Contributors’ Notes, Vol. 30, #3 (2009)
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MAX APPLE has published three collections of stories, The Oranging of America, Free Agents, and The Jew of Home Depot; two novels, Zip and The Propheteers; and two books of nonfiction, Roommates: My Grandfather’s Story and I Love Gootie: My Grandmother’s Story. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His Ph.D. is in seventeeth-century literature. He has taught at Michigan, Stanford, NYU, Columbia, and Rice University, where he held the Fox Chair in English. He currently teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

RUSSELL BANKS is the author of sixteen works of fiction, including the novels Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, Cloudsplitter, The Darling, and The Reserve, and five short story collections. Two of his novels, The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction, have been adapted into award-winning films. His work has received numerous prizes and has translated and anthologized. Banks is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was New York State Author (2004–06). He lives in upstate New York with his wife, the poet Chase Twichell.

JOELLE BIELE is the author of White Summer, winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. She is the editor of Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence, due out from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in October of 2010. Her recent essays on Bishop have appeared in American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, and Gettysburg Review.

GEORGES BORCHARDT is a New York literary agent and cofounder with his wife, Anne, of Georges Borchardt, Inc., an agency representing some two hundred active authors, as well as the estates of Hannah Arendt, Samuel Beckett, Stanley Elkin, Aldous Huxley, and Tennessee Williams.

RICHARD CHESS is the author of three books of poetry, Third Temple (2007), Chair in the Desert (2000), and Tekiah (2002), all from the University of Tampa Press. His poems have appeared in Image: A Journal of Art, Faith, and Mystery, Tampa Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He directs the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina, Asheville, and is on the faculty of the Bread Loaf School of English and the Jewish Arts Institute.

ROBERT COHEN’s novels include Inspired Sleep, The Here and Now, and most recently, Amateur Barbarians (Scribner, 2009). He teaches at Middlebury College.

JOANNE DOMINIQUE DWYER has poems published or forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Conduit, FIELD, Massachusetts Review, and TriQuarterly. She is a 2008 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award recipient.

HY [HYMAN A.] ENZER is a Professor Emeritus at Hofstra University and brother-in-law of Ted Solotaroff (husband of Ted’s sister Dr. Sandra Enzer, deceased). Hy also is coeditor with Sandra of the anthology Anne Frank: Reflections on Her Life and Legacy and co-editor of the Kindertransport memoir by Kurt Fuchel, Episodes and Fragments: A War and Peacetime Memoir. Ted’s memoir First Loves is dedicated to Hy.

LOUISE JARVIS FLYNN’s short stories have appeared in Zoetrope: All-Story, Colorado Review, and Narrative, among other publications. She lives in North Carolina.

FELIX [ELEUTARIO FELICE] FORESTI (1793–1858) was an Italian patriot, a member of the Carbonari, who had been sentenced to twenty years of hard labor in Moravia, in Spielberg. After thirteen years, he was released and permanently exiled in the United States. He settled in New York and became a popular professor of Italian language and literature at Columbia and the University of the City of New York. In 1858 he was appointed U.S. Consul at Genoa, where he died.

AJA GABEL’s fiction is forthcoming in the New Ohio Review. She holds an M.F.A. from the University of Virginia and a B.A. from Wesleyan University. She lives and teaches in Charlottesville, Virginia, and this is her first publication.

ALLEGRA GOODMAN is a National Book Award finalist and the author of seven books, including Intuition, a New York Times Bestseller and Notable Book of 2006 that was long-listed for the Orange Prize in the U.K. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and four children. Her novel The Cookbook Collector is forthcoming from Dial Press in July 2010.

EHUD HAVAZELET’s most recent book, Bearing the Body (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), won the Oregon Book and the Edgar Wallant Awards, and was a New York Times Notable Book of 2007.

GERALD HOWARD is an editor at Doubleday. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Tin House, and other publications.

PETER B. HYLAND is the author of the chapbook Elegy to the Idea of a Child (Trilobite Press, 2009). His poems are forthcoming in Ploughshares and have appeared in American Literary Review, Ecotone, New South, and elsewhere. He is the development director and an occasional workshop instructor at Inprint, a nonprofit literary arts organization in Houston.

KIMBERLY JOHNSON is the author of two collections of poetry, Leviathan with a Hook (Persea, 2002) and A Metaphorical God (Persea, 2008), and of a translation of Virgil’s Georgics. She has work recent or forthcoming in Fence, Literary Imagination, and Modern Philology.

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?, and Vladimir Jabotinsky’s The Five, as well as Vladimir Pecherin’s Notes from Beyond the Tomb. He is currently working on an annotated translation of the novel Pioneers by the Russian-Jewish author and ethnographer S. Ansky, pseudonym of Shloyme Rappoport. His translation of Ivan Shcheglov’s The Dacha Husband: A Novel is just being brought out by Northwestern University Press. It was originally published as Dachnyi muzh in 1896.

FRANK KERMODE is the author of many important critical works, among them Romantic Image, The Sense of an Ending, and Shakespeare’s Language; he has edited countless others, including some of the Abinger editions of E. M. Forster’s works. He currently lives in Cambridge, England.

PETER LASALLE is the author of a novel, Strange Sunlight, and three short story collections: The Graves of Famous Writers, Hockey Sur Glace, and Tell Borges If You See Him. His work has been selected for a number of anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, Best American Fantasy, Best American Mystery Stories, Best of the West, Sports Best Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. In 2008 he received the Award for Distinguished Prose from Antioch Review.

JAMES LASDUN has published several books of fiction and poetry. His latest is a collection
of short stories, It’s Beginning to Hurt (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009).

COREY MARKS’s Renunciation (University of Illinios Pres, 2000) was a National Poetry Series selection. His recent poems appear in Poetry Northwest, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, and TriQuarterly.

BOBBIE ANN MASON’s fiction includes Shiloh and Other Stories, In Country, and Feather Crowns. Clear Springs was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent books are An Atomic Romance (2005) and Nancy Culpepper (2006), both from Random House. She is writer-in-residence at the University of Kentucky.

CAMASIN MIDDOUR has an M.F.A. from Columbia University and has worked in the poetry departments of The New Yorker, Narrative Magazine, and the Poetry Society of America. Her work has appeared in Western Humanities Review, Sarah Lawrence Review, and others.

HEINRICH GOTTFRIED OLLENDORFF (1802–65) is best-known as the originator of the Ollendorff method for learning modern languages. Born in Rawicz, P Poland), he began his career as an educator in London; after moving to Paris in about 1830, he produced a treatise setting out his ideas on the teaching of German.This course in German conversation was first published in French, then in English; it became extremely popular in England, and the method was subsequently applied by Ollendorff to Italian, Spanish, French, modern Greek, and other languages.

LORI OSTLUND’s short story collection entitled The Bigness of the World won the 2008 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and has just been released by the University of Georgia Press. The collection includes both of the stories published here as well as “The Children Beneath the Seat,” which appeared in Vol. 27, #1, of New England Review. Other stories from the collection have appeared or are forthcoming in Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Bellingham Review, Prairie Schooner, and Blue Mesa Review. She is a 2009 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award recipient, and she teaches at the Art Institute of California–San Francisco. Currently she is at work on more short stories and a novel.

FRANK OWEN was born in Kalispell, Montana, in 1939 and educated at the University of California at Davis. His work has been widely shown in this country—including at the Art Institute of Chicago; the Francis Colburn Gallery at the University of Vermont in Burlington; the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati; the Corcoran Gallery and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.; the Madison Art Center in Wisconsin; and the Oklahoma City Art Museum; as well as abroad at the Berlin Kunstmuseum in Germany. His work is represented in numerous museum and public collections, and he resides in Keene Valley, New York.

CARL PHILLIPS is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Speak Low (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009). He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

MIKE PUICAN recently completed his M.F.A. at Warren Wilson College. He has had poems published in the U.S. and in Canada in journals such as Michigan Review, Bloomsbury Review, Crab Orchard Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and Malahat Review. He won the Tia Chucha Press Chapbook Contest for 30 Seconds (Tia Chucha Press, 2004) and was a member of the 1996 Chicago Slam Team.

PHILIP ROTH is the author of nearly thirty books, most recently the novels Indignation (Houghton Mifflin, 2008) and Exit Ghost (Houghton Mifflin, 2007). He twice won the National Book Award (Goodbye, Columbus, 1959; Sabbath’s Theater, 1995) and the National Book Critics Circle Award (The Counterlife, 1986; Patrimony, 1991). He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral (1997) and three times received the Pen/Faulkner Award (Operation Shylock, 1993; The Human Stain, 2000; Everyman, 2007).

JILL SCHOOLMAN is the founder and publisher of Archipelago Books.

STEVEN D. SCHROEDER’s recently published first full-length book of poetry is titled Torched Verse Ends (BlazeVOX, 2009). His writing is available or forthcoming from Verse, Pleiades, Barrow Street, River Styx, and Verse Daily. He edits the online poetry journal Anti- and works as a Certified Professional Résumé Writer.

LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ is the author of twenty-one books, most recently the memoir Not Now, Voyager (Counterpoint, 2009). Her novels include The Writing on the Wall, Disturbances in the Field, and Leaving Brooklyn. She has also published three story collections, several works of nonfiction, a collection of poetry, and translations from Italian. She is presently on the faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars.

ANTON SHAMMAS is a Palestinian writer and translator who has published fiction, poetry, and articles in Hebrew, Arabic, and English. He teaches in the departments of Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

IVAN SHCHEGLOV (1856–1911) was the nom de plume of a Russian army captain whose real name was Ivan Leont’evich Leont’ev. His writing career flourished in the 1880s,during which time he collaborated with Chekhov on a farce entitled The Power of Hypnotism, recently translated and published in Laurence Senelick’s edition of The Complete Plays: Anton Chekhov (Norton, 2007).

IRENE SKOLNICK is a literary agent in New York, having worked previously at Harcourt Brace, The Hudson Review, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

GREGORY BLAKE SMITH’s most recent novel is The Madonna of Las Vegas (Three Rivers Press, 2005). Earlier books include The Devil in the Dooryard and The Divine Comedy of John Venner, which was selected by the New York Times as one of its Notable Books of the Year in 1992. He recently won a Pushcart Prize for his short story “Presently In Ruins.” He is the Lloyd P. Johnson Norwest Professor of English and the Liberal Arts at Carleton College.

TED SOLOTAROFF (1928–2008) served as an associate editor of Commentary and then the editor of Book Week, and he founded the journal New American Review, later American Review. As an editor at Simon & Schuster and Bantam Books and senior editor at Harper & Row (later HarperCollins), he edited many of the prominent writers of his generation. He also published two memoirs: Truth Comes in Blows, which won the PEN Martha Albrand Award, and First Loves. His literary and cultural criticism is collected in The Red Hot Vacuum, A Few Good Voices in My Head, and The Literary Community, and he edited An Age of Enormity, a posthumous collection of writings by Isaac Rosenfeld, as well as Alfred Kazin’s America: Critical and Personal Writings.

GERALD STERN was born in Pittsburgh in 1925. He is the author of fifteen books of poetry, including, most recently, Save the Last Dance (Norton, 2008) and Everything Is Burning (Norton, 2005), as well as This Time: New and Selected Poems, which won the 1998 National Book Award. A book of personal essays titled What I Can’t Bear Losing was published by Norton in 2003. He was awarded the 2005 Wallace Stevens Award by the Academy of American Poets and is currently a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He is retired from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Early Collected Poems: 1965–1992 will be brought out by Norton in 2010.

ROBERT STONE is the author of seven novels: A Hall of Mirrors, Dog Soldiers (winner of the National Book Award), A Flag for Sunrise, Children of Light, Outerbridge Reach, Damascus Gate, and Bay of Souls (2003). His story collection, Bear and His Daughter, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and his memoir, Prime Green, was published by Ecco Press in 2006. He resides in New York City.

FRANCIS-NOËL THOMAS is at work on a memoir called Why I Learned French. He maintains a website on prose style with Mark Turner at classicprose.com

DOUGLAS UNGER is the author of four novels, including Leaving the Land, a finalist for the Pulitzer and Robert F. Kennedy awards, and Voices from Silence, a year’s end selection of the Washington Post “Book World.” His most recent book is Looking for War and Other Stories (Persea, 2004). He serves on the executive boards of Words Without Borders, Point of Contact/Punto de Contacto, and The Americas L Initiative (TALI). He is the cofounder of the M.F.A. in Creative Writing International program and the Schaeffer Ph.D. with Creative Dissertation program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

HILMA WOLITZER’s most recent novels are The Doctor’s Daughter (Ballantine, 2006) and Summer Reading (Ballantine, 2007). She has taught at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Columbia University, and NYU.