Antler, who hails from Milwaukee, has had his work published in several anthologies: Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age; The Soul Unearthed: Celebrating Wildness and Personal Renewal through Nature; Reclaiming the Heartland: Lesbian and Gay Voices from the Midwest; and American Poets Say Goodbye to the 20th Century. Photo by Allen Ginsberg.
David Baker is poetry editor of The Kenyon Review. His most recent books are Meter in English: A Critical Engagement (1996) and The Truth about Small Towns (poems, 1998). Heresy and the Ideal: On Contemporary Poetry is forthcoming. Baker teaches at Denison Univeristy.
Keith Banner lives and works in Cincinnati, Ohio. His first novel, The Life I Lead, was published this year by Alfred A. Knopf.
Erin Belieu is the author of Infanta (Copper Canyon, 1996), which was selected in the National Poetry Series. Her second book, One Above and One Below, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in February of 2000. New poems have appeared in Grand Street, TriQuarterly, and Boulevard. Photo by Miriam Berkley.
Marvin Bell‘s recent books are Ardor (Copper Canyon, 1977), Poetry for a Midsummer’s Night (Seventy Fourth Street Productions, 1998, Seattle, illustrated), and Wednesday (Salmon Poetry, Ireland, 1998).
Beth Bosworth is the author of A Burden of Earth (Hanging Loose Press, 1995). She teaches English at St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn, and is currently working on a second collection of stories.
Derick Burleson has received a 1999 creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is completing a Ph.D. at the University of Houston where he is managing editor of Gulf Coast. His poems are forthcoming or have recently appeared in Paris Review, Poetry, and Georgia Review.
John Chioles is a professor of comparative literature at New York University. He has translated twelve ancient Greek plays for the theater, and writes fiction. He writes both in Greek and English, and divides his time between Athens and New York. His latest two books are Aeschylus: Mythic Theatre, Political Voice (University of Athens Publications, 1995) and Theory of Literature (in Greek, Kastaniotis, 1996).
Robert Dana has been awarded two National Endowment Fellowships (1985 and 1993), the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award for Poetry (1989) and a Pushcart Prize (1996). His most recent books include Hello, Stranger: Beach Poems (Anhinga Press, 1996) and A Community of Writers: Paul Engle and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (University of Iowa Press, 1999), a gathering of memoirs of the first twenty-five years of America’s most famous writing program.
Maija Rhee Devine‘s stories have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, ByLine, and Dutiful Daughters, an anthology on the theme of mother/daughter relationships, which is to be published by Seal Press. Awards include the Doubleday Award in 1996 and a literary fellowship in 1998, both from the Wyoming Arts Council. She is working on a book-length memoir, Ten Times Better than a Boy.
Emil A. Draitser has authored two collections of short stories in Russian. His work has also appeared in International Quarterly, Confrontation, Midstream, ELF, and elsewhere. A recipient of the New Jersey Council of the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, he is a professor of Russian at Hunter College in New York City.
Stephen Dunn is author of eleven collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Riffs & Reciprocities (Norton). His previous book, Loosestrife, (Norton) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Photo by Ted Rosenberg.
Dinara Georgeoliani was educated in Moscow and Tbilisi, Georgia, with a concentration in comparative linguistics. She has published more than ten articles in Russia on American film. She teaches foreign languages at Central Washington University and collaborates with Mark Halperin on translations from Russian/Soviet literature.
Robert Glasser has a B.A. in history from Yale University and has studied Russian at Hunter College and at the Russian Institute in New York.
Mark Halperin teaches English at Central Washington University and has taught in Japan, Estonia, and Russia, where he was also a Fulbright lecturer. His most recent book of poetry is The Measure of Islands (Wesleyan). With Dinara Georgeoliani he has published translations of Russian and Soviet period writers Bunin, Galich, Kharms, and Platonov.
James Hatch, a poet and playwright, is pursuing his Ph.D. in English at the City University of New York. He has published in Partisan Review, Southwest Review, Tennessee Review, and American Book Review.
Mark Jarman‘s latest collection of poetry, Questions for Ecclesiastes, was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award and won the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He teaches at Vanderbilt University. His next collection, Unholy Sonnets, is due to be published by Story Line Press in spring 2000. Photo by Rebecca Walk.
Greek poet Constantine P. Kavafis (1863-1933), born in Alexandria, Egypt, spent his adolescence in England (with a short stay in Constantinople, the place of his family’s origin), and lived out his life in Alexandria as a civil servant. He printed his poems privately for his friends, never offering them for publication in his lifetime. Cavafy designated only 154 of his poems to stand as his published corpus.
Daniel Kharms, now deceased, wrote in the 1920s and 1930s in the then Soviet Union, but aside from his children’s verse, was not permitted to publish. A dozen or so years ago translations of his work appeared in Russia’s Unknown Writers of the Absurd, by George Gibian. An updated version was reissued as The Man in the Black Raincoat. Since then, more works by Kharms have become available, and it is from these that Dinara Georgeoliani and Mark Halperin have translated the prose pieces in this issue.
Karl Kirchwey‘s books of poems include The Engrafted Word (1998), Those I Guard (1993), and A Wandering Island (1990, Norma Farber First Book Award, Poetry Society of America). Recipient of a Rome Prize in literature and of grants from the NEA and Guggenheim Foundation, Kirchwey has been director of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the Ninety-second Street Y in New York since 1987.
Sydney Lea‘s sixth book of poems won the 1998 Poet’s Prize. His 1989 novel, A Place in the Mind, has been reissued in paper by Story Line.
Hubert H. McAlexander, professor of English at the University of Georgia, is the editor of two collections devoted to Peter Taylor. He is now writing Taylor’s biography, from which this essay is taken.
Mong-Lan is a visual artist and writer. Her poems have been included in Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose (1998), Quarterly West (Autumn/Winter 1998-99), and she has work forthcoming in Iowa Review, Seneca Review, and Manoa.
V. Penelope Pelizzon received a 1997 Nation/Discovery Award. Her poetry collection Nostos won the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize and is due out in October from Ohio University Press. Her essay on Philip Larkin and the Carnivalesque is forthcoming this year in New Larkins for Old (St. Martin’s Press).
Robert Protherough, a former teacher of English and education at Hull University (UK) and currently concerned with arts management, is the author of a dozen books, most recently The Challenge of English in the National Curriculum (Routledge, 1995).
Nancy Reisman teaches fiction at the University of Florida. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the University of Wisconsin, the Heekin Group Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her recent work has appeared in Glimmer Train, American Fiction, Lilith, and Conduit.
Melissa Bowen Rubin lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their ten-year-old son. She recently received her B.A. with a major in Russian and minor in Classical Studies from Hunter College.
Nicholas Samaras won a 1997-98 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. His first book won the Yale Series Award. His second book, Survivors of the Moving Earth, was published by the University of Salzburg Press.
Willard Spiegelman, Hughes Professor of English at Southern Methodist University and editor of the Southern Review, is planning a book of essays on contemporary poetry.
Alison Stine is an undergraduate at Denison University. Her first publishing credit was in Hanging Loose at age sixteen. Other works have appeared in Dramatics and Whiskey Island. In 1997 she was a finalist in the Wick Student Series.
Ruth Stone‘s recent books are Simplicity and Ordinary Words, both published by Paris Press. She teaches at SUNY Binghamton.
Thomas S. Turgeon is professor of drama at Kenyon College. His book, Improvising Shakespeare: Reading for the Stage, was published by McGraw-Hill in 1997.
Lee Upton‘s fourth collection of poetry, Civilian Histories, is forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press.
Ellen Bryant Voigt‘s fifth volume of poems, Kyrie (Norton, 1995), was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. “The Flexible Lyric” is the title essay of her prose collection, forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press.
David Wagoner‘s fifteenth book of poems, Walt Whitman Bathing, was published by Illinois in 1966. He edits Poetry Northwest, and won the Ruth Lilly Prize in 1991.
Katharine Whitcomb, a 1998-99 J.C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, University of Wisconsin at Madison, is seeking a publisher for her first poetry manuscript, Saints of South Dakota. Photo by Clover Earl.
