DWIGHT ALLEN has published two books of fiction—The Green Suit (Algonquin, 2000) and Judge (Algonquin, 2003)—and his stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Epoch, The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, and New England Review. His new novel, The Typewriter Satyr, will be out in the spring of 2009 from the University of Wisconsin Press. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

MARK BIBBINS is the author of the forthcoming collection The Dance of No Hard Feelings (Copper Canyon, 2009) and the Lambda Award-winning Sky Lounge (Graywolf, 2003). He teaches at The New School and lives in New York City.

FREDERICK BROWN’s most recent book is Flaubert: A Biography, published in a clothbound edition by Little, Brown and in paperback by Harvard University Press. He is also the author of Zola: A Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995).

RACHEL CANTOR has published stories about the characters in “Tibet, New York” in One Story and Ninth Letter; they are also featured in her just-finished novel. Other stories have appeared in The Paris Review, DoubleTake, Redivider, and elsewhere. This is her fourth appearance in New England Review. She lives in Philadelphia.

RON DE MARIS is a Miami poet who has poems forthcoming in The Paris Review, Antioch Review, and others; his work has appeared in numerous periodicals, including Poetry, The New Republic, The Nation, APR, and The Sewanee Review. A new book manuscript, The Lost Jockey (title poem first appeared in Salmagundi), is in search of a publisher. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

GREGORY DOLNIKOWSKI is a nutrition scientist at Tufts University and a painter of abstract art. To date he has published seventy-seven scientific articles and has sold thirty-four paintings to private collectors. His website is www.yessy.com/gregdolnikowski.

THEA GOODMAN’s “Evidence” is from a collection of stories called A Wife by Any Other Name. Other stories from the collection have appeared in Columbia: A Journal of the Arts, Confrontation, Other Voices, and New England Review and have received two Pushcart Prize nominations and the Columbia Fiction Award (2005). Currently she lives in Chicago and New York and is at work on a novel.

THOMAS GOUGH is the pen name of Thom Conroy, an American who teaches creative writing at Massey University in New Zealand. His fiction has appeared in various journals in America and New Zealand, including AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Landfall, and Quarterly West. He is currently at work on a novel set in New Zealand.

RACHEL HADAS is Board of Governors Professor of English at the Newark campus of Rutgers University. The most recent of her many books is a collection of essays titled Classics (WordTech, 2007), and she is currently co-editing an anthology of Greek poetry from Homer to the present, due out from W. W. Norton in 2010.

CRAIG HILL is an editor and architect who fell in love with La Fontaine’s Fables in the 1950s when he was a young man. He lives in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

BEVERLY JENSEN grew up in Westbrook, Maine. She earned an M.F.A. in Acting at Southern Methodist University and acted in regional theater before turning to writing. Between 1986 and 2003 she wrote but did not seek to publish a series of interrelated stories and plays. She lived in New York with her husband, Jay Silverman, and children, Noah and Hannah, and died of cancer in 2003. Her first published story, “Wake,” which appeared in these pages in 2006, was chosen by Stephen King for the 2007 Best American Short Stories. An article about Beverly is forthcoming in January’s Poets & Writers.

SARA JOHNSON’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Shenandoah, Willow Springs, Cutthroat, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Tampa Review. A poetry review of hers is forthcoming in Zoland Poetry. She received an AWP Intro Journals Project Award in 2007.

MICHAEL R. KATZ is the C. V. Starr Professor of Russian and East European Studies at Middlebury College. He has translated a series of novels from Russian into English, including Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Devils, Turgenev’s Fathers and Children, Herzen’s Who Is to Blame?, Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, Vladimir Jabotinsky’s The Five, and Vladimir Pecherin’s Notes from Beyond the Tomb. He is currently completing a translation of Ivan Shcheglov’s Dacha Husband. His translation of Tolstoy’s story “Alyósha Gorshok: Alyósha-the-Pot” appeared in Vol. 28, #3, of New England Review.

JEAN DE LA FONTAINE (1621–95) wrote in a variety of poetic and dramatic forms, but he is remembered chiefly for his Fables, which rank among the masterpieces of French literature. Born into a bourgeois family in the Champagne region, he spent his most productive years as a writer in Paris, where he attracted a series of patrons who freed him from the need to provide for his own livelihood. His first six books of Fables were published in 1668, followed by five more books in 1678–9 and a twelfth book in 1694. La Fontaine borrowed the basic content of these works from the Aesopic tradition and, in the second collection, from the East Asian. In 1683 he was elected to the French Academy after some opposition by the king to his unconventional and irreligious character.

ALEX LEMON is the author of Mosquito (Tin House Books, 2006) and Hallelujah Blackout (Milkweed Editions, 2008). Among his awards are a 2005 Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2006 Minnesota Arts Board Grant. A memoir he has completed is forthcoming from Scribner.

GEORGE LOONEY’s books include The Precarious Rhetoric of Angels (White Pine Press Poetry Prize, 2005), Attendant Ghosts (Cleveland State University Press, 2000), Animals Housed in the Pleasure of Flesh (Bluestem Award, 1995), and the recently released novella Hymn of Ash (Elixir Press Fiction Chapbook Award, 2007). In addition, Open Between Us, a new book of poetry, is due out from the Turning Point imprint of WordTech Communications early in 2010. He currently serves as chair of the B.F.A. in Creative Writing Program at Penn State–Erie, editor-in-chief of the international literary journal Lake Effect, translation editor of Mid-American Review, and co-director of the Chautauqua Writers’ Festival.

ROBIN MAGOWAN is the author of an autobiography, Memoirs of a Minotaur (Story Line, 1999), and of a travel collection, Improbable Journeys (Marlboro, 2002). His translation of Michaux’s Ecuador: A Travel Journal is available from Marlboro/Northwestern. He lives in northwest Connecticut.

JON MCMILLAN’s fiction has appeared in Dirt and Five Points. His story “Born on Fire” was named one of the “100 Best Stories of 2005” in Best American Short Stories. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

JAY SCOTT MORGAN’s fiction has been published in various small press journals. His essay “The Mystery of Goya’s Saturn” was printed in Volume 22, # 3, of New England Review; an autobiographical essay entitled “Empty Chair” appeared in Volume 25, #3, and was later nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

SARAH MURPHY lives in northeast Florida, where she is an assistant professor of English at Jacksonville University. Her poems have appeared recently in Pleiades, Post Road, and Court Green, and online at Verse Daily.

PETER PEREIRA is a family physician in Seattle. His latest book, What’s Written on the Body (Copper Canyon, 2007), was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Recent poems have appeared in Journal of the American Medical Association, Narrative, Prairie Schooner, Pistola, Gay City, and the 2007 Best American Poetry.

D. A. POWELL’s most recent book is Chronic (Graywolf, 2009). His poems have been published in Boulevard, Poetry, Black Warrior Review, and The Pinch. He teaches in the English Department at University of San Francisco.

PAISLEY REKDAL’s latest book is The Invention of the Kaleidoscope (Pittsburgh, 2007).

FIONA SHAW is an Irish actress who regularly appears in English theater. Trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London, where she won a gold medal, she joined the Royal National Theatre immediately after, and her engagement there was followed by a four-year stint with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her work with director Deborah Warner, which commended much international critical attention, included lead roles in Brecht’s Good Person of Szechuan, Sophocles’ Electra, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Shakespeare’s Richard II, and Euripides’ Medea. (She also played Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter films.) She was awarded an honorary CBE in 2001. Her essay in this issue of NER centers on the experience of playing Winnie in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, in a tour that took the production from London to New York, Athens, Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam, and other locations.

WILLIAM S(hepard) WALSH (1854–1919) was an American editor and writer who compiled, edited, or wrote more than twenty books for J. B. Lippincott, often under the pen name “William Shepard.” He later published several books under his own name, including Faust: The Legend and the Poem (1887), Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities (1894), and Abraham Lincoln and the London Punch (1909), a compilation of poems, cartoons, and comments published during the Civil War.

ROSS WHITE is the editor of Inch, a magazine of short poetry and microfiction, and the publisher of Bull City Press. His work has appeared in Tar River Poetry, Carolina Quarterly, and Southern Poetry Review, among others. He has taught creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

ELIOT KHALIL WILSON’s poems have appeared in numerous journals. His first book of poems, The Saint of Letting Small Fish Go, won the 2003 Cleveland State Poetry Prize. He currently teaches at the University of Colorado at Denver.