Contributors' Notes

Harold Abramowitz is a writer from Los Angeles. His recent publications include Not Blessed (Les Figues Press) and A House on a Hill {A House on a Hill, Part One} (Insert Press). Harold writes collaboratively as part of SAM OR SAMANTHA YAMS and UNFO, and co-edits the short-form literary press eohippus labs.

Etel Adnan is an Arab-American poet, fiction writer and painter, living nowadays in Sausalito and Paris. She has been for some fourteen years a professor of philosophy in a Bay Area college. She writes mostly in English though some of her books have been written in French. Although her work can be highly political, she is particularly influenced by Nature, its impact on thinking, its central place. She often says that her country is California’s weather.

Barbara Beck is a poet/translator who lives in Paris, where she has been editor of the Paris-based English language journal Upstairs at Duroc since 2002. Her work has appeared in, among others, The Los Angeles Review, Van Gogh’s Ear, The Café Review, Slightly West, In’hui, la dérobée, L’Etrangère and online at ekleksographia and Centquatrevue, and is forthcoming in an anthology from Tightrope Books (Toronto).

Amaranth Borsuk is the author of a chapbook, Tonal Saw (Song Cave, 2010), and the digital pop-up poetry book, Between Page and Screen, which can be seen at www.betweenpageandscreen.com. Her poems have recently appeared in Colorado Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, and FIELD. She is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at MIT and received her Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California.

A founding member of the Oulipo, Paul Braffort is a poet, computer scientist, and songwriter. His most recent book is J & I: les deux combinateurs et la totalité (Bassac: Plein Chant, 2002), which contains poems, drawings and an explanatory essay. He maintains an archive of his work at www.paulbraffort.net. He has published five books in the Bibliothèque Oulipienne, as well as numerous textbooks on artificial intelligence and programming. He lives in Paris.

Rocío Cerón was born in Mexico City in1972. Her work consists of experiments in the spaces between poetry, music, performance and video. Her published books of poetry include Basalto (CONACULTA-ESN, Mexico City, 2002) which received the Gilberto Owen National Literature Prize in 2000; Litoral (Filodecaballos, Mexico City, 2001); Soma (Eloisa Ediciones, Argentina, 2003); Apuntes para sobrevivir al aire (Urania, Mexico City, 2005); Imperio (Ediciones Monte Carmelo, Mexico City, 2008; 2nd edition, Dominican Republic, 2010); Imperio/Empire (CONACULTA-FONCA, 2009, interdisciplinary and bilingual edition); La mañana comienza muy tarde (La Propia Cartonera, Uruguay, 2010) and Tiento (UANL, 2010). She teaches at the Polyliterature Laboratory in the Creative Writing Program at the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana. Her texts have been translated into English, Finnish, Swedish, and German. She is currently a grantee of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte. Her work can be accessed online through: http://rocioceron.blogspot.com.

Norma Cole is the author of many volumes of poetry, most recently Where Shadows Will: Selected Poem 1988-2008 (City Lights, 2009), and a critical volume, To Be At Music (Omnidawn, 2010). A prolific translator, she has published translations of Anne Portugal, Danielle Collobert, Jean Daive, and others. She has also worked in installation and with text and image projects. A native of Canada, she lives in
San Francisco.

Jennifer K. Dick recently graduated with her doctorat from the Sorbonne and now teaches literature at the university in Mulhouse, France. She co-founded and co-directed the Ivy Writers’ Series in Paris with Michelle Noteboom from 2005 to 2010. Her first book-length collection, Fluorescence, was selected for the University of Georgia series in 2004. She has also published limited-edition artists book in collaboration with visual artists.

Stacy Doris lives in San Francisco, where she teaches at San Francisco State University. Resident in Paris for several years, she has published poetry and creative prose in French as well as in English including La vie de Chester Steven Wiener écrit par sa femme (P.O.L Editeur, 1998). With Chet Wiener, she edited a collection of Christophe Tarkos’ work published by Roof Books in 2000.

Johanna Drucker has written and published widely on topics related to the history of experimental poetry, aesthetics, and digital media. She is the inaugural Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies at UCLA. Her recent titles include SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing (U. Chicago Press, 2008) and ComboMeals (Druckwerk, 2008).

Rachel Blau DuPlessis is the author of the long poem “Drafts,” begun in 1986, and collected most recently in two books published in 2010 from Salt Publishing: Pitch: Drafts 77-95 and the forthcoming The Collage Poems of Drafts. Other volumes include Torques: Drafts 58-76 (Salt Publishing, 2007) as well as Drafts 1-38, Toll (Wesleyan University Press, 2001) and Drafts 39-57, Pledge, with Draft unnnumbered: Précis (Salt Publishing, 2004). In 2006, two books of her innovative essays were published: Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work (2006), and the groundbreaking The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice ([1990] 2006), both from The University of Alabama Press. She has written several other critical books and coedited three anthologies as well as doing an edition of The Selected Letters of George Oppen (1990).

Sylvain Gallais is an economist whose most recent book is France Encounters Globalization. With his wife, Cynthia Hogue, he received the 2009 Witter Bynner Translation Residency Fellowship from the Santa Fe Art Institute. A native of France, he has Ph.D.s in Political Science and Economics and teaches in the School of International Languages and Cultures at Arizona State University.

Lawrence Giffin is the author of Get the fuck back into that burning plane, Die Traumadeutung, and Comment Is Free. He is the series editor of The Physical Poets Home Library, a Lil’ Norton publication.

Robert Glück is the author of nine books of poetry and fiction, including two novels, Margery Kempe and Jack the Modernist and a book of stories, Denny Smith. Glück edited, along with Camille Roy, Mary Burger and Gail Scott, the anthology Biting The Error: Writers on Narrative. Glück was Co-Director of Small Press Traffic Literary Arts Center, Director of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State, and Associate Editor at Lapis Press. His poetry and fiction have been published in the New Directions in Prose and Poetry anthology, City Lights anthologies, Best New Gay Fiction, 1988 and 1996, The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Best American Erotica, 1996 and 2005, and The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction. His critical articles appeared in Artforum International, Aperture, and Poetics Journal, and he prefaced Between Life and Death, a book on the paintings of Frank Moore. Glück teaches at San Francisco State University.

Stephanie Gray is the author of Heart Stoner Bingo (Straw Gate Books, 2007). Her work has appeared in EOAGH, 2nd Avenue Poetry, Boog City Reader, Press 1, The Recluse, Everyday Genius, and in the anthology The Red Room (Straw Gate Books, 2010). Also a filmmaker, her super 8 films have screened internationally, including at the Viennale, Ann Arbor, Oberhausen, Outfest, Antimatter, and Chicago Under-
ground fests.

Jen Hofer is a Los Angeles-based poet, translator, interpreter, teacher, knitter, book-maker, public letter-writer, and urban cyclist. Her most recent books are Ivory Black, a translation of Mexican poet Myriam Moscona’s Negro marfil (Les Figues Press, 2011) and series of anti-war-manifesto poems titled one (Palm Press, 2009). Recent poems, prose and translations have appeared in Encyclopedia Vol. 2 F-K, Mandorla, Or, out of nothing, and Poets on Teaching: A Sourcebook. She teaches at CalArts, Goddard College, and Otis College, and works nationally and locally as a social justice interpreter.

Cynthia Hogue published Or Consequence and When the Water Came: Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina, a series of interview-poems with photographs by Rebecca Ross, both in 2010. Among her awards are a Fulbright Fellowship, an NEA in poetry, and a Witter Bynner Fellowship. She has co-edited two collections of essays on contemporary women’s work, and holds the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University.

Kevin Holden is currently in the Ph.D. program in German at Yale University. He received an A. B. from Harvard, then an M. Phil. from Cambridge University in the U.K, and then an M.F.A. in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has two chapbooks out, Alpine and Identity and his work has appeared in the Colorado Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Harvard Advocate and other journals.

Gabriela Jauregui is the author of the poetry collection Controlled Decay (Akashic Books/ Black Goat Press, 2008) and El Tiempo Se Volvió Cuero (Sur+, 2009), a bilingual Spanish translation of Tom Raworth’s poems. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California at Riverside, and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Irvine. She is a member of the sur+ publishing collective in Mexico.

Poet, editor and translator Reynaldo Jiménez (b. 1959) currently resides in Buenos Aires. He is the founder/executive editor of the independent press and literary journal Tsé-tsé, whose catalogue of writers includes Cecilia Vicuña, José Kozer, Liliana Ponce, Roberto Echavarren, and Wilson Bueno. A visual artist and musician as well, Reynaldo has given readings and performances in New York, California, Mexico, Europe, and across South America. He has authored more than 8 books of poetry.

Pierre Joris has published over forty books, most recently hand the poem sequence Canto Diurno #4: The Tang Extending from the Blade (Ahadada Books, 2010 ebook), Justifying the Margins: Essays 1990-2006 and Aljibar I & II (poems). Other recent publications include the CD Routes, not Roots and Meditations on the Stations of Mansour Al-Hallaj 1-21. Recent translations include The Meridian: Final Version—Drafts—Materials by Paul Celan (Stanford University Press), Paul Celan: Selections, and Lightduress by Paul Celan, which received the 2005 PEN Poetry Translation Award. With Jerome Rothenberg he edited the award-winning anthologies Poems for the Millennium (Volumes I & II). He teaches at the University of Albany, SUNY. Check out his website http://www.pierrejoris.com/home.html, and his blog, Nomadics http://pjoris.blogspot.com.

Paul Killebrew was born in 1978 in Nashville, Tennessee. He currently lives in Louisiana and works as a lawyer at Innocence Project New Orleans. His first full-length collection of poems, Flowers, was published by Canarium in 2010. He is also author of the chapbooks Forget Rita (Poetry Society of America, 2003), Buenos Dias, Cap’n Crunch (A Rest Press, 2005), and Inspector vs. Evader (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006). Inspector vs. Evader was recently re-published by Ugly Ducking on their website, www.uglyducklingpresse.org.

Brian Laidlaw is a poet and songwriter from Northern California, currently finishing an M.F.A. in Poetry at the University of Minnesota. His work has appeared in American Songwriter Magazine and is forthcoming in FIELD, VOLT, and Quarter After Eight. News, tour, and contact information are available at www.brianlaidlaw.com.

Poet and essayist René Lapierre is professor of literature and creative writing at UQAM (Université du Québec à Montréal). Most of his books have been published by les éditions des Herbes rouges. His most recent title is Aimée soit la honte (2010).

Carlos Lara was born in San Diego, CA. He is currently en route to the Middle East where he will be teaching English. He has received degrees from UCLA and Brown University. Several of his translations have also appeared in Paul Revere’s Horse. As a co-founder of both FAM Airlines and Mansion Press, he is an avid practitioner of Wavy Poetics. He enjoys surfing and Russian literature.

Lauren Levin was born in New Orleans and lives in Oakland. A chapbook, Keenan, is forthcoming with Lame House Press. There’s recent work in a chapbook, Not Time (Boxwood Editions) and in Try!, Realpoetik, Sal Mimeo, Mirage #4/Period(ical), Rabbit Light Movies, labday2010.blogspot.com, Elective Affinities, and Con/Crescent 2. With Jared Stanley and Catherine Meng, she edits Mrs. Maybe.

Louise Loftus lives in Paris where she is a poetry editor for Upstairs at Duroc, a Paris literary journal.

Román Luján is a Mexican poet, translator and doctoral candidate in Latin American Literature.

Jill Magi is the author of Threads (Futurepoem) and Torchwood (Shearsman). Her books Cadastral Map and SLOT are forthcoming in 2011 (Shearsman, Ugly Duckling Presse). The poems published in this issue of Aufgabe are from a collaborative text-image-sound project organized by Ed. Press in Sweden. Recent visual work can be seen online in Elective Affinities and in-person at the Brooklyn Waterfront Artist Coalition 2010 shows. Jill teaches at Goddard, Eugene Lang, and City Colleges, runs the chapbook press Sona Books, and lives in Brooklyn.

Susan Maxwell earned a B.A. in Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.F.A. in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her first book, Passenger, was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2005 through the Contemporary Poetry Series. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and her work has appeared or will appear in 1913: A Journal of Forms, American Letters & Commentary, New American Writing, Tarpaulin Sky, Slope, Denver Quarterly, and Colorado Review, as well as other journals and art installations. She is currently a doctoral student in clinical psychology.

Catherine Meng is the author of the poetry collection, Tonight’s the Night (Apostrophe Books, 2007). Along with Lauren Levin and Jared Stanley she co-edits the poetry journal Mrs. Maybe. She lives in Berkeley, CA.

Erin Morrill grew up in Appalachian Tennessee. She currently resides in Oakland, California where she makes chapbooks with Andrew Kenower under the imprint of Trafficker Press. She received her MFA from California College of the Arts. Her recent writings have appeared in TRY, Mrs. Maybe, and Trickhouse.

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa is currently at work on her sixth poetry collection, titled NOTATIONAL. Originally from the U.S., she lives in central Japan. Email is welcome at janenakagawa@yahoo.com.

Nathanaël is the author of several books, including We Press Ourselves Plainly, Carnet de désaccords and Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book). She has translated the work of Catherine Mavrikakis, Gail Scott and Édouard Glissant.

Michelle Noteboom is the author of The Chia Letters (Dusie Kollektiv, 2009), Edging (Cracked Slab Books), which won the 2006 Heartland Poetry Prize, and Hors-cage, in French translation by Frédéric Forte (Editions de l’Attente, 2010). Her work has appeared in Verse, Fence, Boston Review, and the Columbia Poetry Review, MiPOesias, among others. She’s lived in Paris since 1991, where she co-curates the Ivy Writers Series with Jennifer K. Dick, a bilingual reading series.

Jean-Jacques Poucel has written a book-length study, Jacques Roubaud and the Invention of Memory (UNCSRLL, 2006), co-edited a special issue of Yale French Studies (105), Pereckonings: Reading Georges Perec, a special issue of Poetics Today (30.4 & 31.1), Constraint Writing, and curated the Oulipo dossier in Drunken Boat. Co-founder of the Working Group in Contemporary Poetics at Yale, he is a member of Double Change, a bi-cultural poetic exchange.

Joan Retallack’s most recent volume of poetry is Procedural Elegies / Western Civ Cont’d / (Roof Books, 2010). She is also the author of Gertrude Stein: Selections (2008) and The Poethical Wager (2004), both from University of California Press. Retallack lives in the Hudson Valley where she is John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities at Bard College.

Sarah Riggs, based in Paris, has written 60 Textos (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010) and Waterwork (Chax Press, 2007). She has translated Isabelle Garron’s Face Before Against (Litmus Press, 2008), Ryoko Sekiguchi’s Two Markets, Once Again (Post Apollo Press, 2008), and co-translated, with Omar Berrada, Marie Borel’s Wolftrot (La Presse, 2006). Forthcoming translations: with Cole Swensen, Stéphane Bouquet’s A People, and with Ellen LeBlond-Schrader, Oscarine Bosquet’s Present Participle.

Eléna Rivera received a 2010 National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship and her translation of Bernard Noel’s The Rest of the Voyage won the 2010 Robert Fagles Award from the National Poetry Series. Her translation of Isabelle Baladine Howald’s Secret of Breath was published by Burning Deck Press (2009), and other translations can be found in the Chicago Review, Web Conjunctions, Eleven Eleven, Tuesday: An Art Project, Circumference, and Tarpaulin Sky. She was awarded the 2007 Witter Bynner Poetry Translator Residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute.

Ellen LeBlond-Schrader recently completed her Ph.D. in French literature at the University of California at Davis with a dissertation titled The French Reader’s Relationship to Poetry in the Electronic Age: Ponge, Alferi, and Vassiliou. She currently teaches avant-garde movements in Paris and translates contemporary poetry as well as art criticism for the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Castello di Rivoli Museo in Turin, and other institutions.

Lisa Robertson is a Canadian writer who has been living in France and California in recent years. Her books of poetry include R’s Boat, Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip, The Men, and The Weather. A book of essays on art and architecture, Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, was just reissued by Coach House Books.

Prageeta Sharma is the author of Bliss to Fill (Subpress Collective, 2000), The Opening Question (Fence Books, 2004, winner of the 2004 Fence Modern Poets Prize) and Infamous Landscapes (Fence Books, 2007). Undergloom, her most recent manuscript will be published by Fence Books in 2013. She is the recipient of the 2010 Howard Foundation Grant. She is an associate professor and director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana-Missoula.

Lauren Shufran lives in Santa Cruz, where she is a PhD candidate in the Literature department at UCSC.

Eleni Sikelianos is the author of a hybrid memoir (The Book of Jon) and six books of poetry, the most recent being Body Clock. She has been the happy recipient of various awards for her poetry, nonfiction, and translations, and her work has been translated into a dozen languages. Sikelianos has translated Exchanges on Light by Jacques Roubaud, and is spending her current sabbatical in Paris.

Christopher Stackhouse is the author of Slip (Corollary Press); and is co-author of image/text collaboration with writer/translator John Keene, Seismosis (1913 press), which features Stackhouse’s drawings in philosophical discourse with Keene’s texts. A book of his essays is forthcoming from Sandpaper Press, and a new volume of poems from Counterpath Press, both in 2011.

Cole Swensen is a poet and translator who divides her time between Iowa City, where she teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Washington D.C., and Paris. Her latest books are Ours (U. of California Press, 2008) and Greensward (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010). She is the founder and editor of La Presse, which publishes French poetry translated by English language poets.

Mathew Timmons works include CREDIT (Blanc Press) and Lip Service (Slack Buddha). Recent and forthcoming projects include: a book, The New Poetics from Les Figues Press, an e-book, Sound Noise from Little Red Leaves, a chapbook, Where is it Written? from Imioplex Press, an album of solo and collaborative sound poetries, The Archanoids from Pleonasm Music, and a solo show at (323) Projects. His visual and performance work has been shown at LACE, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, CCA, Outpost for Contemporary Art, ArtSpeak Vancouver, LACMA, UCLA Hammer Museum, and as part of ArtLA. Mathew works as the General Director of General Projects, editor of Insert Press, Los Angeles editor of Joyland, Co-Host of LA-Lit 2005-2009, and has curated events, readings and ephemeral art shows for Beyond Baroque, Betalevel, workspace, and REDCAT.

G.C. Waldrep’s most recent collections are Your Father on the Train of Ghosts (BOA Editions, 2011), in collaboration with John Gallaher, and a chapbook, “St. Laszlo Hotel,” from Projective Industries.

Keith Waldrop has published over 30 books of poetry and translation, including versions of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil and Paris Spleen, and his triology Transcendental Studies (U. of California Press) won the 2009 National Book Award. With Rosmarie Waldrop, he is the founder and editor of Burning Deck Press. He is also a prolific collage artist, and a volume joining his visual and verbal work, Several Gravities, was published in 2009 by Siglio.

Rosmarie Waldrop, a native of Germany, has published some twenty books of poetry, novels, and literary criticism, including Lavish Absence (Wesleyan, 2002), a recollection and literary musing on Edmond Jabès. Her most recent book is Driven to Abstraction (New Directions, 2010). She translates from both German and French, presenting the work of Edmond Jabès, Jacques Roubaud, Paul Celan, Friederike Mayröcker, and others. She is co-founder and co-editor of Burning Deck Publications.

Alli Warren’s chapbooks include Acting Out, Well-Meaning White Girl, and Cousins. Recent poems appear in Jacket, LUNGFULL!, and pax americana. Collaborative works can be found in ON: Contemporary Practice (with Suzanne Stein), con/crescent 2 (with Lauren Levin), and Bruised Dick (with Michael Nicoloff). From 2008-2010, she co-curated The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand. Alli lives in Oakland.

Brian Whitener is an editor at Displaced Press. A chapbook, False Intimacy, is forthcoming from Trafficker Press.

Chet Wiener is a poet, translator and medical writer who lives in San Francisco. In addition to translating poetry, he does various documents for the French Foreign Ministry and the Association for the Diffusion of French Thought-Cultures. He received a Ph.D. in French from Columbia University and afterward lived in Paris for several years. A book of his poetry, Devant l’abondance, was published by P.O.L Editeur in 2003.

David Wolach is editor of Wheelhouse Magazine & Press and an active participant in Nonsite Collective. Wolach’s first full-length collection, Occultations, has just been published by Black Radish Books. Other books include the multi-media transliteration plus chapbook, Prefab Eulogies Volume 1: Nothings Houses (BlazeVox [books], 2010), the full-length Hospitalogy (chapbook forth. from Scantily Clad Press, 2010), and book alter(ed) (Ungovernable Press, 2009). A former union organizer and performing artist, Wolach’s work often begins as site-specific and interactive performance and ends up as shaped, written language. Wolach is professor of text arts, poetics, and aesthetics at The Evergreen State College, and visiting professor in Bard College’s Workshop In Language & Thinking.

Andrew Zawacki is the author of three volumes of poetry, most recently Petals of Zero Petals of One (Talisman House). His translation of Sébastien Smirou’s My Lorenzo is coming out from Burning Deck in 2012; he also translates from Slovenian and edited Afterwards: Slovenian Writing 1845-1995 (White Pine, 1999). He is a co-editor of Verse magazine, which published a special volume on contemporary French poetry in 2007. He teaches at the University of Georgia.