Contributors’ Notes, Volume 27, #4
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STANLEY BATES is Professor of Philosophy at Middlebury College, where he was the first Walter Cerf Distinguished College Professor. He served as the administrative director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for sixteen years.

CHARLES BAXTER is the author of four novels and four books of short fiction. He teaches at the University of Minnesota.

GEORGE BRADLEY is the editor of The Yale Younger Poet’s Anthology and the author of four books of verse, including Some Assembly Required (Knopf, 2001). He is presently assembling a new book of poetry, A Few of Her Secrets.

ROBERT COHEN is the author of three novels, most recently Inspired Sleep (Vintage, 2002), and a collection of stories, The Varieties of Romantic Experience (Vintage, 2003). His work has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers Award, The Ribalow Prize, and a Pushcart Prize. He teaches at Middlebury College.

ROBERT COOVER’s most recent books are The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Directors’ Cut (Grove, 2004), Stepmother (McSweeney’s, 2004), and A Child Again (McSweeney’s, 2005). He is the recipient of the William Faulkner, Brandeis University, American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Endowment of the Arts, Rea Lifetime Short Story, Rhode Island Governor’s Arts, Pell, and Clifton Fadiman awards, as well as Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Lannan Foundation, and daad fellowships. He teaches experimental narrative and literary hypermedia at Brown University, including “CaveWriting,” a writing workshop in immersive virtual reality.

MARY CORNISH received her MFA in creative writing/poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and was awarded a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Field, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Poetry Northwest, as well as a number of anthologies. She is the winner of the 2006 Field Poetry Prize, and her book Red Studio will be out this spring from Oberlin Press. She teaches at Fairhaven College/Western Washington University.

HAYES DAVIS was born and raised in Philadelphia. His poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, and Toi Derricotte’s The Black Notebooks. He has an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland, where he won an Academy of American Poets Prize. A former Bread Loaf working scholar and a founding member of Cave Canem, he teaches English and creative writing at Georgetown Day School in Washington, D.C.

SCOTT DENHAM is Professor of German and Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies at Davidson College. He studied at the University of Chicago, the Philipps-Universität Marburg, the Freie Universität Berlin, and Harvard University (Ph.D., 1990), working primarily in German but also in comparative literature and history. He has recently written about war stories by Jens Rehn and Hans Erich Nossack and coedited a collection of essays entitled W. G. Sebald: History, Memory, Trauma (Walter de Gruyter, 2006). His translation of Friedrich Torberg’s dialogue, “Internal and External Emigration,” appeared in NER in 1999. This is his first translation of work by Thomas Mann.

DAVID C. DOUGHERTY is Professor of English at Loyola College in Maryland. He wrote the Twayne books on James Wright (1986) and Stanley Elkin (1991) and edited the Dalkey Archive casebook on Stanley Elkin’s The Dick Gibson Show, for which he wrote the introductory chapter. His second casebook, on Elkin’s The Magic Kingdom, is scheduled for electronic publication this fall. The Dalkey Archive edition of Elkin’s A Bad Man includes Dougherty’s foreword, “Meeting Bad Men,” and his long-term project is a comprehensive biography of Elkin, which will be published by the University of Illinois Press in early 2009.

STANLEY ELKIN (1930–95) was the author of ten novels and numerous collections of shorter works. He won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1982 for the novel George Mills and again in 1995 for Mrs. Ted Bliss. Other books include The Dick Gibson Show (1971), Searches and Seizures (1973), The Magic Kingdom (1985), and The MacGuffin (1991). He taught at Washington University in St. Louis for thirty-five years.

TIM FITTS is a photographer and fiction writer currently living and teaching in Philadelphia. He studied at the University of Maryland, and his stories have appeared in Cimarron Review, Faultline, PRISM International, and other journals. His work has been shown in galleries in the southeastern United States, and he has had several solo exhibitions in the Republic of Korea.

WILLIAM GASS is the David May Distinguished Professor in Humanities (emeritus) at Washington University in St. Louis. His fiction includes Omensetter’s Luck, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, The Tunnel, and Cartesian Sonata. His nonfiction books are Fiction and the Figures of Life, On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, Habitations of the Word, Finding a Form, Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation, Tests of Time, and A Temple of Texts.

LINDA GREGERSON’s newest book of poetry, Magnetic North, will be published this spring by Houghton Mifflin.

SUSAN HAHN is the author of seven books of poetry, including The Scarlet Ibis, which will be published in spring 2007. Her first play premiered in 2005. She is currently writing a second play and a novel. New work is forthcoming in The Atlantic Monthly and The Kenyon Review.

JOHN IRVING’s eleven novels have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. He won a National Book Award for the paperback edition of The World According to Garp, and an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules. In 1992, Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. In 2001, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is currently adapting two of his novels as films: A Son of the Circus and The Fourth Hand. He is also at work on his twelfth novel. Irving lives in Dorset, Vermont.

LAURA KASISCHKE has published six books of poetry, most recently Gardening in the Dark (Ausable Press, 2004), as well as several novels. She lives in Chelsea, Michigan, and teaches at the University of Michigan.

JOHN KINSELLA’s most recent volumes of poetry are Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems (Norton, 2003), Doppler Effect: Collected Experimental Poems (Salt, 2004), and The New Arcadia (Norton, 2005).

MARCUS KLEIN is currently writing a study of Henry James in the 1890s. His most recent book is Easterns, Westerns, and Private Eyes: American Matters, 1870–1900.

KATHRYN KRAMER is the author of Sweet Water (Knopf, 1998) and other novels. She teaches at Middlebury College.

DAVID LEHMAN has published seven books of poetry, most recently When a Woman Loves a Man (Scribner, 2005). He launched The Best American Poetry series in 1988 and continues as the annual anthology’s series editor. He also edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006) and Great American Prose Poems (Scribner, 2003).

THOMAS MANN (1875–1955) was one of the most important authors of the modern era. His fiction includes the novels Buddenbrooks (1901), The Magic Mountain (1924), and Doctor Faustus (1947), and the novella Death in Venice (1912). His essays were published in Reflections of an Unpolitical Man (1918), Appeal to Reason (1942), and The Sufferings and Greatness of the Masters (1947), among other books. Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929. In 1933, he went into exile from Hitler’s Germany, and in 1939 emigrated to the United States, where he later became an American citizen.

SAGE MARSTERS recently received an MFA from Emerson College. She lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and divides her time between teaching in the freshman writing program at Emerson, working at an independent bookstore, and writing. Her work has appeared in Rosebud and Green Mountains Review, and she is currently working on a collection of short stories.

JYNNE DILLING MARTIN’s poems have recently appeared in the Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, and TriQuarterly. She works at Random House and lives in Queens with her husband and cat.

STEPHEN O'CONNOR is the author of three books, Rescue, Orphan Trains, and Will My Name Be Shouted Out? He lives in New York and teaches in the MFA programs at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence.

LAURENCE OLIPHANT (1829–88) was a British author, world traveler, and mystic. His writings include several travel books, including A Journey to Khatmandu (1852); two novels, Piccadilly (1866) and Altiora Peto (1883); an autobiography, Episodes in a Life of Adventure (1887); and Scientific Religion (1888). He and his first wife, Alice le Strange, wrote Sympneumata; or, Evolutionary Forces Now Active in Man (1885). After her death and not long before the end of his own life, Oliphant married Rosamond Dale Owen, the daughter of the utopian community leader Robert Dale Owen.

ROBERT PACK was Director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for twenty-two years. He retired from from Middlebury College eight years ago, after thirty-four years there, and now teaches at the University of Montana Honors College. Since moving to Montana, he has published three books of poetry (Rounding It Out, Minding the Sun, and Composing Voices, which won a Montana Book Award) and two critical books (Belief and Uncertainty in the Poetry of Robert Frost and Willing to Choose: Volition and Storytelling in Shakespeare’s Major Plays). Last year he was given the University Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching.

CARLA PANCIERA has published fiction, memoirs, and poetry in several journals, including The Chattahoochee Review, Nimrod, Sycamore Review, Under the Sun, Kalliope, and Painted Bride. Her collection of poetry, One of the Cimalores, received the 2004 Cider Press Book Award and is available at www.ciderpressreview.com. She lives in Rowley, Massachusetts.

JAN PENDLETON’s fiction has been published in New England Review, Antioch Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Quarterly, Quarterly West, StoryQuarterly, and Noon. A new story will appear in a future issue of Descant. She lives in Palo Alto, California, and has recently completed a novel.

CARL PHILLIPS’s most recent book of poems is Riding Westward (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986–2006 will be published next fall. Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

ROBERT B. RAY is the author of A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1980, The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy, How a Film Theory Got Lost and Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies, and The ABCs of Classic Hollywood (forthcoming in 2007 from Oxford University Press). Professor of English at the University of Florida, he is also a member of the The Vulgar Boatmen, who have issued four CDs.

SUSAN JACKSON RODGERS’s book, The Trouble With You Is, won the Mid-List Press First Series Award in Short Fiction, and was published in 2004. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in StoryQuarterly, Beloit Fiction Journal, Prairie Schooner, The North American Review, and Glimmer Train. She is a past recipient of a Kansas Arts Commission Fellowship in Fiction, and two Pushcart Prize Special Mentions. “Outside” won the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition in 2002.

MARGRET SCHAEFER is a prizewinning translator of two earlier collections of Arthur Schnitzler’s novellas and stories, Night Games and Desire and Delusion (both published by Ivan R. Dee). She lives in Berkeley, California.

ARTHUR SCHNITZLER (1862–1931) was an Austrian playwright and fiction writer, well-known for his outspoken criticism of anti-Semitism and bourgeois double standards, and for his treatment of erotic themes. His works have served as the basis for a number of films, including Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (based on Traumnovelle). He also practiced medicine and did research in psychology.

GREGORY SPATZ’s short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Santa Monica Review, New England Review, Shenandoah, Iowa Review, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. His most recent book publication is Fiddler’s Dream (Southern Methodist University Press, 2006), a novel. He teaches in the m.f.a. program at Eastern Washington University and spends the rest of his life on the road with the bluegrass band John Reischman and the Jaybirds.

RICHARD TRISTMAN was a professor of literature at Bennington College for twenty-eight years. A contributor to The Encyclopedia of Aesthetics and the coeditor of The Grim Reader: Writings on Death, Dying and Living On (Anchor, 1997), he was writing a book on the idea of indecency when he died in 1998.

HELEN VENDLER is a literary critic and the author of numerous books on poets. She is currently the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University, where she received her Ph.D. in English and American Literature in 1960. Her recent books include Coming of Age as a Poet: Milton, Keats, Eliot, Plath (Harvard University Press, 2003) and Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats (Harvard University Press, 2004).

MYLES WEBER is the author, most recently, of Consuming Silences: How We Read Authors Who Don’t Publish (University of Georgia Press, 2005). He has work forthcoming in The Southern Review.

DAMIEN WILKINS is a New Zealand writer; he completed his MFA at Washington University in 1992. Following a nomination by Stanley Elkin, he received a Whiting Writers’ Award in 1993. The author of a book of stories, a book of poems, and five novels, most recently Chemistry (Granta Books, 2003), he teaches at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

SUSAN WOOD is the author of three collections of poems: Asunder (Penguin, 2001), a National Poetry Series selection and recipient of the Best Book of Poetry Award from the Texas Institute of Letters; Campo Santo (LSU Press, 1991), which was the Lamont selection of the Academy of American Poets and received the Natalie Ornish Poetry Prize of the Texas Institute of Letters; and Bazaar (Holt, 1981). She has received Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and Lannan fellowships, and is the Gladys Louise Fox Professor of English at Rice University in Houston.