David Baker is the poetry editor for The Kenyon Review.
Hadara Bar-Nadav’s book of poetry A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight (Margie, 2007) won the Margie Book Prize. Recent publications appear or are forthcoming in Iowa Review, Colorado Review, TriQuarterly, and other journals. She teaches at the University of Missouri–Kansas City.
Bruce Beasley’s latest books include The Corpse Flower: New and Selected Poems (University of Washington Press) and Lord Brain (University of Georgia Press). He teaches at Western Washington University.
Leslee Becker’s story collection, The Sincere Café, won the Mid-List Press Fiction Award. Other awards include the Nimrod/Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize and the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society Award. Her stories have appeared in the Atlantic, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Epoch, and elsewhere. She currently teaches at Colorado State University.
Robin Behn’s most recent books of poems are Naked Writing (DoubleCross Press) and Horizon Note (University of Wisconson Press). She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Alabama and for Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Chana Bloch’s four books of poems include Mrs. Dumpty (University of Wisconsin, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize) and Blood Honey (forthcoming from Autumn House Press, winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award). She is cotranslator of The Song of Songs, Yehuda Amichai’s Selected Poetry and his Open Closed Open (winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation), and Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch.
Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), a Palestinian, was a preeminent Arab poet honored the world over for his poetry.
Alan Feldman won the Felix Pollak Prize for Poetry for his most recent book, A Sail to Great Island (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). His first book, The Happy Genius (SUN, 1978), won the Elliston Book Award for the best collection published by a small, independent press in the United States. He sails in New England during the summers and travels often in France.
Albert Goldbarth’s new book, To Be Read in 500 Years, is recently out from Graywolf Press. He is the current recipient of the Poetry Foundation Mark Twain Award.
Jeff Gundy was the 2008 Fulbright lecturer in American Studies at the University of Salzburg. His fifth book of poems, Spoken among the Trees (Akron, 2007), won the Society of Midland Authors Poetry Prize. Other recent work is in Colorado Review, Nimrod, Cincinnati Review, and Antioch Review.
Kirsty Gunn’s most recent book, The Boy and the Sea, published by Faber, won the Scottish Book of the Year Award in 2007. She is professor of creative writing at the University of Dundee, Scotland.
Elizabeth Harris teaches creative writing at the University of North Dakota. She is currently translating Giulio Mozzi’s collection, Questo è il giardino (This Is the Garden), which includes “Cover Letter.” Her translations of Mozzi’s stories also appear in Literary Review, Agni, and Missouri Review.
Bob Hicok is a Guggenheim and NEA Fellow this year. His last book, This Clumsy Living, received the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. His next book, Words for Empty and Words for Full, will be out in 2010.
Charles Johnson, a 1998 MacArthur Fellow, is the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Endowed Professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle. His fiction includes Faith and the Good Thing, Dreamer, and Middle Passage (winner of the National Book Award). He is also the author of the short story collections The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Soulcatcher and Other Stories. His nonfiction books include Turning the Wheel, Being and Race, and recently Mine Eyes Have Seen, with photography by Bob Adelman. He is also a screenwriter and professional cartoonist and served as fiction editor of Seattle Review for twenty years.
Fady Joudah’s The Earth in the Attic won the Yale Series for Younger Poets in 2007. His new translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s lyric epics, If I Were Another, is due out this fall from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He is also the translator of Darwish’s The Butterfly’s Burden (Copper Canyon Press.)
Sara Khalili is a financial journalist, editor, and translator of contemporary Iranian literature. She received the 2007 PEN Translation Fund Award for her translation of Seasons of Purgatory, a selection of short stories by Shahriar Mandanipour.
John Koethe’s most recent book is Sally’s Hair. A new book, Ninety-fifth Street, will be published by HarperCollins this fall. He is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.
Chana Kronfeld, professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley, is the author of On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics (winner of the MLA Scaglione Prize for Best Book in Comparative Literary Studies). She is cotranslator of Yehuda Amichai’s Open Closed Open (winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation), and Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch.
William Logan’s most recent book of essays and reviews, The Undiscovered Country (Columbia University Press), received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism last spring. His new book of poetry, Strange Flesh (Penguin), was published in October, 2008. His new book of essays and reviews, Our Savage Art, was published in the spring.
Shahriar Mandanipour is regarded as one of Iran’s most accomplished contemporary writers. He has authored nine volumes of fiction, one nonfiction book, and more than one hundred essays on literary theory, literature, and art criticism. He received the 2004 Mehregan Award for the best Iranian children’s novel, the 1998 Golden Tablet Award for best fiction in Iran during the past two decades, and Best Film Critique at the 1994 Press Festival in Tehran.
Susan Minot is the author of Monkeys, Lust & Other Stories, Folly, Evening, Rapture, and Poems 4 A.M.
Giulio Mozzi (born 1960, Padua, Italy) has more than twenty books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction with prestigious presses such as Mondadori and Einaudi. His prize-winning collection, Questo è il giardino (Theoria, 1993), includes “L’apprendista” (The Apprentice), which was included in Mondadori’s prestigious anthology of the best Italian short stories of the twentieth century, Racconti italiani del Novecento (2001).
Mukoma Wa Ngugi is the author of Hurling Words at Consciousness (poetry, AWP, 2006) and a political columnist for the BBC Focus on Africa magazine. His political essays have appeared in the International Herald, Christian Science Monitor, Mail and Guardian, and the Los Angeles Times, while his fiction or poetry has appeared in the New York Quarterly, Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House, Brick, Chimurenga, Wasafiri, and Kwani?, among other places.
Dahlia Ravikovitch (1936-2005), one of the great Hebrew poets of our time, was widely honored for her artistry and admired for her courage as a peace activist. Her poems have been translated into twenty-one languages, including Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hungarian, Russian, Vietnamese, and Yiddish. Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch (Norton, 2009) presents in English for the first time the full trajectory of her life in poetry.
Paisley Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee, and three books of poetry, A Crash of Rhinos, Six Girls without Pants, and The Invention of the Kaleidoscope. She directs the University of Utah creative writing program.
Ira Sadoff’s most recent book is History Matters (by Iowa), essays on poetics and, broadly speaking, politics. His new poems appear in APR, Massachussetts Review, and Best Poems of 2008. He teaches at Colby College and Drew University’s MFA program.
Gary Scott has been published in the Beloit Fiction Journal, Northwest Review, ZYZZYVA, Quarterly West, Brevity, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. In 2007 he attended the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. He lives in Bellingham, Washington.
Kevin Stein is the author of nine books of poetry and criticism, most recently the collections Sufficiency of the Actual (Illinois, 2008) and American Ghost Roses, winner of the Society of Midland Authors Poetry Award. Poet laureate of Illinois, he teaches at Bradley University.
