GARY ADELMAN is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since 2001 he has published books on Dostoevsky, D. H. Lawrence, and Samuel Beckett. His recent published essays are on Kafka, Ishiguro, Leonid Tsypkin, and Imre Kertész—the last of these in Volume 25, #1 & 2 of NER (2004).

ROY ADKINS, an historian and archaeologist, is also a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in London. His previous books include The Keys of Egypt: The Obsession to Decipher Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Dictionary of Roman Religion, and Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome.

RALPH ANGEL’s Neither World (1995) received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. His third and most recent collection, Twice Removed, is available from Sarabande Books. A fourth collection, Exceptions and Melancholies, as well as his translation of Federico García Lorca’s Poema del Cante Jondo, are forthcoming from Sarabande in 2006.

RICK BAROT’s first book of poems, The Darker Fall, was published by Sarabande Books in 2002. Other poems have appeared in recent issues of Southwest Review, Post Road, and TriQuarterly. He teaches at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.

CHARLES CROS (1842–88) was a French poet, humorist, songwriter, and inventor. He developed improved methods of telegraph technology and photography, but is best known for discovering the sound technology of the phonograph—though he lacked the funds to produce and patent it—before it was patented by Thomas Edison. He was a friend of Verlaine and Rimbaud, who nearly killed Cros by pouring sulfuric acid into his drink one night at a café. Cros’s poetry was largely unknown in his lifetime, and an addiction to absinthe contributed to his early death.

KARIN GOTTSHALL’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere. She currently works at the library at Middlebury College.

MICHALLE GOULD has published poems in Slate, Poetry, NER, and other journals. She was most recently a writer-in-residence at the Portsmouth Abbey School and resides at present in Austin, Texas.

MICHAEL HELLER is a poet, essayist, and critic. His essay in this issue of NER is included in his new collection, Uncertain Poetries, just released in the U.K. by Salt Publishing; the essay appears there under the title “The Narrative of Ezra Gorgon Pound or History Gothicized.” Heller’s most recent book of poems is Exigent Futures: New and Selected Poems (Salt, 2003). Among his many books are Conviction’s Net of Branches, In the Builded Place, Wordflow, and Living Root: A Memoir. He wrote the libretto for the recently performed opera Benjamin, based on the life of Walter Benjamin.

JANET KAUFFMAN lives in Hudson, Michigan, where she has restored wetlands on her farm, and works for watershed protection with Environmentally Concerned Citizens of South Central Michigan. Her latest books include the short novel Rot (New Issues Press, 2001) and a collection of prose poems, Five on Fiction (Burning Deck Press, 2004).

STEVEN G. KELLMAN is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and the author of numerous essays on literary subjects. In addition to Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth (Norton), his books include The Translingual Imagination (University of Nebraska Press, 2000) and Switching Languages: Translingual Writers Reflect on Their Craft (Nebraska, 2003).

RICHARD KENNEY teaches at the University of Washington in Seattle. His books are The Evolution of the Flightless Bird (Yale University Press), Orrery (Atheneum), and The Invention of the Zero (Knopf). He lives in Port Townsend, Washington, with his wife, two sons, and new daughter.

ROY KESEY currently lives in Beijing with his wife and children. His work has appeared in The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, and Other Voices, among other magazines. He writes a monthly column for That’s Beijing and irregular dispatches for McSweeney’s.

JOHN KINSELLA was born in Western Australia and is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose. His new volume is The New Arcadia (Norton), and other recent volumes include Peripheral Light: New and Selected Poems (Norton, 2003) and Doppler Effect (Salt Publishing, 2004). Kinsella is the editor of the international literary journal Salt and international editor of the The Kenyon Review. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and Professor of English at Kenyon College.

FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA (1898–1936) was a Spanish poet and dramatist who is today recognized as one of the greatest artists of modern Spain. He composed Poem of the Deep Song, his first major poetry collection, in 1921, at the age of twenty-three, but it was not published until 1931, five years before he was murdered by the fascists at the start of the Spanish Civil War. Other major poetical works include Gypsy Ballads and Poet in New York, and among his best-known plays are the “rural trilogy,” Blood Wedding, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba.

COREY MARKS is the author of Renunciation (University of Illinois Press), a 1999 National Poetry Series selection. His recent work appears in TriQuarterly and Virginia Quarterly Review. He teaches at the University of North Texas.

DIANE KIRSTEN MARTIN was born in the Bronx, New York, and grew up in Yonkers. She has lived in San Francisco since 1976. In addition to previous publication in NER, her work has been published in Crazyhorse, Third Coast, The North American Review, 32 Poems, Tar River Poetry, Nimrod, Cutbank, and other publications. Her manuscript, Demimonde, has been a finalist in national competitions numerous times. She was second-place winner in the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize competition in 2004, judged by B. H. Fairchild. Most recently she has been employed as a technical writer in the software industry.

CECILY PARKS is an MFA candidate at Columbia University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Five Points, The Paris Review, Southwest Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.

LUCIA PERILLO has published four books of poetry: Dangerous Life, which won the Norma Farber Award from Northeastern University Press in 1989, The Body Mutinies (Purdue, 1996), The Oldest Map with the Name America (Random House, 1999), and Luck Is Luck (Random House, 2005.) Her poetry, essays, and short fiction have appeared in many magazines and have been reprinted in the Pushcart and Best American Poetry anthologies. In the year 2000 she received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. She lives in Olympia, Washington.

ARNOLD RABIN began his career as a television network writer-producer-director, working for the United Nations and for Channel 13, the PBS station in New York. His television plays and documentaries have recieved a New York Emmy nomination, Ohio State and Variety Awards, and an Edinburgh Film Festival showing. His essays and short stories have appeared in numerous magazines and literary quarterlies, and his novel, The Rat and the Rose, was a Small Press awards finalist. He is the author of several Golden Book children’s stories. Also a playwright, Rabin has received the Denver Drama Critics Circle Best New Play Award, the Drama League of New York’s Playwright Award, and the Grand Prize at the Aspen Playwrights’ Festival. He is a recipient of grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, and has been a Professor of English and guest lecturer at several colleges and universities.

NICHOLAS SAMARAS’s first book, Hands of the Saddlemaker, was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1992. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere.

AURELIE SHEEHAN is the author of the short story collection Jack Kerouac Is Pregnant (Dalkey Archive Press) and two novels, The Anxiety of Everyday Objects (Penguin) and History Lesson for Girls, forthcoming from Viking in 2006. She is currently the director of the creative writing program at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

A. J. SHERMAN is the author of numerous literary and historical essays. His most recent book is Mandate Days: British Lives in Palestine, 1918–1948 (2nd edition, 2001).

GREGORY SPATZ’s short stories have been published in The New Yorker, Northwest Review, The Iowa Review, Glimmer Train, Epoch, and elsewhere. His latest book publications include Wonderful Tricks (short stories), and Fiddler’s Dream (a novel scheduled to appear in fall 2006). This is his third story in NER, though it’s been ten long years since his last one. He lives in Spokane, Washington, where he teaches in the MFA. program at Eastern Washington University.

VOLTAIRE (1694–1778) was a French satirist, philosopher, historian, dramatist, and poet, best known for his philosophical novel Candide, ou L’Optimisme (1759), a further attempt to explore the implications of the Lisbon earthquake. In his time, he was famous for his slashing wit, his enmity toward organized religion and fanaticism, and his determination to écraser l’infâme (annihilate the infamous).

G. C. WALDREP’s first book of poems, Goldbeater’s Skin, won the 2003 Colorado Prize. New work appears in recent issues of Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Boston Review, The Georgia Review, and other journals. In 2005–06 he will serve as a visiting assistant professor of humanities and the social sciences at Deep Springs College in California.

JESSICA WATSON is a photographer who lives in New York City. She received her m.f.a. in photography from Bard College in 2001. She has exhibited her work at Art in General, Massimo Audiello, Sean Kelly Gallery, and most recently at Magnan Projects, all in New York. She is currently a resident artist at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s workspace residency program.

DAVID YEZZI is the Director of the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y in New York. The author of The Hidden Model (TriQuarterly Books, 2003), he has published his poetry widely in journals. He serves as the poetry editor of The New Criterion.

THOMAS YORI is a coal cracker by birth, Viet Nam war resister, clawhammer banjo player, woodworker (some banjos made, aspiring now toward MasterTone), would-be has-been system analyst, twice ex–novo collegian, twice ex–Penn Statie; ex–silo builder, piano mover, dairy herdsman and farm laborer, dishwasher, cook. Aging now ashore Kennebec River (Maine) like fine vinegar. Sedulous, subversive, inveterate, banked in rage.