Contributors’ Notes

Dawn Michelle Baude's recent publications include egypt (Post-Apollo, 2002), Sunday (Signum Editions, 2002) and The Beirut Poems (Skanky Possum, 2001). She lives in Goult, a small village in the Luberon.

Laynie Browne's most recent books include Pollen Memory (Tender Buttons, 2003) and Acts of Levitation, a novel (Spuytenduyvil 2002). Forthcoming are a pamphlet from Phylum Press titled Webs of Agriope and a collaborative chapbook- with Lee Ann Brown- from the Owl Press titled Nascent Toolbox.

Mary Burger's book Antimatter Memoir, a collection of prose and poetry, will be published by Faux Press in 2004. Mary co-edits Narrativity (www.sfsu.edu/~poetry/narrativity/), an online forum for writers of experimental prose. A print anthology of Narrativity contributors is forthcoming from Coach House Books. Mary publishes Second Story Books, featuring short works of experimental prose.

Kate Colby lives in San Francisco. Recent work can be found or is forthcoming in Bombay Gin, Mirage #4/Period(ical), commonweal and Five Fingers Review.

Jennifer K Dick's first book, Fluorescence, is forthcoming in October 2004 from University of Georgia Press' Contemporary Poetry Series. Other poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such periodicals as VOLT, The Colorado Review, Tears in the Fence (UK), Bombay Gin, Phoebe, The Alembic, Whistkey Island Magazine, Stand (UK), Van Gogh's Ear (France) & Canary River. From Iowa City, Iowa, she now lives and teaches in Paris, France.

kari edwards is author of iduna, O Books (2003), a day in the life of p. , subpress collective (2002) and a diary of lies - Belladonna #27 by Belladonna Books (2002). hir work can also be found in Scribner’s The Best American Poetry (fall, 2004), Narrativity: Investigations by Writers, Coach House, Toronto, (2004), Bisexuality and Transgenderism: InterSEXions of the Others, Hawoth Presss, Inc. (2004)

Alison Mara Friedman graduated from Brown University with a degree in Comparative Literature. She currently lives in Beijing where she writes about dance in China and also works for China Radio International.

E. Tracy Grinnell is the author of Music or Forgetting (O Books, 2001) and Harmonics (Melodeon Poetry Systems, 2000). Quadriga, a colloborative project with Paul Foster Johnson, is forthcoming from g o n g chapbooks.

Bob Harrison moved to this country from Panama at the age of 7, at which time he first began learning English. He edits Bronze Skull Press and co-edits, with Andrew Levy, Crayon. His first full length book, Os, is forthcoming from subpress in 2004. He lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Takashi Hiraide, born in Fukuoka prefecture in 1950, is one of the leading poets of Japan's postwar generation. He writes in several forms, including modern poetry (The Inn), prose poetry (For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut), off-prose poetry (Notes for my Left-hand Diary), tanka (One Hundred and Eleven Tankas to Mourn My Father), critique (Point of Attack), essay (Berlin Moments), and fiction (Cat Guest). He is a Professor at Tama Art University in Tokyo, as well as a book designer.

Christine Hume is the author of Musca Domestica (Beacon Press 2000), winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize, and Alaskaphrenia (New Issues 2004), winner of the Green Rose Award. She teaches at Eastern Michigan University.

Born in 1949 in northern Japan, Masato Inagawa edited a poetry magazine with Hiraide Takashi while in college. He published his first book of poems in 1976 – For a Biography of the Redeemed, followed by Seal in 1985, and For Those Who Make Us Live in 1986. He has published a total of six collections of poetry, as well as books of literary and film criticism. His work questions basic assumptions in Japanese postwar poetry such as the lyric self, and is concerned also with the relationship between poetic discourse and contemporary consumer culture (the commoditization of language). In more recent years Inagawa has directed a series of art films. For other translations of Inagawa Masato by Eric Selland, see durationpress.com and The Oakland University Anthology of Younger Japanese Poets, Katydid Press, 1992.

Scott Inguito is a graduate of The Iowa Writer's Workshop. His poems have most recently appeared in 1913: A Journal of Forms. He lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. Other of his poems have appeared in the following; Parlour Games, DANTA, and Aufgabe #1.

Hiromi Ito (b.1955) is the author of over 30 books of poetry, prose, and nonfiction, including Good Breast Bad Breast, and I am Anju Himeko. She began her career as a contemporary poet in the 1980s, and was a prominent figure amongst female poets of her generation. At the same time she became well-known for developing a genre of personal essays with her books on pregnancy and child-bearing. Ito has lived in Tokyo, Warsaw, and Kumamoto, and since 1997 has lived in San Diego. She continues to explore new literary ground, more recently in fiction, and received the 1999 Noma Literary Prize for the book La Nina.

Paul Foster Johnson co-curates (with Sherry Mason) the Experiments and Disorders reading series at Dixon Place in New York City. His work has appeared in a number of journals, including Fence, Pom2, and Conundrum.

Work of Jeffrey Jullich's is forthcoming/published in New American Writing, Fence, Shiny, Chain, Ecopoetics, Boston Review, etc., and LUNGFULL! will be publishing a comic book done when he was eleven years old.

Ayane Kawata was born in China in 1940. She published her first book, Sora no jikan/Time of the Sky, in 1969 and has published at least eight other books. In the summer of 1969, Kawata traveled to Italy to pursue studies in art and then lived there and throughout Europe for numerous years. Despite her multi-lingual background, she writes poetry exclusively in Japanese.

John Keene is the author of Annotations (1995), and with artist Christopher Stackhouse, of Seismosis (2003). A 2003 Fellow in Poetry from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, he teaches at Northwestern University.

Drew Kunz is co-editor, with Stacy Szymaszek, of the poetry journal traverse & also editor of g o n g chapbooks. Recent work has appeared in Antennae, Conundrum, Bird Dog, Gam, 26 & the Bronze Skull Eight chapbook series.

Susan Landers is the author of 248 mgs., a panic picnic (O Books, 2003). She lives in Brooklyn, where she co-edits the magazine Pom2.

Gian Lombardo’s third collection of prose poetry, Who Lets Go First, might see the light of day this year. He directs Quale Press and teaches in the publishing program at Emerson College.

Jill Magi’s poetry and prose and visual art has appeared in Chain, Boog City, canwehaveourballback? issue 12, Pierogi Press, murmur, and Global City Review. She runs Sona Books/sonaweb.net, a community-based micro-press and teaches writing at The City College/CUNY Center for Worker Education. The pieces published here are from Threads, a work in-progress that will include documentary and imaginative prose, poetry, and collage.

Bill Marsh lives in La Mesa (near San Diego) California with his three collaborators, Octavia, Zazil, and Maya. His new book of poems, Tao Drops, I Change, written and assembled in collaboration with Steve Carll, was released this year from Subpress.

Chris Martin is the author of Vermontana, a chapbook published by Angry Dog Midget Editions featuring the art of Larry Heller. He lives in Brooklyn where he edits Puppy Flowers: an online magazine of the arts and coaches girls basketball. His recent and forthcoming work can be found in Lit, XConnect, Accurate Key, Pom2, Jacket, Magazine Cypress, Respiro, and Forklift, Ohio. He is furthermore a rapper and half of Twiglight, a folk-hop duo anchored by Edmund Berrigan.

Ted Mathys’s first book of poetry, Forge, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press. Poems have appeared or are slated in The Canary, Fence, Swerve, Good Foot, Ploughshares, Quarterly West and elsewhere, as well as the anthology City Voices: Hong Kong Voices in English, 1945 to the Present. He currently lives in Manhattan and works for a trade book publisher and as the New York limb of Hong Kong’s Sixth Finger Press.

Laura Mullen will be joining the MFA faculty at LSU (Baton Rouge) in the fall. Her fourth book, Subject, is forthcoming from University of California Press in Spring of 2005.

Sawako Nakayasu writes poetry, prose, and performance text, and translates from Japanese to English. Her first book, So we have been given time Or, was selected for the 2003 Verse Prize and will be published in 2004. Other works include Clutch (Tinfish chapbook, 2002), Balconic (Duration e-book, 2003) and Nothing fictional but accuracy or arrangement (she (e-Faux, 2003). She edits Factorial Press and the translation section for HOW2, and can be contacted at sawako@factorial.org.

Michelle Noteboom is a writer and translator living in Paris. Her poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Verse, Fence, Gargoyle, Tears in the Fence, Van Gogh’s Ear and others.

Kyong-Mi Park (b. 1956) is a second-generation Korean living and writing in Tokyo. Since publishing her first book of poetry Supu/Soup, in 1980, she has continued to publish numerous works of poetry and prose in major Japanese publications including La Mer, Waseda Bungaku, Ginka and Asahi Weekly. She is noted for her translations of Gertrude Stein: The World is Round (1987) and Geography and Plays, (co-translation 1992). In addition to other translations such as Over the moon by Mother Goose (1990), and a collection of essays The Guardian Spirit in a Garden: Words to Remember (1999), her most recent collection of poetry is titled Sonoko/That little one (2003). In 2002 she was invited to Canada as one of the featured poets in Dialogue 2001: Artists in Banff. Park’s work has been translated into Korean and English, and she currently teaches at Wako University.

David Pavelich lives in Madison,Wisconsin. He is curator of the Felix reading series at the University of Wisconsin. Cuneiform Press published his first chapbook, Outlining, in 2003. His poems have appeared in Antennae and Traverse, and are forthcoming in Bird Dog.

Sarah Rosenthal is the author of three chapbooks: How I Wrote This Story (Margin to Margin, 2001), sitings (a+bend, 2000), and not-chicago (Melodeon, 1998). Her poetry and fiction has appeared in hinge: A BOAS Anthology (Crack Press, 2002), as well as in magazines such as Bombay Gin, Shampoo, Untitled, VeRT, Tinfish, Fourteen Hills, Tripwire, and Mirage Period(ical). She is the recipient of the Primavera Fiction Prize and the Leo Litwak Award for Fiction.

Chika Sagawa (real name Chika Kawasaki) was born in 1911 in Hokkaido, Japan. Through the encouragement of her brother, Noboru Kawasaki, a poet and editor himself, she moved to Tokyo in 1928 and became a member of the lively community of writers surrounding Katue Kitasono, and was highly esteemed by many of her contemporaries. In addition to her own poetry, she translated literature from English, including prose by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Stomach cancer took her life at the age of 25, at which point her poems were collected and edited by Sei Ito and published (Sagawa Chika Shish [Collected Poems of Sagawa Chika], Shorinsha, 1936). Later a more complete collected works — including prose, eulogies, and a complete bibliography — was published as Sagawa Chika Zenshish [Collected Works of Chika Sagawa] by Shinkaisha in 1983.

Trey Sager lives and works in New York City. Recent work has or will be in Fence, Insurance, FO A RM, BlazeVox, canwehaveourballback, Aught, Counterpunch, and Brooklyn Stoop.

John Sakkis received the 2002 Frances Jaffer Award for poetry. An interview with Benjamin Hollander will appear in Vigilance from Beyond Baroque Books (‘04). His poetry and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Small Town, Scribbler, Transfer, Firebush, Papier-Machete, Zaum, and Commonweal. He lives in San Francisco.

A leading translator of Japanese poetry into English, Hiroaki Sato has won the 1982 PEN American Center Translation Prize for From the Country of Eight Islands: Anthology of Japanese Poetry (Anchor Books, 1981, with Burton Watson), as well as the 1999 Japan-United States Friendship Commission Japanese Literary Translation Prize for Breeze Through Bamboo: Kanshi of Ema Saiko (Columbia, 1997).

Jennifer Scappettone's recent poetry and prose appears or is forthcoming in The Poker, 26, Volt, Can We Have Our Ball Back?, Tripwire, & elsewhere. She co-curates the Holloway Poetry Series in Berkeley.

Eric Selland is a poet and translator living just south of San Francisco. His translations of contemporary Japanese poets appear in a variety of anthologies, as well on the Internet. He has also published articles on Japanese Modernist poetry and translation theory. He is the author of The Condition of Music (Sink Press 2000), and has work in an upcoming Copper Canyon Press anthology of Asian literary translation.

Timothy Shea has published Unflux (Orchises), & a chapbook, Memory's Guest (Red Barn Press).

Gustaf Sobin has lived in Provence for the past forty years where he’s written, translated, and taught. Recent work is appearing in First Intensity, Verse, Talisman, The Denver Quarterly, Literary Imagination, and New American Writing.

Brian Strang, co-editor of 26 magazine, lives in Oakland and teaches English composition at San Francisco State University. He is the author of Incretion (Spuyten Duyvil), machinations (a free Duration Press ebook), normal school: hommage à Beckett (lyric&), A Draft of L Cavatinas (Letters to Ez) (Potes and Poets) and movement of avenues in rows, (a+bend). Some of his recent writing has appeared in 580 Split, Vox and ecopoetics.

Chimako Tada (1930?2003) published her first book of poetry, Hanabi/Fireworks, in 1956. Several of her books have been recognized with awards, including Hasukuibito/Lotus-Eating People (Contemporary Women’s Poetry Prize, 1980), Kawa no hotori ni /By the River (Hanatsubaki prize, 1998), and Nagai kawa no aru kuni/Country with Long Rivers (Yomiuri Literary Prize, 2000). Tada is also well-known for her translations from the French, including work by Marguerite Yourcenar (most notably The Memoirs of Hadrian in 2001), Claude Lévi-Strauss, Georges Charbonnier, Antonin Artaud, and Saint-John Perse. Her last collection of poetry, Fu o kiruto/When breaking the seal, was published posthumously by Shoshi Yamada in 2004.

Taeko Tomioka was born in 1935 in Osaka. After playing a significant role in the emergence of postwar poetry by women in Japan, with six books of poetry as well as a Collected Poems book in 1973, Tomioka practically stopped writing poetry, focusing her attentions to countless works of fiction, essay, criticism, plays, screenplays, radio plays, and translations (including Gertrude Stein’s Pink Melon Joy). She is the first woman to be included in the Gendaishibunko (Contemporary Poets Paperback) series, and her criticism and prose has had a profound effect on the representation of women in Japanese literary history.

Hirata Toshiko (b.1955) won the Gendaishi Shinjinsho (New Faces in Modern Poetry prize) in 1984, leading to the publication of her first book, Rakkyo no Ongaeshi (Repayment of the Shallots), which has been translated into English for The New Poetry of Japan anthology (Katydid, 1993). She is the author of over ten books of poetry (including Terminal, which won the Bansui Prize in 1997), fiction (Piano Sandwich), essays, and award-winning plays (Kaiun Radio/Good-luck Radio)). Her work has been translated and anthologized in English, Chinese, Korean, Italian, and Russian.

Chris Tysh teaches creative writing and women’s studies at Wayne State University in Detroit. Her latest book of poems is Continuity Girl (United Artists, 2000); Mother, I (fragment of a film script) was released as a pamphlet by Belladonna in 2002. Her poems, reviews and essays have recently appeared in Chicago Review, Jacket, Lipstick Eleven, Chain, Metro Times, Mirage, Poetry Flash and How2, among others. She edited mark(s), an online quarterly. (http://www.markszine.com) from its inception in June 2000 to December 2002. She is the recipient of the 2003 NEA Fellowship in poetry.

Africa Wayne is the editor of Dürer in the Window, Reflexions on Art, a selection of art writing by Barbara Guest and the author of tiny pony, a book of poetry from Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. She is also the curator of the BBR Reading Series in Brooklyn.

Xue Di was born in Beijing in 1957. He has published four books in English translation, An Ordinary Day, Circumstances, Heart Into Soil and Flames. Xue Di is a two-time recipient of the Hellman/Hammett Award, sponsored by Human Rights Watch.

Poet, novelist, and translator Sumiko Yagawa (1930-2002) studied English literature at Tokyo Woman's Christian University, German literature at Gakushuin University, and Art History at the University of Tokyo. She wrote over fourteen books of fiction, poetry, essays, criticism, and children's books, as well as literary translations from German and English. Her translations of childrens’ books include the Babar series, works by the Brothers Grimm, Michael Ende, Paul Gallico, and Reiner Zimnik. Yagawa’s works include an experimental book of poetry Alice in Word-land (1974), fiction Woman called Rabbit (1983), and essays and critical biographies of female authors such as Naoko Nomizo, Mari Mori, and Anaïs Nin, which contributed to developing her own unique feminist theories on literature.

Elizabeth Marie Young is a Berkeley-based poet working toward her Ph.D in Comparative Literature at U.C. Berkeley. She studies Ancient Greek, Roman and 20th c. American poetry and poetics. She is currently organizing a Bay Area inter-arts poetry festival that will highlight intersections between poetic and other art forms.