Contributors’ Notes, Vol. 26, #4

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MARK BIBBINS lives in New York City. His first book of poems, Sky Lounge, was published by Graywolf Press in 2003 and received a Lambda Literary Award.

ROBIN BLAETZ is Associate Professor and Chair of the Film Studies Program at Mount Holyoke College. She is the author of Visions of the Maid: Joan of Arc in American Film and Culture (University of Virginia Press, 2001) and is currently working on a book about several women experimental filmmakers entitled Home Movies.

FRANZ BOAS(1858–1942), a cultural anthropologist and one of the most influential figures in the history of American anthropology, was born in Minden, Germany. His works include The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), Primitive Art (1927), General Anthropology (1938), and Race, Language, and Culture (1940), as well as more than six hundred articles.

FREDERICK BROWN is the author of Zola: A Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995), among other works. His biography of Flaubert will be coming out in April 2006 from Little, Brown.

MICHAEL COLLIER’s new collection of poems, Dark Wild Realm (Houghton Mifflin), and his translation of Medea (Oxford University Press) will be published in spring 2006. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Maryland and is the Director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

DICK DAVIS is Professor of Persian and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University. As author, translator, or editor, he has produced twenty-two books. In addition to academic works, he has published translations from Italian (prose) and Persian (prose and verse) and numerous books of poetry.

RON DE MARIS is a Miami poet. He has poems forthcoming in Antioch Review, TriQuarterly, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, Atlanta Review, Tampa Review, and other journals, and has previously appeared in Poetry, The New Republic, The Nation, Antioch Review, TriQuarterly, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, APR, and more than thirty other magazines. He has two books looking for a publisher: The Architect of the Infinite and Other Poems and Thirty-Six Elegant Diversions.

JAN ELLISON is currently in the M.F.A. program at San Francisco State University. She has a B.A. in history from Stanford and lives in Portola Valley, California, with her husband and their four children. This is her first published story. Visit her on the web at janellison.com.

ABOLQASEM FERDOWSI (c. 940–1020) was born in Tus in northeastern Iran. He composed the epic Shahnameh, which is considered the longest poem ever written by a single author, between the years 980 and 1010, about four centuries after the fall of the ancient Persian Empire and the coming of Islam.

CASTLE FREEMAN, JR. is the author of many stories and essays. His novel My Life and Adventures was published in 2002 by St. Martin’s. He lives in Newfane, Vermont.

DOUGLAS GOETSCH’s most recent poetry collection is The Job of Being Everybody (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2004). He leads the creative writing program for incarcerated teens at Passages Academy in the Bronx, and is founding editor of Jane Street Press.

ROB HARDY’s poetry chapbook, The Collecting Jar, won the 2004 Grayson Books Poetry Chapbook Competition. His essay “Sinclair Lewis’s Work of Art” appeared in New England Review in 2004. The steadiest employment he has ever held was as a stay-at-home father for his two sons, a position he held from 1992 to 1999. Since his sons were outsourced to the public schools, he has worked as a substitute teacher, written scripts for Garrison Keillor, taught Latin to Catholic seminarians, and led a writing group for secular homeschoolers.

SHEILA HETI is the author of The Middle Stories (McSweeney’s Books, 2002) and a founder of the Trampoline Hall lecture series. Her full-length musical, All Our Happy Days Are Stupid, will tour Canada in 2006. She lives in Toronto.

CHARLES JENSEN is the author of the chapbook Little Burning Edens. His poems are forthcoming or have appeared in Bloom, Colorado Review, No Tell Motel, Quarterly West, and West Branch. He works for the Piper Center for Creative Writing, where he coordinates several community enrichment opportunities, and in the Maricopa Community Colleges system, where he teaches film studies. He is an editor of Three Candles Journal, blogs about Phoenix at Metroblogging, and freelances for Outlook Arizona.

LAURA KASISCHKE has published six collections of poetry, most recently Gardening in the Dark (Ausable Press, 2004). She has also published three novels, and was a recipient this year of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches at the University of Michigan.

NORMAN LOCK has written plays for the stage and for German radio. He is the author of seven prose collections: Grim Tales, Émigrés, and Joseph Cornell’s Operas (published in one volume by Triple Press as Trio), A History of the Imagination (Fiction Collective Two), Notes to the Book of Supplemental Diagrams for Marco Knauff’s Universe (Ravenna Press), and—writing as George Belden—Land of the Snow Men (Calamari Press, 2005). The fiction published in this issue is from the unpublished The Sleep Institute.

WILLIAM LOGAN’s most recent book of poetry is The Whispering Gallery (Penguin, 2005), his most recent book of essays and reviews The Undiscovered Country (Columbia University Press, 2005).

ALYCE MILLER leads a double life as an attorney specializing in animal law and disabled guardianship, and a professor of English who teaches in the graduate writing program at Indiana University in Bloomington. Her books include a story collection, The Nature of Longing (Norton, 1995), which won the Flannery O’Connor Award, and the novel Stopping for Green Lights (Doubleday, 1999). More than fifty stories have appeared in Hotel Amerika, Story Quarterly, Los Angeles Times, Story, Michigan Quarterly Review, New England Review, The Southern Review, The Sun, Puerto del Sol, Glimmer Train, Prairie Schooner, Witness, The Kenyon Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and other magazines. She has also published poetry, creative nonfiction, and legal works.

KEVIN PRUFER’s most recent books are Fallen from a Chariot (Carnegie Mellon, 2005) and The Finger Bone (Carnegie Mellon, 2002). He is editor of Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing and, with Joy Katz, Dark Horses: Poets on Overlooked Poems (University of Illinois Press, 2006). With Wayne Miller, he is now working on an anthology called The New European Poets, to be published by Graywolf Press.

ORIT RAFF, born in Israel, works in New York and Tel Aviv. She graduated cum laude from the School of Visual Arts in New York (B.F.A.) and with honors from the M.F.A. program at Bard College. She has also participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program and The International Studio and Curatorial Program, both in New York. She has taken part in dozens of group exhibitions and had more than twenty solo exhibitions in Madrid, Berlin, and New York, among other cities. A monograph on her work entitled Insatiable has recently been published in Tel Aviv by Daniella De-Nur Publishers, and her work has been shown and written about in The New York Times, The Village Voice, The New Yorker, Art Papers, BlindSpot, and other publications.

F. D. REEVE is the author of The Return of the Blue Cat, poems with a cd of his reading to the improv jazz of Exit 59, and of the novel My Sister Life (Other Press, 2005), two chapters of which ran in New England Review. He recently translated poems by Anatoly Naiman (Lions and Acrobats, Zephyr Press, 2005) and saw publication of a chapbook of new docker stories, North River.

PAISLEY REKDAL is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee (Pantheon, 2000; Vintage, 2002), and two books of poetry, A Crash of Rhinos (University of Georgia Press, 2000) and Six Girls Without Pants (Eastern Washington University Press, 2002). Her work has received a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, an NEA Fellowship, the University of Georgia Press’s Contemporary Poetry Series Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, several Pushcart Prize nominations, and the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review. Her poems and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from The New York Times Magazine, Nerve, Ploughshares, Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Quarterly West, among others.

MARK RUDMAN’s latest volume, Sundays on the Phone, includes the poem that appears in this issue of New England Review. It is the final book in The Rider Quintet. His essay/novella “On the Road, Touch and Go, with D. H. Lawrence” appeared in the July/August issue of The American Poetry Review. He is working on a prose book, The Book of Samuel.

DAVID WOO’s book of poems, The Eclipses, appeared in 2005 from boa Editions.

MICHAEL WOOD is Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University and the author of The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (Princeton University Press, 1995), Franz Kafka (Northcote House, 1998), and The Road to Delphi: The Life and Afterlife of Oracles (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), as well as other books. His articles on film and literature have appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and elsewhere.