Contributors' Notes, Volume 23, #2 _______   EVE ADLER is a professor of Classics at Middlebury College. In addition to a study of Virgil, her publications include a translation (from the German) of Leo Strauss's Philosophy and Law, and most recently, A Dictionary of Russian Slang and Colloquial Expressions (co-authored with Vladimir Shlyakhov and published by Barron's). JOHN BERTOLINI is the author of The Playwrighting Self of Bernard Shaw, as well as articles on Alfred Hitchcock, Renaissance drama, and Terence Rattigan, the subject of his current research. He teaches literature and film at Middlebury College, where he is the Ellis Professor of the Liberal Arts. NICHOLAS BENSON's translations of Attilio Bertolucci have appeared in Forum Italicum, Downtown Brooklyn, and Poetry International. His own work has been published in Berkeley Fiction Review, Groundswell, and Downtown Brooklyn. He has a doctorate in Italian studies from New York University and currently teaches Italian and English in New York. ATTILIO BERTOLUCCI (1911-2000), the father of renowned film directors Bernardo and Giuseppe, is considered one of Italy's greatest twentieth-century poets. The author of several volumes of poetry, he was also a prolific translator, essayist, and editor. A recipient of the prestigious Viareggio and Montale prizes, Bertolucci was also honored by the Accademia dei Lincei. ELIZABETH BURNETT grew up in Michigan, graduated from Williams College, and attended the writing program at the University of Montana. Her stories have appeared in Fourteen Hills and Other Voices. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she serves as director of the Writers in the Schools program sponsored by Literary Arts, Inc. DAVID CASTRONOVO is the author of books of literary criticism and cultural history, including Edmund Wilson (a New York Times Notable Book, 1985), Thornton Wilder (1986), The English Gentleman (1987), The American Gentleman (1991), Richard Yates (1996) with Steven Goldleaf, and Edmund Wilson Revisited (1998). He and his collaborator Janet Groth have edited From the Uncollected Edmund Wilson (1995) and most recently Edmund Wilson, The Man in Letters (2002). His essays and reviews have appeared in America, Commonweal, The Forward, and other publications. "Humbert's America" is part of a work-in-progress on the literature of the 1950s. Mr. Castronovo is currently a professor of English at Pace University in New York City. VICTORIA CHANG's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as The Nation, Massachusetts Review, Cream City Review, Crab Orchard Review, Kalliope, Florida Review, and Hawaii Review. She is also currently editing an anthology titled Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, due out in 2003 from the University of Illinois Press. JODI DAYNARD, fiction editor for Boston Review, is a writer of fiction, essays, and criticism. She is the editor of The Place Within: Portraits of the American Landscape by 20 Contemporary Writers (W. W. Norton). Ms. Daynard's essays, stories, and reviews have appeared in numerous periodicals, including the New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Harvard Review, Harvard Magazine, New England Review, Agni, and Other Voices, as well as in several anthologies. Her work has been nominated for a number of prizes including the Pushcart Prize, Glimmer Train, and the NBCC for Book Criticism. She has recently received notable mentions two years in a row (2000 and 2001) from Best American Essays. Ms. Daynard has taught writing at Harvard University and at M.I.T., and currently teaches in the M.F.A. Program at Emerson College. MIKHAIL N. EPSTEIN was born in Moscow in 1950 and graduated from Moscow State University summa cum laude in philology in 1972. The founder and director of the Laboratory of Contemporary Culture in Moscow, he is now Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University. Epstein is the author of fifteen books and approximately four hundred essays and articles, translated into fourteen languages. In 2000, he was the recipient of a Liberty Prize, established in 1999 and awarded once a year to prominent Russian cultural figures who have made an outstanding contribution to American society. He has also received, among numerous other awards, the 1995 Social Innovations Award from the Institute for Social Inventions (London) for his electronic Bank of New Ideas. NATALIA GINZBURG (1916-1990) was one of the most renowned and distinctive voices in postwar Italian literature, revered for her inimitable style and her unforgettable depiction of private lives in a disrupted social landscape. A prolific novelist, dramatist, and essayist, she is best known in this country for her novels All Our Yesterdays, The City and the House, and Voices in the Evening, and her autobiographical work, The Things We Used to Say. DAVID GRIFFITH is an anthropologist at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. His book The Estuary's Gift: An Atlantic Coast Cultural Biography (Penn State Press, 1999) was recently the Honorable Mention selection for the James Mooney Award given by the Southern Anthropological Society. He won second place in Story magazine's short-short fiction competition and has new fiction appearing The Gettysburg Review. He attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 2001. PATRICIA HALLOFF's stories have appeared in Cream City Review, Fish Stories, New Letters, Other Voices, Short Fiction, Tatlin's Tower, Witness, and various anthologies. She's published two nonfiction books, authored a story collection entitled Self-Validation and the novels Roadblocks to Nirvana and Memorial Candle. She lives in Freehold, New Jersey. (read Tenants) EDWARD HARDY is the author of the novel Geyser Life. His stories have appeared in Ploughshares, GQ, Witness, and Boulevard, among other magazines. "The Oort Cloud" comes from a linked collection titled Lost Gorge. He lives in Cranston, Rhode Island. BRIGIT PEGEEN KELLY teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her most recent book is Song, published by BOA Editions, Ltd. ADAM LEVIN holds an M.A. in clinical social work from the University of Chicago. He is presently a Creative Writing Fellow (Fiction) at the Syracuse University M.F.A. program. NORMAN LOCK, a recipient of the Aga Kahn Prize from The Paris Review, regularly publishes fiction in the U.S., and Canada, Europe, and Australia. His stage plays have been widely produced in the U.S., Germany, and at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival. Lock's radio plays have been broadcast in Germany, and he has also written for film. Two short-fiction sequences&emdash;Emigres and Joseph Cornell's Operas&emdash;are available in a single volume from Elimae Books (www.elimae.com). A fellow of the New Jersey Arts Council, he works as an advertising copywriter and a teacher in a federal prison. JOANIE MACKOWSKI's book The Zoo, winner of the 2000 AWP Prize in Poetry, was released by University of Pittsburgh Press in January. Also winner of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Grant and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, she is currently a Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Missouri--Columbia. CATE MARVIN's first book of poems, World's Tallest Disaster (Sarabande, 2001), was recently awarded the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her poems are forthcoming in The Paris Review, Pleiades, and Slate. SUZANNE MATSON's books of poems are Durable Goods and Sea Level, both from Alice James Books (individual poems have appeared in APR, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, Harvard Review, and many other journals and anthologies). She is also the author of two novels published by W. W. Norton, The Hunger Moon and A Trick of Nature, and her autobiographical essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine and Child. She teaches at Boston College. CRAIG MCDANIEL writes primarily on the visual arts. His recent publications, co-authored with Jean Robertson, include Painting As a Language: Material, Technique, Form, Content (Harcourt, 2000) and essays in Art Journal and Sculpture. He is currently a professor of art at Indiana State University. In an earlier lifetime, he studied poetry with Richard Hugo at the University of Montana. SARAH MURPHY is a Chancellor's Fellow in the English department at Indiana University, where she is pursuing her Ph.D. Her poem "Prayer," published in NER 22:1, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. (read Canto 31) PATRICK PHILLIPS's poems have appeared in recent issues of Poetry, DoubleTake, and Ploughshares, and his translations of the Danish poet Paulla Cour are forthcoming in AGNI and Scandinavian Review. He has been a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Copenhagen, and is currently a McCracken Fellow at New York University. PADGETT POWELL's most recent book is Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men, a novel. He teaches in the University of Florida M.F.A. program. KEVIN PRUFER's second book is The Finger Bone (Carnegie-Mellon, 2002). Editor of The New Young American Poets (Southern Illinois, 2000) and Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing, he has new poems in The Pushcart Prize 2002, Kenyon Review, Boulevard, Field, Prairie Schooner, and Ploughshares. (read Fallen from a Chariot) MARK RUDMAN received The National Book Critics Circle Award for the first volume of his trilogy that includes Rider, The Millennium Hotel, and Provoked in Venice (Wesleyan). The Couple (Wesleyan) is his most recent book. THEODORE SHERARTS was born and reared in New York City, and spent his adolescence in North Dakota and Minnesota. Currently in his thirty-sixth year of teaching art at St. Cloud (Minnesota) State University, he began a diary ten years ago. His Berlin diary from 2000 can be found online at http://condor.stcloudstate.edu/~art/Sherarts/diary.html. Before becoming a teacher, he was a reporter for the Akron Beacon Journal and the Wooster Daily Record in Ohio. LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ's books include the novels Leaving Brooklyn, Disturbances in the Field, and In the Family Way: An Urban Comedy, as well as the memoir Ruined by Reading. Her first collection of poetry, In Solitary, is appearing this spring from Sheep Meadow Press. Her earlier translation from Italian of Smoke Over Birkenau, by Liana Millu, won the PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award in 1991. JENNIFER TONGE's poems have appeared most recently in the Western Humanities Review and the Bellingham Review and are forthcoming in Denver Quarterly. She recently completed a Ucross Foundation residency and lives in Salt Lake City. MYLES WEBER's collection of drama criticism, Middlebrow Annoyances, is forthcoming from Gival Press. (read Two Times Two: Some Notes on Our Contemporary Theater) VALERIE WOHLFELD's collection of poems, Thinking the World Visible, is published by Yale University Press. She received her M.F.A. degree from Vermont College.