Contributors' Notes, Volume 24, #2
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GARY ADELMAN teaches English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His recent works include Retelling Dostoyevsky: Literary Responses and Other Observations (Bucknell University Press, 2001) and Reclaiming D. H. Lawrence: Contemporary Writers Speak Out (Bucknell, 2002). His forthcoming work, Naming Beckett's Unnamable, will be published next year.
QUAN BARRY is the author of Asylum, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press (2001). Her work has appeared in such publications as Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, and The New Yorker. She currently teaches at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. (read "The Long Jump as Teleportation")
MATT BONDURANT is a Virginia native and the 2001 winner of the Bernice Slote Award for best story of the year by a new writer in Prairie Schooner magazine. Other fiction publications will appear this spring in Gulf Coast Review and Hawaii Review. In the past he has worked for National Public Radio, the Associated Press, and the British Museum in London. He is currently a Kingsbury Fellow at Florida State University, and living in Austin, Texas. "The Two Lands" is the first chapter of a novel in progress.
GEOFF BROCK's poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Southern Review, and Hudson Review. A volume of his translations of Cesare Pavese's poetry was published last fall by Copper Canyon Press. A recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the National Endowment for the Arts, he is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford.
PHILIP CALLOW has published fifteen novels, several collections of short stories and poetry, and five earlier biographies&emdash;of Chekhov, Cézanne, Walt Whitman, Van Gogh, and D. H. Lawrence (early years)&emdash;all of them highly acclaimed. He lives and writes in Evesham, England.
MARC ESTRIN is a writer, cellist, and activist living in Burlington, Vermont. His debut novel, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa has recently been released in paperback. Insect Dreams was named a notable book of 2002 by the New York Public Library, the Christian Science Monitor, Publisher's Weekly, and the San Francisco Chronicle; it has twice been a Booksense 76 selection, and recently inaugurated the Utne Reader Online Bookclub. Other work has appeared in Exquisite Corpse, In Posse, Failbetter, Slow Trains, and The Land-Grant College Review. He has been a Fellow in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and also at the Wesleyan Writers' Conference.
RACHEL HADAS is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, essays, and translations, including most recently the poetry collection Indelible (Wesleyan, 2001). Her next book of poems, Laws, is forthcoming in 2004. In 2000&endash;2001 she was a Fellow at the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers. She teaches at the Newark campus of Rutgers University.
SUSAN HAHN is a poet and playwright, and is the editor of TriQuarterly magazine. Her five books of poetry include Holiday (2001) and Mother in Summer (2002). She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2003.
BRET ANTHONY JOHNSTON has received three consecutive honors in the Atlantic Monthly and has been shortlisted in 2002 Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. His fiction has appeared in numerous magazines including Southwest Review, Greensboro Review, Black Warrior Review, Mid-American Review, and Shenandoah. New work is forthcoming in New Stories from the South: The Year's Best 2003. His writing has been included in Scribner's Best of the Fiction Workshops 1999 and his collection of stories, Corpus, will be brought out by Random House in spring 2004. He holds an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and currently teaches fiction in the M.F.A. program at Northern Michigan University.
STEVE KISTULENTZ lives and writes in Washington, D.C. He was the 1999 Writers at Work Fellow, and his work in both fiction and poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Mississippi Review, Antioch Review, Quarterly West, The Crab Orchard Review, New Letters, and other publications. He was educated at the College of William and Mary and at the Johns Hopkins University, where he now teaches writing.
SUSAN KOLODNY's poems appear in 88, Cimarron Review, River Styx, Threepenny Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and other journals and anthologies. A psychotherapist in private practice in Oakland, she is the author of The Captive Muse: On Creativity and Its Inhibition (Psychosocial Press, 2000).
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."
BRENT PALLAS is a self-employed illustrator and designer in New York City.
CARL PHILLIPS, who teaches at Washington University in St. Louis, is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Rock Harbor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). His seventh book, The Rest of Love, will be published in 2004, along with Coin of the Realm, a collection of critical essays.
JOHN POCH's first book, Poems, is forthcoming from Orchises Press. One of the editors of 32 Poems Magazine, he teaches in the creative writing program at Texas Tech.
GLEN POURCIAU's stories have been published most recently in New England Review, Mississippi Review, Ontario Review, Tatlin's Tower, and Quarterly West.
DIANE RAVITCH is Research Professor of Education at New York University and holds the Brown Chair in Education at the Brookings Institution, where she edits Brookings Papers on Education Policy. A historian of education, she is the author of seven previous books, including the recent study entitled Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform (2001). She graduated from the Houston public schools, and earned a B.A. from Wellesley College and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Appointed to serve as Assistant Secretary of Education in charge of research for the U.S. Department of Education from 1991&endash;1993, Ravitch was honored as a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library and is a board member of the New York City Council for the Humanities. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
KAREN RIGBY is an M.F.A. student at the University of Minnesota. Festival Bone, a letterpress chapbook, will be published by Adastra Press in the fall of 2003. Other poems have appeared in Field, Black Warrior Review, and other journals.
DAVID RODERICK is currently a Wallace Stegner Writing Fellow in poetry at Stanford University, and also the recipient of a Robert and Charlotte Baron Artist Fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society for 2003. His poems are forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Lit, Massachusetts Review, Ontario Review, and Verse. (read "Riparian")
MARK RUDMAN, whose poems and essays have appeared previously in NER, is the author of seven books of poetry and three books of prose. His poetic trilogy comprises The Millennium Hotel, Provoked in Venice, and Rider, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1994. The Couple (2002) is his most recent book of poems.
GEORGE SINGLETON's latest collection of stories is The Half-Mammals of Dixie (2002). "The Morton Salt Boy" is part of When Dogs Chased Cars, to be brought out by Algonquin Books in the fall of 2004.
TED SOLOTAROFF is a widely published editor and critic. "An Evening with Bernard Malamud" is taken from his new memoir, First Loves (2003). His first book of recollections, Truth Comes in Blows (2000), won the PEN-Albrand award for the art of the memoir in 1999. His edition of Alfred Kazin's America: Critical and Personal Writings will be published this fall by HarperCollins.
TRENTON LEE STEWART is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and has fiction published or forthcoming in New England Review, The Georgia Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Canary Review, and other journals.
JONATHAN WILSON was born in London in 1950. He has lived in the United States since 1976, with a four-year interlude in Jerusalem. The author of two previous works of fiction, Schoom (1995) and The Hiding Room (1995), he has published stories in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Tikkun, Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere, and he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for fiction in 1994. He is currently chair of the English department at Tufts University. A Palestine Affair, the new novel from which the story in this issue is excerpted, will be brought out by Pantheon in June 2003.