AMY BENSON is the author of The Sparkling-Eyed Boy, winner of the 2004 Bakeless Literary Prize in Nonfiction. Recent essays have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Seneca Review, Black Warrior Review, Pleiades, and Hotel Amerika. She teaches in the Writing Program at Columbia University.
NICHOLAS BENSON has previously published translations of poetry by Attilio Bertolucci and Aldo Palazzeschi in New England Review. His translation of Bertolucci’s Winter Journey was published in 2005 by Free Verse editions of Parlor Press, and he was awarded a 2008 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship.
ISABELLA LUCY BIRD BISHOP (1831–1904) was an intrepid Victorian traveler whose numerous books include The Englishwoman in America (1856), The Hawaiian Archipelago. Six Months among the Palm Groves, Coral Reefs and Volcanoes of the Sandwich Islands (1875), A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879), Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880), and The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither (1883).
C. P. BOYKO lives and writes in Victoria, BC, Canada. He is the author of Blackouts (Emblem Editions, 2009), a collection of short stories.
ROGER CAMP’s photographs have been published in more than a hundred magazines, including Darkroom Photography, American Photo, Popular Photography, Graphis, and North American Review. He is the author of three books, Butterflies in Flight (Thames & Hudson, 2002), 500 Flowers (Dewi Lewis Media, 2005), and Heat (Charta/DAP, 2009). As a teacher of photography and/or literature, he has held positions at Eastern Illinois University, the University of Iowa, Columbus College of Art & Design, and the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris. A recipient of the Lecia Medal of Excellence, he has also been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown.
MICHAEL COFFEY has published three books of poems as well as stories and essays in the Republic of Letters, Conjunctions, and New England Review. He is co-editorial director at Publishers Weekly and lives in New York City.
MICHAEL COLLIER’s sixth book, An Individual History, will be published by W. W. Norton in spring 2012. In 2009, he received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Maryland and is director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
JORDAN DAVIS is poetry editor of the Nation. His most recent publication is POD | Poems on Demand (Greying Ghost, 2011).
THEODORE DEPPE is the author of four collections of poetry: Orpheus on the Red Line (Tupelo, 2009), Cape Clear: New and Selected Poems (Salmon, 2002), The Wanderer King (Alice James Books, 1996), and Children of the Air (Alice James Books, 1990). His work has received two fellowships from the NEA and a Pushcart Prize. Since 2000, he has lived mostly on the west coast of Ireland, and he coordinates Stonecoast in Ireland, part of the Stonecoast M.F.A. Program in Maine.
JENNIFER GROTZ is the author of two poetry collections from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: The Needle (2011) and Cusp (2003). Her poems, reviews, and translations appear widely in journals and anthologies. She teaches at the University of Rochester and serves as assistant director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
JOSHUA HARMON’s most recent book is Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie (University of Akron Press, 2011). Other essays from his work-in-progress, The Annotated Mix-Tape, have been published or are forthcoming in Agni, the Believer, Cincinnati Review, Gulf Coast, Open Letters Monthly, and New England Review.
DAVID HERNANDEZ is a recipient of a 2011 NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry. His third collection of poetry, Hoodwinked, won the 2010 Kathryn A. Morton Prize and was published by Sarabande Books. For more information, visit his website at www.DavidAHernandez.com.
MAURA HIGH lives in Carrboro, North Carolina, where she works as a freelance copy editor and translator. She also coordinates controlled burn crews for the North Carolina chapter of the Nature Conservancy and spends as much time as possible out in the woods.
CHARLES HOLDEFER is an American writer currently based in Brussels. His fiction and essays have appeared in North American Review, Antioch Review, World Literature Today, and other magazines. He has also published three novels, and his next novel, Back in the Game,is scheduled for 2012 from The Permanent Press.
CAROL KEELEY’s work has appeared in Ploughshares, Oxford Poetry, Playboy, Antioch Review, Chicago Magazine, Columbia Poetry Review, Chicago Tribune, New American Writing, Chicago Reader, and elsewhere. She has taught creative writing at three universities. “Confession, with Wolves” is from a collection of linked stories.
SANDRA LEONG is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who lives in New York City. Her short fiction has appeared in Antioch Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, SouthWest Review, and other journals. She’s a recipient of a 2012 Pushcart Prize for fiction.
JAMES MAGRUDER’s stories have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Normal School, Subtropics, Bloom, and New Stories from the Midwest, among others. His first novel, Sugarless (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and was shortlisted for the 2010 William Saroyan International Writing Prize. “Matthew Aiken’s Vie Bohème” is part of his novel-in-stories, Let Me See It, due out in May 2012 from Magnus Books. He teaches theater at Swarthmore College and lives in Baltimore.
CATE MARVIN’s most recent book of poems, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, appeared from Sarabande Books in 2007. A Whiting Award recipient, she is an Associate Professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York, and teaches also in Lesley University’s low-residency M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing.
JAMES MAY served as editor-in-chief of New South from 2008 until 2011. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Green Mountains Review, the New Republic, New Ohio Review, and Pleiades. He lives in Decatur, Georgia, with his wife, the poet Chelsea Rathburn.
FRANK M. MEOLA’s work has appeared in various publications, including Michigan Quarterly Review and the New York Times. He is at work on a novel, in which Jones Very appears, as well as on a book-length study of Emerson’s continuing influence on American culture. He teaches Writing and Humanities at Polytechnic Institute of NYU.
MICHAEL MILBURN teaches high school English in New Haven, Connecticut. His third book of poems, Carpe Something, is forthcoming next summer from Word Press.
ANNE RAEFF’s “Keeping an Eye on Jakobson” and a few other stories, including one that was previously published in New England Review, were originally part of a set of interrelated short stories. Some of the stories were eventually incorporated into her second novel, Winter Kept Us Warm, which she just recently completed, and some, like this one, were better left as they were, as individual stories.
CHELSEA RATHBURN’s poems have appeared in the Atlantic, Poetry, the New Republic, Ploughshares, and Five Points, among other journals. She is author of the collection The Shifting Line (University of Evansville Press, 2005), and in 2009 received an NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry. She lives in Decatur, Georgia, with her husband, the poet Jim May.
ROBERT BEVERLEY RAY’s book Walden x 40: Essays on Thoreau comes out this fall from Indiana University Press. He is the author of four other books on the cinema (most recently, The ABCs of Classic Hollywood, published by Oxford University Press, 2008), and a member of The Vulgar Boatmen, who have released four CDs. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Boston Review, and Antioch Review.
SUSAN RICH is a Seattle poet and author of three collections of poetry from White Pine Press: The Alchemist’s Kitchen (2010), which was a finalist for the Foreword Prize andthe Washington State Book Award; Cures Include Travel (2006); and The Cartographer’s Tongue/Poems of the World (2000), which won the PEN Awardfor Poetry. She has received awards from the Times Literary Supplement of London, Peace Corps Writers, and the Fulbright Foundation. Recent poems appear in Antioch Review, Poetry International, and Southern Review.
SCIPIO SLATAPER (1888–1915) was born into an upper middle-class family in Trieste, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1909, he published a series of essays in the avant-garde literary journal La Voce that explored the complexities of Triestine cultural identity. After his lover committed suicide in 1910, Slataper retreated to a village in the Karst, in the countryside near Trieste, to finish writing the novel that would become Il mio Carso (Libreria della Voce, 1912). In 1913, Slataper took a teaching position at the University of Hamburg, but returned home with the advent of war, and in May 1915 enlisted with the Sardinian Grenadiers. He was killed in action in December 1915 on Monte Podgora (now Monte Calvario), above Gorizia. Slataper is widely considered the most precise articulator of a distinct Triestine culture whose best-known literary figures include Umberto Saba, Italo Svevo, and Claudio Magris.
SCOTT SOUTHWICK invented one of the earliest web search engines, Liszt.com. More recently, he invented cicada ice cream. In between, his short fiction appeared in journals such as Gettysburg Review, Mississippi Review, and Glimmer Train Stories.
NATASHA TRETHEWEY is author of Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and three collections of poetry, Domestic Work (Graywolf, 2000), Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002), and Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. She is the recipient of NEA, Guggenheim, Bunting, and Rockefeller fellowships. At Emory University she is Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing. Her new book, Thrall, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2012.