CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
V. JOSHUA ADAMS is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago and editor of Chicago Review.
JOE AMATO's recent books include Pain Plus Thyme (Factory School 2008) and Industrial Poetics: Demo Tracks for a Mobile Culture (Iowa 2006). His memoir, Once an Engineer: A Song of the Salt City, is forthcoming later this year from SUNY Press.
ROBERT ARCHAMBEAU's books include Home and Variations (Salt), Word Play Place (Ohio), and Laureates and Heretics (Notre Dame 2010). He has received awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Illinois Arts Council and he teaches at Lake Forest College.
MATTHEW C. ARMSTRONG recently embedded with SEAL Team 4 on behalf of The Winchester Star, and published extensively on the war through that paper. His poetry and fiction have appeared in The Virginia Literary Review, Fugue, Lyre, and other publications. An editor for Convergence Review, he has also written a trilogy of novels currently being represented by the John Hawkins Agency.
TIM ATKINS is the author of Folklore (Salt 2008); Horace (O Books 2007); Horace (Matchbox Series 2006); Last Poems (Tolling Elves 2003); Sonnets (The Figures 2000); Oriental Tapping (Sun & Moon 1999); and To Repel Ghosts (Like Books 1998). His work has appeared in the following anthologies: The Thunder Mutters, The Grid Project, THESEPAGESAREMARKEDBYWOMEN, Football Haiku, Resolute, and FOIL: An Anthology of New British Writing. He is the editor of the online poetry journal Onedit and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of East London.
KATIE ATKINSON, a proud Celeveland native, is a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University. She has won awards for playwriting, poetry, and nonfiction.
ROBERT P. BAIRD is the former editor of Chicago Review and has written reviews and essays for Slate, Bookforum, and CR. He runs the website digital emunction.
DAN BEACHY-QUICK, born in Chicago, grew up in Colorado and upstate New York. He attended Hamilton College, the University of Denver, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently Assistant Professor of English at Colorado State University. He is author of four books of poems, North True South Bright (Alice James 2003), Spell (Ahsahta 2004), Mulberry (Tupelo 2006) and This Nest, Swift Passerine (Tupelo 2009); two chapbooks, Mobius Crown (with Srikanth Reddy: P-Queue 2008) and Apology for the Book of Creatures (Ahsahta 2008); and a book of essays, A Whaler's Dictionary (Milkweed 2008).
JOHN BEER's poems and criticism have appeared in numerous periodicals including Another Chicago Magazine, Barrow Street, Chicago Review, Colorado Review, Come Hither, Crowd, Court Green, Denver Quarterly, the Hat, MoonLit, Time Out Chicago, Verse, and the Village Voice. He lives in Chicago, where he studies philosophy and social thought at the University of Chicago and reviews theater for Time Out.
JERROD BOHN was born and raised in Kansas, but he now lives in Fort Collins, CO where he is a student in Colorado State University's MFA in poetry program. His work has appeared in Kansas English and Touchstone. His current reading interests include Lewis Hyde, Amiri Baraka, and John Berryman.
JOHN BRADLEY is a frequent reviewer for Rain Taxi and the author of Terrestrial Music (Curbstone) and War on Words (BlazeVOX). He teaches at Northern Illinois University.
STEPHEN BURT's poetry reviews have appeared widely, in publications like The New York Times, The Believer, and the Times Literary Supplement. His essays have recently been gathered in Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry (Graywolf). He is an associate professor of English at Harvard University.
PAULA CARTER's flash fiction has also appeared in Quick Fiction and Rhino. She recently completed her MFA in creative writing from Indiana University and is currently working on a book project that pairs short stories with creative nonfiction essays.
CHRISTOPHE CASAMASSIMA is the Literary Arts Director at Towson Arts Collective and teaches English at Towson University in Baltimore. He recently resurrected Furniture Press after a three-year hiatus, and plans to publish more hand-made objects in the months to come. Along with a number of poems in journals physical and electronic, he is the author of the Proteus Cycle (The Proteus, Moria 2008; Joys: A Catalogue of Disappointments, BlazeVOX 2008; Ore, twentythreebooks 2009) and UNTILTED, twentythreebooks 2010. He lives in Baltimore with Karen Morrison and a catdog named Heloise Chainsaw.
DAVID-BAPTISTE CHIROT was born Lafayette, Indiana, grew up in Vermont, and has lived in Gottingen, Germany; Arles and Paris, France; Hastveda, Sweden; Wroclaw, Poland; Boston and currently Milwaukee. Since 2006 creating via essays, "El Colonel" fictions, Visual, Sound, Event works, and curating international Mail Art/Visual Poetry Calls, a critique/investigation of "The New Extreme Experimental American Poetry and Arts" involving the intersections of torture and art, the interrelationships among language, rebranding, the military, surveillance, security, starvation, detention, imprisonment & siege in Poetry & Art. As part of his human rights activism, work in over 90 different print and electronic journals, galleries and blogs, and has been translated into 8 languages. His books include Anarkeyology (Runaway Spoon), Offender Handbook and Zada (Reflections, Chicago/Kiev), HUNG ER (Neotrope), found rubBEings (Xerolage 32), and Zero Poem (Traverse). His work has appeared in the anthologies Word Score Utterance Choreography (ed. Bob Cobbing, London) and Loose Watch (ed. John M. Bennett, London). More of his own work, plus an ongoing assembly of new visual poetry by other artists, can be found at davidbaptistechirot.blogspot.com.
RAUL CLEMENT lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he attends UNC-Greensboro and plays in the band LA Tool and Die. His fiction, book reviews, and interviews have appeared in The Chaffey Review and Main Street Rag.When not pummeling his liver with alcohol, he is at work on a novel, coauthored with Okla Elliott, called Joshua City—a post-apocalyptic Brechtian monstrosity replete with lepers, revolutionaries, and Siamese triplets that tell the future, an excerpt of which will appear in this year’s Surreal South.
DAVID DASHER holds a BA from UNC-Greensboro and an MA in English from Loyola Chicago. His poems have appeared in Whiskey Island Magazine, Into the Teeth of the Wind, Plainsongs, and other magazines. He lives in Chicago.
STEVE DAVENPORT is the author of Uncontainable Noise (poetry) and two chapbooks, Murder on Gasoline Lake (an essay, New American Press) and Nine Poems and Three Fictions (available free on-line and in The Literary Review’s Summer 2008 chapbook issue). Recent and forthcoming activities include a story in The Southern Review,a lyrical essay in Northwest Review, a scholarly essay about Richard Hugo’s poetry in All Our Stories Are Here: Critical Perspectives on Montana Literature (University of Nebraska Press), and a Black Guy/Bald Guy reprint in Online Writing: The Best of the First Ten Years (Snowvigate Press).
OKLA ELLIOTT is a visiting assistant professor of creative writing at Ohio Wesleyan University. His non-fiction, poetry, short fiction, and translations appear in A Public Space, Indiana Review, International Poetry Review, The Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, New Letters, North Dakota Quarterly, and the Sewanee Theological Review, among others. He is the author of The Mutable Wheel and Lucid Bodies and Other Poems and is co-editor, with Kyle Minor, of The Other Chekhov.
SCOTT ESPOSITO is the editor of The Quarterly Conversation, a magazine of book reviews and essays.
ANNIE FINCH is the author of several books of poetry, including The Encyclopedia of Scotland (Salt), Eve (Story Line), Calendars (Tupelo), and Among the Goddesses: An Epic Poem Libretto (Red Hen). She has also written or edited books about poetry, most recently An Exaltation of Forms (coedited with Kathrine Varnes), Multiformalisms: Postmodern Poetics of Form (coedited with Susan B. Schultz), and The Body of Poetry: Essays on Women, Form, and the Poetic Self. She lives in Maine where she directs the Stonecoast low-residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Maine. Her website is at www.anniefinch.com.
BILL FREIND is the author of American Field Couches (BlazeVOX 2008) and An Anthology (housepress 2000). He is also editing a collection of essays on Araki Yasusada that is forthcoming from Shearsman. He lives near an abandoned golf course in South Jersey.
DAISY FRIED is the author of two books of poetry, She Didn't Mean to Do It, and My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. New poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Threepenny Review, Ploughshares and The Nation. A recent Guggenheim Fellow, her prose about poetry has appeared in Poetry, poetryfoundation.org/harriet, Threepenny Review and elsewhere.
DAVID GIBBS is a graduate of The Ohio State University, where he earned a degree in English and history. His recent poetry can be found in the forthcoming issue of the Columbia Poetry Review. He lives in Columbus, OH.
MATT GONZALEZ is a native of McAllen, Texas, who has been living in California for the past two decades. He has been active in politics as a former city councilman in San Francisco and most recently as Ralph Nader's 2008 running mate. He was formally educated at Columbia College in New York where he studied comparative literature and political theory and at Stanford University where he received a law degree. His collage work has been exhibited at a number of art venues in the San Francisco area, including Lincart, Adobe Books Backroom Gallery, Johansson Projects, and Soap Gallery.
JOHANNES GÖRANSSON is the author of three books of poetry and prose and the translator of several books of poetry. He is the co-editor of Action Books and Action, Yes, and he teaches at the University of Notre Dame. His blog is exoskeleton-johannes.blogspot.com.
GORDON HADFIELD's poems, translations, and essays have appeared in journals including Fence, Circumference, Chain, and Denver Quarterly. His the author of Distants (BlazeVOX 2009), co-author of correspondence (with Sasha Steensen, Handwritten Press 2005), and his translation with Nancy Hadfield of Abdellatif Laâbi's Fragments d'une genèse oubliée / Fragments of a Forgotten Genesis is forthcoming from Leafe Press. He lives in Colorado, where he studies law and co-edits Bonfire Press.
NANCY HADFIELD is a French scholar and professor of Medieval Literature at Central Methodist University. Fragments from her translation with Gordon Hadfield of Abdellatif Laâbi's Fragments of a Forgotten Genesis have appeared in Circumference and the fall issue of BlazeVOX 2K3.
MARK HALLIDAY teaches at Ohio University. His fifth book of poems, Keep This Forever, was published in 2008 by Tupelo Press.
KENT JOHNSON's most recent books are Poetic Architecture: Twelve Quizzes for a Conceptual Poetries Symposium and Homage to the Last Avant-Garde. With an international group of linguists and writers, he is currently working to establish a poetry workshop program in Nahuatl-speaking communities near Puebla, Mexico, where he conducted research on the project during the summer of 2008.
SEAN KARNS is a native Ohioan who is now an MFA candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign. His work has appeared in several journals.
ABDELLATIF LAÂBI, internationally celebrated poet, playwright, novelist, activist, was officially but uncertainly born in 1942 in Fez, Morocco. He helped found the journal Souffles in 1966, eight issues of which were printed in Arabic as Anfas. In 1972 the journal was banned and Laâbi received a ten-year prison sentence for “crimes of opinion.” He was released in 1980 and denied work and a passport until 1985 when he left for Paris, where he still lives. He describes his work as “the inner quest and the desire of the human condition,” couched in ironies that “maintain the clarity that is compatible with hope.”
JOHN LATTA is the author of Rubbing Torsos (Ithaca House 1979) and Breeze (University of Notre Dame Press 2003). He writes regularly at Isola di Rifiuti.
DAVID LAU teaches writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Cabrillo College. His book of poetry is Virgil and the Mountain Cat (UC Press). He is co-editor of Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion.
ERIC LORBERER is the editor of Rain Taxi Review of Books, a nonprofit, nationally distributed book review journal focused on poetry, innovative fiction, and other works of literary interest.
MAUREEN MCLANE is the author of Same Life: poems (Farrar, Straus 2008), and two books on British romanticism. A contributing editor at Boston Review, she has published essays in many venues, including The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and The Washington Post. In 2003 she won the National Book Critics Circle's Nona Balakian Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing. She teaches at NYU.
KYLE MINOR's short story collection, In the Devil's Territory, is available from Dzanc. His work has appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, among them Best American Mystery Stories 2008, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Surreal South, and Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers: The Best New Voices of 2006. He's co-editor, with Okla Elliott, of The Other Chekhov.
ANGE MLINKO's third book of poetry, Shoulder Season, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press in Spring 2010. She writes regularly for The Nation, Poetry, and The London Review of Books.
DAVID MYERS contributed the cover art for this issue. He is a revolutionary graphic designer with a revolutionary hairstyle. Think: Patrick Henry.
MURAT NEMET-NEJAT is the poet of Turkish Voices and Io’s Song. He is also the writer of the essay, The Peripheral Space of Photography (Green Integer 2003) and the editor of Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry (Talisman House 2004). He is presently working on the long poem, The Structure of Escape, and on the translation of the Turkish poet Seyhan Erozçelik’s complete book of poetry, Rosestrikes and Coffee Grinds (Gül ve Telve).
TOM ORANGE has taught literature and writing at Vanderbilt, Georgetown, and The George Washington Universities. Slack Buddha published his chapbook of conceptual prose, American Dialectics, in 2008. He is currently revising a book-length manuscript on the early poetry of Clark Coolidge. His recent and forthcoming work can be found in Aquaduck, Big Bridge, Boog City, English Studies in Canada, The I.E. Reader, Wheelhouse, and 1913: A Journal of Forms.
DAVID ORR writes the column "On Poetry" for the New York Times Book Review. He received the National Book Critics Circle's award for excellence in book reviewing in 2004.
RICHARD OWENS edits Punch Press and Damn the Caesars, a journal of contemporary poetry and poetics. Delaware Memoranda, a book-length poem, was published through BlazeVOX in 2008.
REBECCA PORTE is a graduate student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
KRISTIN PREVALLET is a poet whose recent book, I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time, was published by Essay Press in 2006. She is the editor of A Helen Adam Reader (National Poetry Foundation 2007), and is on the faculty of the Institute for Writing Studies at St John's University in Queens, NY.
CHUCK RICHARDSON's fiction has appeared in the Fall issue of BlazeVOX 2K7: An Online Journal of Voice. His brief essay, “Looking for a Deathbed Conversion,” was published in The Cost of Freedom: The Anthology of Peace and Activism (Howling Dog Press 2007), a book which has received good reviews from Harry Belafonte, Howard Zinn, and others. His first novel, Smoke, was published this spring by BlazeVOX. Richardson's blog is updated weekly and he lives in Western New York.
MICHAEL ROBBINS's poems have appeared in The New Yorker and several other journals. His critical work appears in or is forthcoming from Poetry, The London Review of Books, Chicago Review, Boston Review, and elsewhere. He is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Chicago.
JARED SCHICKLING has three books with BlazeVOX: Aurora (2007), submissions (2008), and O (forthcoming 2009). An excerpt from his translation of Abdellatif Laâbi will appear in Circumference. On editorial staffs at New American Press, Mayday, and Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics and Poetry / Literature and Culture.
BARRY SCHWABSKY, an American poet and art critic living in London, is the author of The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art (Cambridge University Press); Opera: Poems 1981-2002 (Meritage Press); Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting (Phaidon Press); most recently Book Left Open in the Rain (Black Square Editions/The Brooklyn Rail); as well as several chapbooks of poetry and numerous contributions to books and exhibition catalogues on contemporary and modern art. He writes regularly for The Nation and for Artforum, where he is also co-editor of international reviews.
DON SHARE is Senior Editor of Poetry magazine in Chicago. His books include Squandermania (Salt Publishing), Union (Zoo Press), Seneca in English (Penguin Classics), I Have Lots of Heart: the Selected Poems of Miguel Hernández (Bloodaxe Books), and a critical edition of Basil Bunting’s poems (Faber and Faber). He has been an editor at Harvard Review, Partisan Review, and Literary Imagination.
DAVID SLAVITT is the author of over eighty books—non-fiction, novels, poetry, short fiction, and translations. His work has appeared in many journals and anthologies including Best American Poetry, Boulevard, Poetry, Texas Review, and the Yale Review. His most recent books include Change of Address: Poems New and Selected (LSU Press), Re Verse: Essays on Poetry and Poets (Northwestern University Press), and a new translation of Sophocles' Theban Plays (Yale University Press).
DALE SMITH lives in Austin, Texas, with the poet Hoa Nguyen. His poems, essays, and reviews appear in Best American Poetry, Chicago Review, Damn The Caesars, Jacket and in other print and digital media. He is the author of several books—most recently, Black Stone and Susquehanna—and writes a popular poetry blog, Possum Ego.
MARK SPITZER is the author of 11 books (see his website at www.sptzr.net) and the Managing Editor of Exquisite Corpse Annual. He's a professor of creative writing somewhere in Arkansas, where he wrassles 200-pound alligator gar and mucks around in the swamps. His novel CHODE! will be published in 2009 by Six Gallery Press, Pittsburgh.
MICHAEL THEUNE has published poems, essays, and reviews in journals such as The Iowa Review, The New Republic, and Verse, and he is a contributing editor for Pleiades. Theune is the editor of Structure & Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns (Teachers & Writers 2007) and host of the blog structureandsurprise.wordpress.com. He teaches at Illinois Wesleyan University.
RODRIGO TOSCANO’s latest book is Collapsible Poetics Theater (Fence Books). Toscano is also the artistic director and writer for the Collapsible Poetics Theater (CPT). His polyvocalic pieces, poetics plays, and body-movement poems, have been performed at the Disney Redcat Theater in Los Angeles, Ontological-Hysteric Poet’s Theater Festival, Poet’s Theater Jamboree 2007, and the Yockadot Poetics Theater Festival. His radio pieces have appeared on WPIX FM (New York), KAOS Public Radio Olympia, WNYU, and PS.1 Radio. His work has been translated into French, German, Italian, and Catalonian. Toscano is originally from Southern California. He works in Manhattan at the Labor Institute, and lives in Brooklyn. (For pictures of CPT at work, please click here.)
MARK WALLACE is the author of a number of books of poetry and fiction, including most recently Felonies of Illusion (Edge Books) and Walking Dreams (BlazeVOX).
JILLIAN WEISE is the author of a collection of poems, The Amputee's Guide to Sex (Soft Skull Press 2007), and a chapbook, Translating the Body (All Nations Press 2006). She studied at Florida State University and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She is currently on a creative writing Fulbright in Tierra del Fuego. Her first novel is forthcoming in January 2010.
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