Contributors' Notes, Volume 24, #4

Linda Bierds is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Seconds (Putnam, 2001). She teaches at the University of Washington and in 1998 was named a fellow of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Rachel Cantor’s stories have appeared in The Paris Review, DoubleTake, Antioch Review, Chelsea, and elsewhere. Two additional stories from this series have appeared in The New England Review. One of her stories was shortlisted for an O. Henry Award. She lives in Philadelphia where she is revising a first novel and completing a first collection.

David Castronovo's "Humbert's America" appeared in NER spring 2002. He is the author of books of literary criticism and cultural history, including Edmund Wilson (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. Along with "Humbert's America," the essay in this issue of NER will be appearing in Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit: Books from the 1950s that Made American Culture, to be published by Continuum in fall 2004. Mr. Castronovo is currently Professor of English at Pace University in New York City.

William Collins Donahue is the author of The End of Modernism: Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fe (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), which was awarded the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures. In addition, he has published numerous articles on nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century German literature, culture, and film. He is co-editor (with Scott Denham) of History and Literature (Tubingen: Stauffenburg, 2000), and co-editor of several issues of the journal German Politics and Society.

Geri Doran's poems have appeared previously in New England Review and in TriQuarterly, The New Republic, Illuminations, and 32 Poems Magazine. She was a 2001-03 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.

Robin Ekiss is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Salt Hill Journal, zyzzyva, and Strange Attraction, an anthology of West Coast writing published by University of Nevada Press. She is currently completing her first book-length manuscript, The Mansion of Happiness.

Debora Greger's most recent book of poetry, God, was published in 2001. Her new collection, Western Art, will be out from Penguin in 2004.

Michael R. Katz has translated a series of novels from Russian into English, including Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and Devils, Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, Artsybashev's Sanin, and works by Herzen and Chernyshevsky. He is now completing a translation of Vladimir Jabotinsky's novel The Five. He serves as Dean of Language Schools and Schools Abroad at Middlebury College.

Sally Keith's second collection, Dwelling Song, is forthcoming (spring 2004) from the University of Georgia's Contemporary Poetry Series.

Brigit Pegeen Kelly teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has a new book of poems, The Orchard, coming out in April 2004 from BOA Editions, Ltd.

Norman Lock is a recipient of the Aga Khan Prize from The Paris Review. His fiction appears in leading American and European reviews. He has also written for film and for the theater: his plays have been produced in the United States, Germany, and at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival, and his radio plays have been broadcast in Germany. A collection of linked stories, A History of the Imagination, is scheduled for 2004 publication by Fiction Collective 2. A new chapbook, Marco Knauff's Universe, is available from Ravenna Press (www.ravennapress.com).

Cate Marvin's first book of poems, World's Tallest Disaster, received the 2002 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Fence, and The Canary, and are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review. She is an assistant professor in English at the College of Staten Island, CUNY.

John McNally is the author of Troublemakers (Iowa) and winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award (2000) and the Nebraska Book Award (2001). The Book of Ralph, a collection of linked stories, is forthcoming in 2004. His stories have appeared in over two dozen magazines, including North American Review, Open City, Chelsea, The Sun, Colorado Review, Florida Review, Idaho Review, and Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. The recipient of Michener (University of Iowa), Djerassi (University of Wisconsin), and Jenny McKean Moore (George Washington University) fellowships, he's presently an assistant professor of English at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Keith Lee Morris's first novel, The Greyhound God, was published recently by the University of Nevada Press. A story collection, Three or Four Hills and a Cloud, will follow from the same press in the fall of 2004. A previous contributor to New England Review, he has also published stories in such journals as The Sun, Georgia Review, New Orleans Review, and Puerto Del Sol. He teaches creative writing at Clemson University

Sheila Mulligan received a 2003 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction. Her work has previously appeared in New England Review, Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, and other publications.

V. Penelope Pelizzon's first poetry collection, Nostos, won the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award. She is also the recipient of a 2002 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant, and has new poems appearing or forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Hudson Review, and Field. She frequently reviews books in the field of photographic theory for the British Journal of Aesthetics and is at work on Tabloid Dramas & Celluloid Fantasies, a critical study of the relationship between tabloid newspapers and crime films from 1927 to 1958.

Charles Simic is a poet, essayist, and translator. He teaches American Literature and creative writing at the University of New Hampshire. The author of sixteen collections of poetry, five books of essays, a memoir, and numerous books of translations, he has received many literary awards for his work, including the MacArthur Fellowship and the Pulitzer Prize. The Voice at 3 a.m., his selected and new poems, was published by Harcourt in spring 2003.

Ann Townsend's poems have appeared in Poetry, The Nation, The Paris Review, and many other magazines. A first collection of poetry, Dime Store Erotics, appeared in 1998; a second collection, The Coronary Garden, will appear in 2005. She teaches at Denison University.

Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) was a U.S. novelist and music and drama critic, and a highly influential figure in New York literary circles in the 1920s. An associate of Gertrude Stein and other modernists working in the arts, he was also identified as an early advocate for the cultural expression of African Americans. Van Vechten was graduated from the University of Chicago in 1903 and worked as assistant music critic for The New York Times (1906-08), then afterward as that paper's Paris correspondent.

Nance Van Winckel's fourth collection of poems is Beside Ourselves (Miami University Press, 2003). New poems appear in American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, agni, Ploughshares, New Letters, and DoubleTake. A recipient of two NEA Poetry Fellowships, she has also published three books of short stories, most recently Curtain Creek Farm (Persea Books, 2000). She teaches in the MFA programs at Eastern Washington University and Vermont College.

Sidney Wade has published four collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Celestial Bodies, which lsu Press brought out in November 2002. She has also published Green (University of South Carolina Press, 1998), From Istanbul/Istanbul'dan (poems in translation, English/Turkish, Yapi Kredi Yayinlari, Istanbul, 1998), and Empty Sleeves (University of Georgia Press, 1991). Her poems have appeared in a wide variety of journals, including Poetry, The New Yorker, Grand Street, The Paris Review, New Republic, Gettysburg Review, and Harper's, among many others. She has taught in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Florida since 1993.

Myles Weber is assistant professor of English at Ashland University in Ohio. His collection of drama criticism, Middlebrow Annoyances, sections of which originally appeared in New England Review, was published in fall 2003 by Gival Press. He has work forthcoming in Georgia Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Studies in American Fiction. His second book, Consuming Silences: How We Read Nonpublication, will be published in 2004 by the University of Georgia Press.