André Bernard assembles the “Commonplace Book” column for the American Scholar. The author of four books, he is vice president and publisher of Harcourt, Inc., in New York.
M. Allen Cunningham’s novel, The Green Age of Asher Witherow (Unbridled Books, 2004), was a number one Book Sense pick and is available in paperback. His fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Epoch, Inkwell, and a number of other journals. He lives with his wife, Katie, in Portland, Oregon.
Philip F. Deaver is the thirteenth winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. He is the author of the short story collection Silent Retreats. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and Bread Loaf. His fiction has appeared in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and has been recognized in Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize. His poems are collected in a volume entitled How Men Pray. Deaver is associate professor of English and permanent writer-in-residence at Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida.
Aleš Debeljak is director of the Center for Cultural and Religious Studies at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. He has won the Slovenian National Book Award, the Chiqu Poetry Prize (Tokyo), the Miriam Lindberg Israel Poetry for Peace Prize (Tel Aviv), and other awards. His most recent books in English are The City and the Child (White Pine, 1999) and The Hidden Handshake: National Identity and Europe in the Post-Communist World (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004).
Randy Fertel teaches at the New School for Social Research. Portions of his memoir-in-progress, The Gorilla Man and the Empress of Steak, have been published in My New Orleans: Ballads to the Big Easy (Touchstone, 2006), New Orleans Magazine (2004), and Corn Bread Nation 2: The Best of Southern Food Writing (UNC Press, 2004). He has served as a commentator on All Things Considered.
Steven Gehrke’s third book, Michelangelo’s Seizure, was selected for the National Poetry Series by TR Hummer and is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press. His poems have appeared in Georgia Review, Slate, Threepenny Review, VQR, Yale Review, and many others. He is a Ph.D. student at the University of Missouri, Columbia, where he lives with his wife, the poet Nadine Meyer.
Emery George is professor emeritus of German at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is winner of a major Avery Hopwood Award in Poetry, and of the Kenyon Review Prize for Literary Excellence (for his essay “The Allegory of Spandau”). He is author, most recently, of Compass Card: One Hundred Villanelles (Mellen, 2000).
Linda Gregerson’s most recent collection of poetry, Waterborne, won the 2003 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Newer poems have appeared or are forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Poetry, and Atlantic Monthly.
Eamon Grennan’s most recent collection of poems is The Quick of It. His Still Life with Waterfall won the Lenore Marshall Award for 2002. He is in the English Department of Vassar College.
Joy Harjo’s most recent book is How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton, 2002). Her most recent CD of music is Native Joy for Real (Mekko Productions, 2004). Harjo is at work on a book of stories and a CD of music. When she is not teaching every fall as the Joseph M. Russo Professor of Creative Writing at the University of New Mexico, she lives in Honolulu.
Cynthia L. Haven is a literary critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and also writes for the Washington Post Book World, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and the Times Literary Supplement. Peter Dale in Conversation with Cynthia Haven was published last year in London. Joseph Brodsky: Conversations was published in 2002; Czeslaw Milosz: Conversations was published in Spring 2006.
Barry Hill is poetry editor of the Australian, a post-doctorate fellow at the University of Melbourne, and author of many books, including prize-winning poetry and history, most recently Broken Song (Knopf). He lives in Queenscliff on the south coast of Australia.
Don Lee is the author of the novel Country of Origin, which won an American Book Award, and the story collection Yellow, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has been the editor of the literary journal Ploughshares for seventeen years.
Randall Mann won the 2003 Kenyon Review Prize for Poetry for Complaint in the Garden (Zoo Press, 2004). Recent poems appear in Subtropics, Court Green, Pleiades, and Salmagundi. He lives in San Francisco.
Eugenio Montejo was born in 1938. He is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Elegos, Muerte y Memoria, Algunas Palabras, Terrredad, and Alfabeto del Mundo; he has published two books of essays and a volume of cross-genre pieces entitled El Cuaderno de Blas Coll. Montejo received the prestigious Octavio Paz Prize in 2004, and was awarded Venezuela’s National Prize for Literature in 1998. He has also served as Venezuela’s ambassador to Portugal at various times.
Kirk Nesset’s translations, poems, and stories have appeared in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Raritan, Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, Boston Review, New England Review, Iowa Review, Witness, and elsewhere. He is the author of Mr. Agreeable, a book of short stories forthcoming from Mammoth Press, and The Stories of Raymond Carver (Ohio University Press), a nonfiction study. He teaches creative writing and literature at Allegheny College and serves as writer-in-residence alternate years at the Chautauqua Writers’ Center in upstate New York.
Jay Parini, a poet, novelist, and biographer, is Axinn Professor of English at Middlebury College. His new and selected poems, The Art of Subtraction, appeared in 2005.
Michael Pettit’s new book is Riding for the Brand (Oklahoma). Winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize for Cardinal Points, he has received an NEA Fellowship and other honors for his work.
Bridget Bentz Sizer is a Web site producer in Washington, D. C. Her nonfiction has been published in the Washington Post. “Snow Blind” is her first story to appear in a literary magazine. She is currently working on a novel.
William Walsh recently published The Conscience of My Other Being (Cherokee Publishers, 2005). He has work forthcoming in Five Points, Hunger Mountain, and Turnrow. He edited Under the Rock Umbrella: Modern American Poets from 1951-1977, to be published this year.
Andrew Zawacki is the author of two poetry books, Anabranch (Wesleyan, 2004) and By Reason of Breakings (Georgia, 2002). Coeditor of Verse, he edited Afterwards: Slovenian Writing 1945-1995 (White Pine, 1999). He teaches at the University of Georgia.
