Contributors’ Notes
Vol. 29, #2 (2008)
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SALLY BALL is the author of Annus Mirabilis (Barrow Street, 2005). She has new poems appearing in The American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Slate, The Threepenny Review, and The Yale Review. She teaches at Arizona State University in Tempe.

JOHN A. BERTOLINI teaches Shakespeare, film, and dramatic literature at Middlebury College. He has written The Playwrighting Self of Bernard Shaw, as well as having introduced and annotated two volumes of Shaw’s plays for Barnes & Noble. At present, he is completing a book on Rattigan’s dramatic art.

WILLIAM E. CAIN is the Mary Jewett Gaiser Professor of English at Wellesley College. His publications include William Lloyd Garrison and the Fight Against Slavery: Selections from The Liberator (1995); Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance: A Critical and Cultural Edition (1996); Henry David Thoreau (2000), in the series Oxford Historical Guides to American Authors; and (as co-editor) The Norton Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (2001). He is also the editor of a two-volume anthology of American literature published by Longman in 2004.

LOUIS CANCELMI is a writer and translator living in Brooklyn. His work has been published in various journals, including disClosure and Collectanea, and his plays have been produced in New York City by Naked Angels, Shalimar, and others. His English version of Robert Desnos’s ciné-poem, “Midnight at Two in the Afternoon,” will appear in the inaugural issue of ebb|flo.

REBECCA COOK, a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, has published prose and poetry in a variety of literary journals including Wicked Alice, Poet Lore, Diode, New Orleans Review, Orchid, Northwest Review, Story South, and Quarter After Eight. Her chapbook of poems, The Terrible Baby, is available from Dancing Girl Press. She teaches English literature and creative writing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

DARIUS CUPLINSKAS was born in Canada, and lived in Lithuania during the heady years when it regained its independence, from 1989 to 1994. He is now based in London, where he works for the Open Society Institute.

ROBIN EKISS is a 2007 recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award for Emerging Women Writers and is a 2008 Artist-in-Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere.

CHRIS GAVALER’s fiction appears in Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Boulevard, Black Warrior Review, Crab Orchard Review, and more than a dozen other national journals. He earned an M.F.A. in fiction at the University of Virginia and teaches at Washington and Lee University.

DEBORA GREGER’s new book of poems, Men, Women, and Ghosts, will be published by Penguin in fall 2008.

JEFFREY HARRISON’s fourth full-length book of poems, Incomplete Knowledge (Four Way Books), made the Book Sense top ten poetry list for 2007 and was runner-up for the 2008 Poets’ Prize. In June 2006, The Names of Things, a selection from his previous books, was published by The Waywiser Press in England.

BOB HICOK’s most recent collection, This Clumsy Living (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Poetry Prize from the Library of Congress. He is a Guggenheim Fellow this year and has poems forthcoming in The Pushcart Prize anthology and The Best American Poetry.

ELLEN HINSEY is the author of Update on the Descent, a forthcoming collection of poems; The White Fire of Time (Wesleyan/Bloodaxe Books); and Cities of Memory, which was awarded the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. She has edited and translated (with Constantine Rusanov) The Junction: Selected Poems of Tomas Venclova, forthcoming from Bloodaxe Books in fall 2008, and her poems and essays have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, and New England Review. The recipient of a Berlin Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Berlin, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award, and a Lannan Foundation Award, she has lived in Paris since 1987.

CAROL JENKINS is a visual artist, writer, and publisher living in Sydney, Australia. You can find examples of her work on her blog, Show Me the Treasure. Her first book of poetry, Fishing in the Devonian, will be published in 2009 by Puncher & Wattmann. Her publishing company, River Road Press, produces audio CDs of Australian poetry.

LAURA KASISCHKE’s most recent collection of poems, Lilies Without, was published by Ausable Press in 2007. She is also the author of several novels and teaches at the University of Michigan.

HENRY KEARNEY IV is from Robersonville, North Carolina, and now lives in Carrboro, North Carolina. His work has appeared online in Xelas Magazine and was included in the art exhibit The Illustrated Word at Flanders Art Gallery in Raleigh. He received an M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College in January 2008. This is his first major publication in print.

ALEXANDER WILLIAM KINGLAKE (1809–91) was a British historian and travel writer. His principal published works are Eothen: Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East (1844, last revised 1864), an account of his journey through the Ottoman Empire, and The Invasion of the Crimea: Its Origin and an Account of Its Progress down to the Death of Lord Raglan (1863–87), a comprehensive eight-volume study.

REBECCA MAKKAI’s work was recently chosen by Salman Rushdie for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories 2008. Her work has also appeared recently in The Threepenny Review, The Iowa Review, Shenandoah, and The Sewanee Review. She is at work on a novel and on a collection of stories linked by the themes of music and war. A 2004 graduate of Middlebury’s Bread Loaf School of English, she lives near Chicago with her husband and baby.

DAVID PHILLIP MULLINS s grew up in Las Vegas and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, Cimarron Review, Fiction, and North Dakota Quarterly and have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He has held the Dorothy and Granville Hicks Residency in Literature at Yaddo, has been awarded the Stanley Elkin Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, has won third prize in the Playboy College Fiction Contest, and has been a finalist for the Indiana Review Fiction Prize. He recently completed a novel in stories entitled Long to Love You. With his wife and daughter, he lives in Omaha, Nebraska, where he is Resident Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Creighton University. This is his third appearance in New England Review.

ROBERT OLDSHUE is a primary care physician in Boston. His work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review and Bellevue Literary Review.

MATT PEPPER is a writer and actor who lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son. Other plays he’s written include Inheritance and The Bar Play.

KEVIN PRUFER’s newest books are National Anthem (Four Way, 2008) and Fallen from a Chariot (Carnegie Mellon, 2005). With Wayne Miller, he’s also editor of New European Poets (Graywolf, 2008) and Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing.

SAMUEL C. RAMER is Associate Professor of History at Tulane University in New Orleans. He first met Mark Serman and the Serman family in Leningrad in 1968.

RITA MAE REESE has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award, a Stegner Fellowship, and a “Discovery”/The Nation award. Her work has appeared in Bloom, The Southern Review, The Nation, Prairie Schooner, and From Where You Dream. She lives with her wife and daughter in San Francisco.

MARK SERMAN was born in Leningrad, USSR, now St. Petersburg, Russia. He received an M.A. from the Oriental Department of the Leningrad State University and is studio-schooled in still and motion-picture photography. His film work has been shown at several independent film festivals, and his photography has been exhibited in New York and Connecticut. His most recent exhibit—the first in his country of origin—took place in St. Petersburg this year. A sampling of his fine art photography and literary essays may be found on his website, www.markserman.com.

CLAUDE SIMON (1913–2005) was born in Tananarive, in what was then the French protectorate of Madagascar, and grew up primarily in Perpignan, a small town in the French Pyrenees. He took courses in English at Oxford and Cambridge, and as a young man studied painting with André Lhote and others. In 1936, after completing his French military service, he fought alongside the Republicans in the Spanish civil war. At the outset of World War II, he was drafted back into the French army and in 1940 was captured by the Germans and taken to a prison camp in Saxony. Managing to escape, Simon returned to France and joined the Resistance. It was during this time that he wrote his first novel, Le Tricheur (The Cheat), which was published in 1945. Several books would follow, but not until the late 1950s, with the appearance of Le Vent (The Wind) and an increasing critical interest in the nouveaux romanciers, did Simon began to attract serious attention. Over the next three decades he wrote another dozen novels, works whose “experimental” qualities aroused both admiration and disdain, and in 1985 Simon was awarded the Nobel Prize. Simon spent the greater part of his life in Salses, in the province of his youth, operating a small vineyard inherited from his mother’s family. He died in Paris on July 6, 2005.

SEAN SINGER’s first book, Discography, won the 2001 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, selected by W. S. Merwin, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is also the recipient of a fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and a 2005 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

ALEXANDRA TEAGUE’s work has recently appeared in Slate and Poetry Daily Essentials 2007 and is forthcoming in Notre Dame Review, Epoch, and The Iowa Review. She teaches English at City College of San Francisco and is currently a Stegner fellow.

TOMAS VENCLOVA was born in Klaipeda, Lithuania, in 1937. He took part in the Lithuanian and Soviet dissident movements and was one of the five founding members of the Lithuanian Helsinki Group. In 1977 he was forced to emigrate, and since 1985 he has taught Slavic Studies at Yale University. His published works include volumes of poetry, criticism, literary biography, conversations, and works on Vilnius. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Lithuanian National Prize in 2000 and the 2002 Prize of Two Nations, which he received jointly with Czeslaw Milosz. Venclova’s poetry has been translated into more than twenty languages.