregon.

JOANNE DOMINIQUE DWYER lives in New Mexico. She earned her M.F.A. from the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program for Writers, is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award, and was a recent Bread Loaf Scholar. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Conduit, Cortland Review, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, and TriQuarterly.

KATHLEEN FORD has published stories in commercial magazines such as Yankee, Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Woman’s World, and in quarterlies such as the Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Antioch Review, North American Review, and others. Two of her stories have won PEN awards for Syndicated Fiction and another story was included in the anthology Cabbage and Bones (Henry Holt, 1997). Her first novel was published by St. Martin’s Press. The recipient of a Christopher Isherwood Foundation award for 2011, she lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she teaches adult ESL and is currently writing stories about Irish maids and the soldiers of World War I.

SARAH FRISCH was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction and is currently the Draper Lecturer in Nonfiction at Stanford University. She holds an M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis, and has been a finalist for the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award.

TARA GOEDJEN’s fiction has been published in journals such as AGNI, BOMB, Denver Quarterly, Fairy Tale Review, and Quarterly West. Her collection of short stories, Absence of Oxygen, won the 2008 Best Thesis Award at the University of Alabama. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Wollongong in New South Wales, Australia.

LINDA GREGERSON’s most recent book, Magnetic North (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), was a finalist for the National Book Award.

JOSHUA HARMON’s forthcoming book, Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie (University of Akron Press), was awarded the 2010 Akron Poetry Prize. His two previous books are Scape, a collection of poems (Black Ocean, 2009), and Quinnehtukqut, a novel (Starcherone Books, 2007). The essay in this issue is from a work-in-progress called The Annotated Mix-Tape.

GEORGE F(RISBIE) HOAR (1826–1904) served in the Massachusetts state legislature, and then for four terms as a U.S. Congressman and four terms as a U.S. Senator. His personal recollections were collected in the two-volume Autobiography of Seventy Years (1903). He was born in Concord and after his death was buried there, in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.

TOM LATHROP is the editor of the Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America. Aside from this new translation, he has done an unabridged edition of the Spanish original of this work by Cervantes, as well as a children’s Don Quixote, illustrated by Jack Davis. He has spoken about Don Quixote in national and international forums, and has received the “Order of Don Quijote,” the highest award made by Sigma Delta Pi, the national Spanish honorary society. He was also invested by the king of Spain as an officer in the Order of Isabel la Católica. A Professor Emeritus at the University of Delaware, he has a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from UCLA.

SCOTT NADELSON is the author of two story collections: Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories (Hawthorne Books, 2004), winner of the Oregon Book Award for short fiction and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and The Cantor’s Daughter (Hawthorne Books, 2006), recipient of the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize. His work has recently appeared in Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Crazyhorse, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Post Road, and his new story collection, Aftermath, is forthcoming from Hawthorne Books in fall 2011.

MATTHEW NIENOW is the author of two chapbooks: The Smallest Working Pieces (Toadlily Press, 2009) and Two Sides of the Same Thing (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2007). His work has appeared in Best New Poets, Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, Willow Springs, and elsewhere. He has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts (2011), the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Foundation, and Seattle’s leading arts organization, 4Culture. He holds an M.F.A from the University of Washington and is currently attending the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding in preparation for opening his own boat shop.

ROBERT OLDSHUE is a physician in Boston. His work has appeared previously in New England Review, as well as in Gettysburg Review and Bellevue Literary Review.

STEVE ORLEN (1942–2010), who died in November of 2010, is the author of two chapbooks and four collections of poetry (Permission to Speak, A Place at the Table, The Bridge of Sighs, and Kisses). He received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well as the George Dillon Memorial Award from Poetry magazine. He recently taught at the University of Arizona and in the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program for Writers. A memorial tribute to him by Michael Collier appears on p. 115 of this issue.

OLIVER DE LA PAZ is the author of three books of poetry. His most recent collection, Requiem for the Orchard, was published by Akron University Press (2010). He is the co-chair of the Kundiman.org advisory board and teaches creative writing at Western Washington University.

CHRISTINE SNEED has published stories in three other issues of the New England Review, one of which was selected for Best American Short Stories. Her story collection, Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry, won AWP’s 2009 Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction and was published in November 2010 by the University of Massachusetts Press. Other recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Southern Review, Pleiades, Glimmer Train, Notre Dame Review, and a number of other journals.

MARK WAGENAAR’s book Voodoo Inverso is the 2011 winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin Press. The last student to work with Charles Wright at the M.F.A. program at the University of Virginia, he has published his poems widely, most recently in Southern Review, Subtropics, Crab Orchard Review, and American Literary Review. He’s currently at work on a Ph.D. at the University of Utah.