Contributors' Notes

Nathan Austin’s publications include Tie an O (Burning Press, 1998), (glost) (Handwritten Books, 2002), and Survey Says! (Black Maze Books, 2009). He holds a Ph.D. from SUNY Buffalo’s Poetics Program and currently teaches English in New York City.

Ari Banias lives in Brooklyn, New York, and sometimes teaches literature and creative writing. Recent poems have appeared in Literary Imagination, The Cincinnati Review, FIELD, Mid-American Review, MiPOesias, and elsewhere. He curates and hosts the monthly series Uncalled-For Readings, also in Brooklyn.

Jasper Bernes is the author of Starsdown and Desequencer. He lives in Albany, CA.

Damaris Calderón was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1967 and currently lives in Santiago de Chile. Her published books include Con el terror del equilibrista, Duras aguas del trópico, and El arte de aprender a despedirse (all on Ediciones Matanzas, Matanzas, Cuba), Se adivina un país (Ediciones UNEAC, Havana, Cuba), Duro de roer (Ediciones Las Dos Fridas, Santiago de Chile), Sílabas. Ecce Homo (Ediciones Editorial Universitaria, Santiago de Chile), La extranjera (Ediciones Cauce, Pinar del Río, Cuba), and Los amores del mal (Ediciones El Billar de Lucrecia, Mexico City). Her work has been widely anthologized in Latin America, and has been translated into French, English and Serbo-Croatian.

Thomas Campbell is a translator, editor, writer, and researcher based in Saint Petersburg and South Karelia, Finland. He is the editor of Chtodelat News (chtodelat.wordpress.com) and has recently contributed to the journals Russian Literature, Ante, Mute, and Kabinet. He was also the curator of last year's exhibition of work by the Azeri artist Babi Badalov at the Freud Museum of Dreams in Petersburg.

Xochiquetzal Candelaria was raised in San Juan Bautista, California, and holds degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and New York University. Her work has appeared in The Nation, New England Review, Gulf Coast, Seneca Review, and other magazines. She currently lives in San Francisco.

Miles Champion’s recent books are Eventually (The Rest, 2008) and Providence, a limited edition artist’s book in collaboration with Jane South (Sienese Shredder Editions, 2008). He lives in Brooklyn.

Corina Copp’s recent short play, “A Week of Kindness,” was produced in the 2007 Tiny Theater Festival at the Ontological-Hysteric. Recent poems can be found in Antennae, 6x6, Denver Quarterly, and EOAGH; and she’s the author of Play Air (Belladonna chaplet, 2005), Carpeted (Faux Press e-book, 2004), and Sometimes Inspired by Marguerite (Open 24 Hours, 2003). A former Monday Night Reading Series Coordinator at The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, she is currently pursuing her MFA in Mac Wellman’s playwriting program at Brooklyn College.

Phil Cordelli is a poet and gardener newly residing in the Happy Valley of Western Massachusetts. More poems of his can be seen in Cannibal, Octopus, Tuesday, Zoland, and other publications.

Alan Davies was born in Canada, and has lived for over half his life in New York City. Alan is the author of RAVE (Roof), NAME (This), CANDOR (O Books), and SIGNAGE (Roof), and an untitled collaboration with photographer M. M. Winterford (Zasterle Press). Recent publications include BOOK 5, (Katalanché); BOOK 6 (House Press); Odes (Faux Press); and a token is a think upon a tongue (Sonaweb). BOOK 1 is forthcoming from Harry Tankoos Press. More information is available at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Davies_%28poet%29
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/davies/
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Davies-Alan.html
Alan can be contacted at canadianluddite@yahoo.com.

Geoffrey Detrani is a visual artist and writer. His artist’s books are in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His writing has appeared in Crowd, New Orleans Review, New Delta Review, Massachusetts Review, First Intensity, Epiphany, Fourteen Hills, Parthenon West Review, Black Warrior Review, 6x6, Fence, The Canary, Tarpaulin Sky, and Eleven Bulls, among other publications, and will be included in a “best of” Fence anthology. His artwork recently appeared on the cover of the New England Review and is featured in the current issue of Cutbank.

Dolores Dorantes’ books include sexoPUROsexoVELOZ (Lapzus and Oráculo, 2004), Lola (cartas cortas) (Fondo Editorial Tierra Adentro, CONACULTA, 2002), Para Bernardo: un eco (MUB editoraz, 2000) and Poemas para niños (Ediciones El Tucán de Virginia, 1999). Her op-ed pieces, criticism and investigative texts have been published in numerous Mexican newspapers. Jen Hofer’s translations of her poems into English have been published in various periodicals, as a Seeing Eye chapbook, and in the anthology Sin puertas visibles (ed. and trans. Jen Hofer, University of Pittsburgh and Ediciones Sin Nombre, 2003). sexoPUROsexoVELOZ and Septiembre, a bilingual edition of books two and three of Dolores Dorantes by Dolores Dorantes was co-published in early 2008 by Counterpath Press and Kenning Editions. She lives in Ciudad Juárez, where she is founding director of the border arts collective Compañía Frugal and teaches through a nonprofit women’s advocacy and education organization.

Thomas Epstein translates and writes on contemporary and modern Russian and French literatures, especially their “unofficial” variants. He is an Assistant Professor at Boston College.

Elena Fanailova, a poet and journalist, was born in Voronezh in 1962. She is a graduate of the Voronezh Medical Institute and the Voronezh State University, where she majored in linguistics. Fanailova has worked as a doctor and an educator. Currently, Fanailova is a host of the radio program Far from Moscow for Radio Liberty. Fanailova’s poems have been anthologized in Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey Archive, 2008), The Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets (University of Iowa, 2005) and Crossing Centuries: the New Generation of Russian Poetry (Talisman, 2000). Fanailova is the author of four books of poetry in Russian, and a volume of selected poems in English translation, The Russian Version (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009). She has received the Andrey Bely Award (1999) and the Moskovsky Schyot (Moscow Score) Award (2003). She lives in Moscow.

Keith Gessen is a founding editor of n+1 and the author of All the Sad Young Literary Men (Viking). His translation, with Anna Summers, of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's scary fairy tales will be published this fall.

Peter Golub is a Moscow-born poet and translator. He has published translations of Russian poetry in various journals, and edited “New Russian Poetry” published by Jacket Magazine. In 2007 a bilingual edition of his poems, My Imagined Funeral, was published in Russia. He currently teaches at the University of Utah, Salt Lake City.

Dmitry Golynko, born in 1969 in Leningrad, is the author of three books of poems in Russian — Homo Scribens, Directory and Concrete Doves — and one volume of selected poems in English translation, As It Turned Out (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008). Golynko has been nominated for the Andrey Bely Prize. He is the author of numerous critical essays on contemporary art, cinema and literature, and is currently writing a critical book on Dmitri Prigov. His poems and essays have been translated and published in English, German, French, Finnish, Swedish, and Italian. He has taught in South Korea, has been a participant of CEC Artslink’s Open World Cultural Leaders Program, and was a writer-in-residence at the Literarischer Colloqium in Berlin. He holds a research position at the Russian Institute of Art History and is a member of the editorial board for the Moscow Art Magazine. He lives in Petersburg.

Iinor Goralik, a poet, prose writer, and critic, was born in 1975 in Dnepropetrovsk. She graduated from Beer-Sheva University (Israel) with a degree in computer science, and worked in the hi-tech sector. In 2001 she returned to live and work in Moscow. She is the co-author of two novels: Nyet (No), written with Segey Kuznetsov, and Polovina Neba (Half the Sky), written with Stanislav Lvovsky. She has published two collections of short prose and poetry, a nonfiction book about the Barbie doll, several anthologies of translations from Hebrew and English, a comic book, and several children’s books. She is a frequent contributor to Teorii Mody (Theories of Fashion), Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie (The New Literary Observer), the online project Snob, the business newspaper Vedomosti, and other periodicals.

Noah Eli Gordon is the author of several collections, including Novel Pictorial Noise, which was selected by John Ashbery for the 2006 National Poetry Series, and subsequently chosen by Sesshu Foster for the 2007 San Francisco State University Poetry Center Book Award. His recent essays, reviews, poetry, creative nonfiction and other itinerant writings can be found in Bookforum, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, and elsewhere. He pens a quarterly column on chapbook culture for Rain Taxi: Review of Books, and is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Colorado – Boulder.

Inti García Santamaría has published: Corazoncito (Compañía, Mexico City, 2004) and Recuento al final del verano (NarrArte, Mexico City, 2000). He edits the artist’s book imprint Compañía and directs the internet video channel AutismoProducciones.

Sarah Gridley is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Montana in 2000. The University of California Press published her book, Weather Eye Open, in 2005. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Fourteen Hills, NEO, Harp and Altar, Crazy Horse, jubilat, Denver Quarterly, New American Writing, and Chicago Review. A new book of poems, Green Transistor, will be published by University of California Press in 2010.

David Hock received his bachelor's degree in Comparative Literature and Slavic Studies from Brown University in May 2009 and plans on continuing his studies as a Ph.D. candidate in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. This is his first published translation.

Jen Hofer’s recent publications include The Route, a collaboration with Patrick Durgin (Atelos, 2008), sexoPUROsexoVELOZ and Septiembre, a translation from Dolores Dorantes by Dolores Dorantes (Counterpath Press and Kenning Editions, 2008), and lip wolf, a translation of Laura Solórzano’s lobo de labio (Action Books, 2007). Her forthcoming books are from the valley of death (Ponzipo), Laws (Dusie Books), one (Palm Press), and a translation of Guatemalan poet Alan Mills’ Síncopes (Piedra Santa). She currently teaches at Pomona College, at Goddard College, and in the MFA Writing Program at CalArts.

Uulia Idlis is a poet, critic, and editor. She is a recipient of the Debut award for criticism and was shortlisted for the Debut award in poetry. Her poetry is published in various online and print periodicals, and translations of her poems can be found in Jacket magazine’s “New Russian Poetry” anthology (issue 36). She lives in Moscow.

A major voice in Québec literature, Suzanne Jacob has twice won the Governor-General’s Award, once for fiction and once for poetry. She is the author of seven novels and three novellas, and has written short fiction, poetry and essays. In 2001, she was inducted to the Académie des lettres du Québec. In 2008, she was awarded the prestigious Prix Athanase-David to honor the body of her work. She lives in Montréal.

Paolo Javier is the author of LMFAO (OMG Press), Goldfish Kisses (Sona Books), 60 lv bo(e)mbs (O Books), and the time at the end of this writing (Ahadada). He publishes 2nd Ave Poetry, and lives in New York.

Garrett Kalleberg’s books include Some Mantic Daemons (Futurepoem Books), Psychological Corporations (Spuyten Duyvil), Limbic Odes (Heart Hammer), and the forthcoming Malilenas (Ugly Duckling Presse). His writings have appeared in Brooklyn Rail, The Canary, Crowd, Damn the Caesars, Denver Quarterly, Sulfur, Mandorla, and elsewhere. Garrett lives in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Paula Koneazny lives in Sebastopol, California, with numerous rose bushes and four cameras and earns her living as a tax consultant. Her poetry has appeared most recently in Volt: The War Issue and is forthcoming in Pool. Her reviews are published periodically in American Book Review and have appeared in Rain Taxi and Verse. She has a chapbook, The Year I Was Alive, out from dpress.

Sergey Kruglov was born in 1966 in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. In the early 1990s, he published through the Vavilon Union of Young Poets. In 1996 he received a baptism and then took the cloth, ceasing his literary activities. In 2006, his work began to appear in print once more. In addition to magazine and online publications, Kruglov has published several books of poetry, most recently Prinoshenie (The Sacrifice) and Perepishchik (The Copyist). A book of early poems (Sniatie zmiia so kresta) was shortlisted for the Andrey Bely Award in 2003. Sergey Kruglov lives in Minusinsk, in the Krasnoyarsk region, where he serves as a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Dmitri Kuzmin was born in 1968. He is a poet, publisher, editor, curator, educator, and translator. In 1989 he founded the Vavilon Union of Young Poets, which was the organizational hub for Moscow's experimental poetry scene. Since 1993, he has been Editor-in-Chief of ARGO-RISK (which publishes about 20 titles of contemporary Russian poetry yearly). Since 1996 he has been editing the Vavilon Internet project (www.vavilon.ru), an anthology of contemporary Russian writing, with about 200 authors currently. He is Editor-in-Chief of Vozdukh (Air), a quarterly poetry magazine. He is a recipient of the Andrei Bely Award of Merit in Literature (2002), and the Moskovsky Schyot (Moscow Score) Award for the best debut poetry collection for his selected poems and translations, Horosho byt’ zhivym / It’s fine to be alive (2008). He has taught literature and literary translation, and has translated poetry from French, Ukrainian, and English (Auden, cummings, Stevens, and Ashbery, among others). His poems have appeared in translation in England, France, Poland, China, Italy, and the US.

Rachel Levitsky’s second long poem, NEIGHBOR, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2009. Some of this work can be found translated into Icelandic in the anthology 131.839 Slög Med Bilum, edited and translated by Eiríkur Örn Nordahl. Online poetry and critical essays can be found on such sites as Delirious Hem, Narrativity, Duration Press, How2, and Web Conjunctions. She is the founder and co-director of Belladonna*, an event and publication series of feminist avant-garde poetics.

Román Luján currently lives in Los Angeles, where he is studying for his Ph.D. in Hispanoamerican Literature at University of California – Los Angeles. His books include Deshuesadero (Fondo Editorial Tierra Adentro, 2006), Aspa Viento (in collaboration with the artist Jordi Boldó, Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 2003), and Instrucciones para hacerse el valiente (Consejo Nacional para el Arte y la Cultura and Centro Cultural Tijuana, 2000). With Luis Alberto Arellano, he edited an anthology of poetry from Querétaro titled Esos que no hablan pero están (Fondo Estatal de Querétaro, 2003).

Kimberly Lyons is a clinical social worker in private practice in New York City. She is the author of several collections of poems including Phototherapique (Portable Press, Katalanche Press, 2008), Saline (Instance Press, 2005), Abracadabra (2000) and Mettle (a 1996 limited edition collaboration with artist Ed Eppling), both published by Granary Books. Her poems, reviews and critical writing can be found in the anthologies New (American) Poets (Talisman), The Boog Lit Reader and Not for Mothers Only (Fence, 2008), and recently in the journals Critiphoria, Satellite Telephone, The Poetry Project Newsletter and The Recluse. She curated the Zinc Bar Reading Series from Fall 2008 through Winter 2009. She is starting a new small press, Lunar Chandelier.

Christopher Mattison graduated with an M.F.A. in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa and is currently a senior editor at Zephyr Press, co-director of the series Adventures in Poetry and translation editor for the Zoland Poetry annuals. His books of translation include Dmitri Prigov’s 50 Drops of Blood in an Absorbent Medium (Ugly Duckling Presse) and the forthcoming Eccentric Circles: Selected Prose of Venedikt Erofeev (Twisted Spoon Press). Mattison has also edited Bei Dao’s first two books of essays, Blue House (Zephyr Press) and Midnight’s Gate (New Directions).

Catherine Mavrikakis teaches literature and creative writing at University of Montreal. Among her numerous publications are four novels and a play, as well as a book-length essay, Condamner à mort (Presses de l’Université de Montréal).

Eduardo Milán has moved to Mexico City in 1979 for political reasons and has lived there ever since. He was on the editorial board of the magazine Vuelta and has worked with the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte. He has published numerous books of poetry and critical prose, including most recently Acción que en un momento creí gracia (Igitur, Tarragona, Spain, 2005), Indice al sistema del arrase (Baile del Sol, Tenerife, Canary Islands, 2007), Sobre la capacidad de dar sombra de ciertos signos como un sauce (Fondo de Cultura Económica, Mexico City, 2007), and Hechos polvo (with illustrations by Gabriela Gutiérrez, Escuela Superior de Arte de Mérida, España, 2008).

Alan Mills currently lives in São Paulo, Brazil, where he is writer-in-residence at the Casa das Rosas-Espaço Haroldo de Campos de Poesia. His books include Testamentofuturo (www.librosminimos.org, 2007) and Síncopes (Perú: Zignos, 2007; México: Literal, 2007; Bolivia: Mandrágora Cartonera, 2007), forthcoming in trilingual edition (French, Portuguese, Spanish; Brazil: Demónio Negro) and in bilingual edition (English-Spanish; Guatemala: Piedra Santa).

Max Nemtsov was born in Vladivostok, where he majored in English Literature at university, graduating with honors. He has worked as a captain’s mate, a newspaper editor, and a press attaché for the US Consul General in Vladivostok. In 1986, he co-founded DVR, an underground journal of alternative culture. In 1996 he created the electronic library Speaking in Tongues: A Journal of Non-Literal Translation. From 2001 to the present he has worked as an editor and translator in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. In 2002, he was named “Editor of the Year” by the newspaper Knizhnoe Obozrenie (The Book Review). He lives in Moscow.

Akilah Oliver is the author of A Toast in the House of Friends (Coffee House Press, 2008) and the she said dialogues: flesh memory (Smokeproof/Erudite Fangs, 1999, Winner of the PEN Beyond Margins Award), a book of experimental prose-poetry. Her chapbooks include: a (A)ugust (Yo-Yo Labs, 2007), The Putterer’s Notebook (Belladona, 2006), and An Arriving Guard of Angels, Thusly Coming to Greet, which was published by Farfalla Press (2005) in a text and performance CD edition. She currently makes her home in Brooklyn, NY.

Eugene Ostashevsky is a Russian-born American poet and translator. He is the author of several books of poetry, including Iterature (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005) and The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008). Eugene’s poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2005, Jubilat, Fence, Boston Review and other magazines. Ostashevsky edited and co-translated OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (Nortwestern University Press, 2006), containing work by Alexander Vvedensky, Daniil Kharms, and others. He teaches the humanities at New York University.

Tim Peterson is a poet and critic living in Brooklyn, New York. Peterson is the editor of EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts and curator of the Tendencies talk series at CUNY Graduate Center. Peterson’s most recent book is Since I Moved In (Chax Press). A new chapbook, Violet Speech, is forthcoming from 2nd Avenue Poetry in late 2009.

Natasha Randall is an American writer and translator living in London. She is the author of new translations of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (Random House) and Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (Penguin Classics). Her work has appeared in A Public Space, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The Moscow Times, Bookforum, The New York Times, HALI Magazine, The Strad Magazine, The St. Petersburg Times (FL), and on National Public Radio. Her translations of Osip Mandelstam have appeared in Jubilat and in the chapbook Osip Mandelstam: New Translations (Ugly Duckling Presse). She has also translated letters by Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and short fiction by Olga Zondberg.

Matt Reeck lives in Brooklyn. His poems have appeared or will soon appear in magazines including Brooklyn Review, Circumference, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, They Are Flying Planes, Tight, and Upstairs at Duroc. His two chapbooks were published in 2009, Love Songs and Laments by MIPOesias and Sieve by Other Rooms Press. His translations can be read online at Jacket and the Annual of Urdu Studies.

Margaret Ronda’s poetry has most recently appeared in Pool, Xantippe, Portland Review, and Gulf Coast. She is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of California – Berkeley, writing on the esthetics of labor in American poetry. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Trish Salah is a Montreal-based writer, activist and teacher at Concordia and Bishop’s Universities. Her writing addresses questions of desire, identity and the precarity of belonging. She has been politically active in grassroots, campus-based and labor organizations on issues of Palestinian solidarity, anti-capitalism, sex workers’ rights, anti-racism, queer and trans rights. Her first book of poetry Wanting in Arabic was published by TSAR in 2002 and her recent writing appears in the journals Open Letter, Atlantis, No More Potlucks, and West Coast Line.

Simona Schneider is a writer and photographer until recently based in Tangier, Morocco, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Bidoun, A Public Space, Issue One and other publications. She was a co-translator for Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Works of Daniil Kharms and As It Turned Out by Dmitry Golynko. She will be pursuing a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Ethics this Fall at the University of California – Berkeley.

Zachary Schomburg is the author of Scary, No Scary (Black Ocean, 2009) and The Man Suit (Black Ocean, 2007). He co-edits Octopus Books and Octopus Magazine. His translations from the Russian can be found in The Agriculture Reader, Circumference, Jacket, Harp & Altar, Mantis, and Peaches and Bats. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Andrei Sen-Senkov was born in 1968 in Tadjikistan. He is the author of seven books. His work has been translated into Itlaian, English, French, German, Dutch, Estonian, and Albanian. In 2008, he traveled to the US as a participant of CEC Artslink’s Open World Cultural Leaders Program. He lives in Moscow where he works as a medical doctor.

Laura Sims is the author of two books of poems: Practice, Restraint, winner of the 2005 Fence Books Alberta Prize, and Stranger (Fence Books, 2009). Her book reviews and essays have appeared in Boston Review, New England Review, Rain Taxi, and The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and she has recently published poems in the journals Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, CAB/NET, and Crayon. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches writing at Baruch College in Manhattan.

Aleksandr Skidan was born in 1965 in Leningrad. He is a poet, literary critic, essayist, and translator. He has worked as a journalist, a lecturer, and a boiler-room operator, and has served on the selection committee of the Andrei Bely Award and on the editorial boards of several literary journals. Skidan is the author of several books of poetry and literary criticism, including Delirium (1993), A Critical Mass (1995, nominated for the Small Booker Prize), In the Re-reading (1998), The Resistance to/of Poetry (2001), Red Shifting (2006, Andrei Bely Award) as well as a volume of selected poems in English translation, Red Shifting (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009). His poetry has been translated into English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Hebrew, Italian and Swedish. In 1998, he received Turgenev Award for short prose. He has participated in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa (1994) and in the CEC Artslink Open World Cultural Leaders Program (2005). He lives in St. Petersburg.

Laura Solórzano (Guadalajara, 1961) is the author of Un rosal para el señor K (Universidad de Guanajuato, 2006), Boca perdida (bonobos, Metepec: 2005), lobo de labio (Cuadernos de filodecaballos, Guadalajara: 2001) and Semilla de Ficus (Ediciones Rimbaud, Tlaxcala: 1999). Jen Hofer’s en face translation of lobo de labio was published as lip wolf by Action Books in March 2007. Laura is on the editorial board of the literary arts magazine Tragaluz, and currently teaches writing at the Centro de Arte Audiovisual in Guadalajara.

Maria Stepanova was born in Moscow in 1972. She is the author of six books of poetry and the recipient of several literary awards, including the Pasternak Prize (2005), the Andrei Bely Award (2005), and the Hubert Burda Preis (Germany, 2006). She has published poems in many literary journals and poetry almanacs, including Zerkalo (The Mirror), Znamya (The Banner), Kriticheskaja Massa (Critical Mass), Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie (The New Literary Observer), and Vavilon (Bablylon), and in the online journal TextOnly. Her poems have been translated into several languages, including English, Hebrew, Italian, German, Serbo-Croatian, and Finnish. She is the Editor-in-Chief of the internet portal, OpenSpace.ru.

Nathalie Stephens (Nathanaël) writes l’entre-genre in English and French. She is the author of sixteen books, including The Sorrow and the Fast of It (2007), L'injure (2004), and the essay of correspondence Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book) (2009). Her book, ...s’arrête? Je (2007) was recently awarded the Prix Alain-Grandbois. Je Nathanaël (2003) exists in English self-translation with BookThug (2006). Other work exists in Basque and Slovene, with book-length translations in Bulgarian (2007). In addition to translating herself, Stephens has translated Catherine Mavrikakis, Gail Scott, Bhanu Kapil and Édouard Glissant. She is, she thinks, in Chicago.

François Turcot has published miniatures en pays perdu (2006) and Derrière les forêts (2008) with Éditions La Peuplade. He teaches literature, took interest in the œuvre of W. G. Sebald in the context of a Masters at UQÀM and sometimes contributes to journals (Riveneuve Continents, La Table des Matières (TM03), filling Station, Nor, C’est selon).

Dmitry Vodennikov was born in 1968. He is the leader of a poetic movement, the New Sincerity, and the author of several books of poetry, and a documentary novel. He works at Radio Rossia, the radio station Kultura, and the magazine Russkaia zhizn (Russian Life). He is the creator of several radio programs dedicated to contemporary literature. In 2007 he was named King of Poets. He lives in Moscow.

Dana Ward is the author of Goodnight Voice (House Press, 2008), The Drought (Open 24HRS, 2009), & Roseland (Editions Louis Wain, 2009) He lives in Cincinnati where he edits Cy Press and works as an advocate for adult literacy.

Diane Ward attended the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC and is currently pursuing a degree in Geography/Environmental Studies at University of California – Los Angeles. She has published ten books of poetry including, most recently, No List (No List) (Seeing Eye Books). She has been included in numerous anthologies, among them: MOVING BORDERS: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, edited by Mary Margaret Sloan (Talisman House) and OUT OF EVERYWHERE: linguistically innovative poetry by women in North America & the UK (Reality Street Editions). She is currently working on a text for avant-garde sound performer and musician Emily Hay.

Karen Weiser is thinking about the culture wars of the 1790s, conspiracies and all.

Elisabeth Whitehead grew up in the Washington, DC area and Japan, and currently lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. She is the co-editor of Greatcoat magazine.

Brian Whitener is a writer, researcher, translator, and member of the collective project La Lleca, an artistic-social intervention into the prison system of Mexico City. A translation of Colectivo Situaciones’ Genocida en el barrio is forthcoming from ChainLinks. He is an editor at Displaced Press (http://displacedpress.blogspot.com). Since 2005 he has undertaken an investigation on new political and artistic movements in Latin America and autonomist political theory.

Tyrone Williams teaches literature and theory at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the author of two books of poetry, c.c. (Krupskaya Books, 2002) and On Spec (Omnidawn Publishing, 2008). He also has several chapbooks out, including AAB (Slack Buddha Press, 2004), Futures, Elections (Dos Madres Press, 2004), and Musique Noir (Overhere Press, 2006). A new book of poems, The Hero Project of the Century, is forthcoming in 2009 from The Backwaters Press. He recently completed a manuscript of poetry commissioned by Atelos Books.

Matvei Yankelevich was born in Moscow in 1973, emigrated to the US in 1977 and grew up in New England. He is the author of The Present Work (Palm Press, 2006) and the forthcoming Boris by the Sea (Octopus, 2009). His writing has appeared in Boston Review, Damn the Caesars, Fence, Open City, Tantalum, Zen Monster, and other journals. His translations have appeared in journals including Calque, Circumference, Harper’s, New American Writing, Poetry, and The New Yorker. He edited and translated Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook, 2007; Ardis, 2009); and contributed translations to OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (Northwestern Univ., 2006); Night Wraps the Sky: Writings by and about Mayakovsky (FSG, 2008); and Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey Archive, 2008). Matvei teaches Russian Literature and Language at Hunter College while pursuing a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at City University of New York. He is a founding member of Ugly Duckling Presse, where he designs and edits various books and runs UDP’s Eastern European Poets Series.

Sergei Zavyalov was born in Tsarskoe Selo (near St. Petersburg) in 1958. Educated as a classicist, he is the author of three books of poetry, the Melik cycle, recently collected in one volume in Finnish translation. This year, a selection from this series was published in Swedish as Melik & tal. His essays have appeared in Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie (The New Literary Observer), and English translations of his poems have appeared in A Public Space, St. Petersburg Review, and the anthology Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry (Talisman House, 2000). The poems included in this issue are from a collection soon to be published under the title Rechi (Orations).

Igor Zhukov was born in 1964 in the city of Kovrov, Vladmirskaya region. He graduated from the Philology Department of the Ivanovsky State University. He is the author of five books of poetry, as well as many books of poetry and fairy-tales for children. He lives in Moscow.

Tatiana Zima was born in 1968 in the port of Vanino, Khabarovsky Region, in the Russian Far East. She is the author of an award-winning poetry book, Skoby (Shackles). She edited Ryby i Pticy (Fish and Birds, 2006), an anthology of alternative poetry from Vladivostok, where Zima organized many poetry events and workshops for youner poets. In 2007, she traveled to the US as a participant of CEC Artslink’s Open World Cultural Leaders Program. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals and almanacs, including Seraia loshad (Gray Horse), Den i Noch (Day and Night), Rubezh (Boundary), Dalnii Vostok (Far East), and Deti Ra (Ra’s Children). She lives in Moscow.

Olga Zondberg studied chemistry at Moscow State University. She has written two collections of poetry, including Seven Hours Two Minutes (2007), and a book of short stories, The Winter Company of Year Zero (2001). In 2006, A Public Space published two of her prose poems in English translation.