DEBRA ALLBERY’S most recent poetry collection is Fimbul-Winter (Four Way Books, 2010). She lives near Asheville, North Carolina, and is the director of the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program for Writers.
DAVID BARBER’S latest collection of poems is Wonder Cabinet (TriQuarterly Books, 2006). He is poetry editor at the Atlantic.
JUSTIN BIGOS is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of North Texas, where he serves as Interviews Editor for the American Literary Review. His poems have appeared in magazines including Ploughshares, Indiana Review, Gettysburg Review, Crazyhorse, and the Collagist. He co-directs the Kraken Reading Series, based in Denton, Texas.
PAUL BOURGET (1852–1935) was an influential French novelist, poet, and literary critic. He was credited with “discovering” Stendhal and Baudelaire, as well as with introducing Freud’s work to his contemporaries. Bourget is largely forgotten today, but his Essais de psychologie contemporaine (1883–1885) continue to shed unique light on the writings of such authors as Flaubert, Baudelaire, Stendhal, Dumas fils, the Goncourt brothers, and Turgenev.
LARRY BRADLEY’S work has appeared in the New Republic, New York Times, Paris Review, Poetry, Southwest Review, and previously in New England Review. He has received the Morton Marr Prize, the Reginald Shepherd Memorial Prize, and scholarships to both the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences.
TRACI BRIMHALL is the author of Our Lady of the Ruins (W. W. Norton), selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press), winner of the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Slate, Ploughshares, New England Review, Missouri Review, and Best American Poetry. She has received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the King/Chávez/Parks Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
MARY-ALICE DANIEL was born in Nigeria and raised in England. She is currently an M.F.A. candidate at the University of Michigan.
KELLY KATHLEEN FERGUSON is the author of My Life as Laura: How I Searched for Laura Ingalls Wilder and Found Myself (Press 53, 2011). Her work has appeared in Mental Floss, Poets & Writers, Gettysburg Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Witness, among other publications. She has an M.F.A. from the University of Montana, and is now at work on a Ph.D. in creative writing at Ohio University.
CAROLINE FOX (1819–1871) was an English diarist who made the acquaintance of many prominent nineteenth-century figures, including John Stuart Mill, William Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle. Selections of her diaries and correspondence were posthumously published in a volume entitled Memories of Old Friends. Being Extracts from the Journals and Letters of Caroline Fox, of Penjerrick, Cornwall, from 1835 to 1871.
TED GENOWAYS is the author of two books of poems and the critical study Walt Whitman and the Civil War (University of California Press, 2009). His new book about Hormel Foods and the Great American Recession is forthcoming from HarperCollins. He has recently published essays and poems in the Atlantic, Harper’s, Kenyon Review, Mother Jones, OnEarth, Outside, and Best American Travel Writing 2010. This fall he will be a visiting reporter at the Middlebury College Program in Environmental Journalism.
PHILIP F. GURA is the William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of American Transcendentalism: A History (Hill & Wang), which was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction, as well as many other books of American cultural history.
DAVID HERONRY is an apprentice funeral director in Central Ohio, where he lives with a tall man and a small dachshund. This is his first publication.
RICHIE HOFMANN is the recipient of a 2012 Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, among other honors. His poems have appeared in a number of magazines, including Poetry, FIELD, Yale Review, and the New Yorker. He is currently pursuing an M.F.A. in the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars.
WAYNE JOHNS’S manuscript, “Words Without Songs,” has been a finalist for the Wick Poetry Prize and the National Poetry Series, among others. His work has been published in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, court green, and Image. This past summer he was a resident at the Vermont Studio Center, and he recently began taking courses at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies.
REED JOHNSON has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and an M.A. in Slavic Languages and Literature from the University of Virginia, where he is now working toward his Ph.D. in Russian Literature. His fiction has appeared in Narrative Magazine and his translations in Meridian and Virginia Quarterly Review. He is currently finishing a novel set in Russia, where he lived for eight years.
COURTNEY KAMPA is from Virginia and holds an M.F.A. from Columbia University. Her work is forthcoming in Boston Review, TriQuarterly, the Journal, National Poetry Review, Drunken Boat, and elsewhere, and has received awards from the Atlantic, Poets & Writers, and North American Review. She works at a publishing house in New York.
MICHAEL R. KATZ is C. V. Starr Professor Emeritus of Russian and East European Studies at Middlebury College. He has written two monographs on Russian literature and has translated a dozen or so Russian novels into English. He was recently named a Mellon Emeritus Fellow and is currently working on a compilation that includes a new translation of Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata and the recently discovered “counterstories” written in response to it by his wife and son.
SYDNEY LEA, poet laureate of Vermont, recently published a selection of critical essays, A Hundred Himalayas (University of Michigan Press, 2012), and one of personal essays, A North Country Life (Skyhorse Publishing, 2013). His eleventh book of poems, I Was Thinking of Beauty (Four Way Books), is due in April, as is Growing Old in Poetry (Autumn House), co-authored with Fleda Brown.
EMMA LIEBER is a lecturer in Columbia University’s Core Curriculum and in the Slavic Languages and Literatures department. Her work focuses on the nineteenth-century Russian and English novel, novel theory, and psychoanalytic criticism. She has published articles in Massachusetts Review, Slavic Review, Slavic and East European Journal, and Nabokov Studies.
WILLIAM LOGAN’S new book of poems, Madame X (Penguin), was published in the fall. His edition of John Townsend Trowbridge’s forgotten comic epic, Guy Vernon (University of Minnesota Press), was released last spring. A new book of criticism, Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure (Columbia University Press), will appear late this year. He recently received the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern Poetry from the Sewanee Review and the Staige D. Blackford Prize for Nonfiction from the Virginia Quarterly Review.
MICHAEL MEWBORN’S paintings and serigraphs are included in various private and public collections in the United States and Canada. He has shown his work in solo exhibitions in museums in Columbia and Charleston, South Carolina, and in Columbus, Georgia. His work has been selected for invitational and juried group shows in New York, D.C., Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, and he has produced corporate commissions for IBM and Westvaco. He presently maintains a studio in Riverviews Artspace, a converted shoe warehouse in Lynchburg, Virginia, where he lives. More of his work can be seen at www.michaelmewbornart.com.
NANCY O’CONNOR, Lois B. Watson Professor Emerita of French at Middlebury College, recently published a new French edition of Anne-Marguerite Petit Dunoyer’s Lettres historiques et galantes (1707–1717) (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012). Her translation of Paul Bourget’s essay on Baudelaire appeared in New England Review Vol. 30, #2 (2009).
ROBERT OLDSHUE is a physician in Boston. His work has appeared in Gettysburg Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and previously in New England Review.
JAN PENDLETON’S fiction has been published in New England Review, Antioch Review, Alaska Quarterly, StoryQuarterly, Noon, Quarterly West, Descant, the Quarterly, and Slice. She won a Phelan Award in poetry and was a 2007 Bread Loaf Tuition Scholar. Her story collection manuscript, “The Nature of My Father’s Crimes,” was a finalist in the 2012 Katherine Anne Porter Competition. A recent publication, “Eleven,” from the spring 2012 Antioch Review, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
GLEN POURCIAU’S collection of stories, Invite, won the 2008 Iowa Short Fiction Award. His stories have been published by AGNI Online, Antioch Review, Epoch, Literarian, Paris Review, and other magazines, including NER.
CHAZ REETZ-LAIOLO’S work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Ecotone, Harvard Review, Paris Review, and Best American Nonrequired Reading 2012.
CHRISTOPHER SHAW is the author of Sacred Monkey River (W. W. Norton, 2000)and a former editor of Adirondack Life. He teaches writing at Middlebury College, where he also co-directs the Middlebury Fellowships in Environmental Journalism. Some sections of his essay took shape in other publications over the years, including the New York Times and Adirondack Life.
A. J. SHERMAN is the author of numerous literary and historical essays. His most recent book is Mandate Days: British Lives in Palestine, 1918–1948 (2001).
SOPHIA TOLSTOY [Sofiya Andreevna Tolstaya] (1844–1919) was the wife and lifelong companion of Leo [Lev Nikolaevich] Tolstoy and the mother of his thirteen children (of whom eight survived into adulthood). She also served as his literary assistant, translator, editor, and publisher. For many years her own writings were eclipsed by his; only recently have her original stories, diaries, letters, monumental autobiography, and extraordinary photographs come to light.
THEODORE WOROZBYT’S work has appeared or is forthcoming in Antioch Review, Best American Poetry, Crazyhorse, Iowa Review, Mississippi Review 30 Year Anthology, New England Review, Po&sie, Poetry, Sentence, Shenandoah, Southern Review, TriQuarterly Online, and Quarterly West. He has published two books of poetry, The Dauber Wings (Dream Horse Press, 2006) and Letters of Transit (University of Massachusetts Press), which won the 2007 Juniper Prize. “Impossible Objects” appears in the inaugural issue of the Chapbook.