CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES

 

 

TAO AIMIN is known for her anthropological works made from the washboards of rural woman. Over the years she has collected thousands of these boards, recording the stories and faces of the women whose hands wore these boards down through the recursive repetition of monotonous labor. Creating installations and experimental ink wash rubbings from the boards, Aimin creates an archive of silent histories—the multiple, and seemingly invisible, realities of the vast majority of women in history, even today, who labor in obscurity until they pass from this world.

DAVID BOWEN edits and publishes New American Press and MAYDAY Magazine. His writing has appeared in Main Street Rag, Salt River Review, and The Literary Review, among others.

AARON BURCH edits Hobart: another literary journal. His stories have appeared or will in New York Tyrant, PANK, Barrelhouse, and Another Chicago Magazine. His chapbook, How to Predict the Weather, is forthcoming from Keyhole Books.

CINDY M. CARTER is a Beijing-based translator of Chinese fiction, poetry and film, and a founder of the literary website Paper Republic. Her script and subtitle translations have won awards at Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Rotterdam and numerous other film festivals, and she has worked with dozens of China's most daring independent directors, including Wang Bing (West of Tracks; Fengming: Portrait of a Chinese Woman), Wang Xiaoshuai (Shanghai Dreams; In Love We Trust), Huang Wenhai (WE: Creatures of Politics, Voices of Conscience), Zhao Liang (Crime and Punishment; Petition) and Xu Xin (Karamay). Her 2004 translation of Guo Xiaolu's novel Village of Stone was nominated for the Dublin IMPAC Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. She recently finished translating Yan Lianke's Dream of Ding Village, a novel banned for its frank depiction of blood-selling and AIDS in the Chinese countryside. The book will be published in early 2011 by Constable and Robinson, U.K.

STEPHAN CLARK's short stories and essays have appeared in numerous magazines, including Ninth Letter, Cincinnati Review, Swink, LA Weekly, and Salt Hill. Several are accessible online. A graduate of the graduate creative writing program at UC Davis, Stephan will be spending the 2010-2011 academic year teaching creative writing at Reed College. "FlavAmerica" is an excerpt from his novel, The Flavorist, which is getting a final polish and shine before being pushed out into the world. 

RAUL CLEMENT lives in Greensboro, North Carolina. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been published in Coe Review, Chaffey Review, Troika Moonshine 300 and Main Street Rag. A short story he co-authored with Okla Elliot appears in Surreal South ’09.

PAUL CRENSHAW is a graduate of the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he was a Fred Chappell fellow. His stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Essays 2005, Shenandoah, North American Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among others. He teaches writing and literature at Elon University.

NITOO DAS teaches English at Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi. She was born in Guwahati, but came to Delhi in 1994 for her higher studies. Her PhD dealt with constructions of the Assamese Identity under the British (1826-1920). Das’ poetry works with voice, soundscape and comic defamiliarisation. Her first collection, Boki, was published by Virtual Artists Collective, Chicago, in September 2008. She can be contacted at river.slant[at]gmail[dot]com and she blogs at http://riversblueelephants.blogspot.com.

RANA DASGUPTA was born in Canterbury, UK in 1971.  He is the author of two novels: Tokyo Cancelled (2005), which was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and Solo (2009), currently shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize. Both these books demonstrate a preoccupation with the lives of cities, and his current book is a non-fiction portrait of his adopted city, Delhi, where he has lived for the last nine years. His photography is a record of his own movements in cities strange and familiar, an attempt to capture what he calls "the trembling intensity of encounter."

ANTARA DATTA teaches literature in Delhi University.  She is a Charles Wallace scholar and is working on a book of fiction and a life-stories narrative. She is a minimalist in her living; her home is her work-station and she lives with her cat. She has wheels on her feet.

OKLA ELLIOTT is currently the Illinois Distinguished Fellow at the University of Illinois and holds an MFA from Ohio State University. In 2008-09, he was a visiting assistant professor at Ohio Wesleyan University. His nonfiction, poetry, short fiction, and translations have appeared in Indiana Review, The Literary Review, Natural Bridge, New Letters, New York Quarterly, and A Public Space, among others. He is the author of two chapbooks of poetry and is co-editor, with Kyle Minor, of The Other Chekhov.

KATHY FAGAN earned her MFA from Columbia University and her PhD from the University of Utah. She is the author of four books of poems, The Raft, a National Poetry Series Award Winner (Dutton, 1985), MOVING & ST RAGE, winner of the 1998 Vassar Miller Prize for Poetry (Univ of North Texas Press), The Charm (Zoo Press, 2002), and LIP (2009). Her work has been anthologized in Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets (Doubleday, 1989), Geography of Home: California and the Poetry of Place (HeyDay, 1999), Extraordinary Tide: Contemporary Poetry by American Women (Columbia, 2001), American Diaspora (Iowa, 2001), The Breath of Parted Lips: 25 Years of Poems from the Frost Place (CavanKerry, 2001), and Poet's Choice, edited by Edward Hirsch (Harcourt, 2006). Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, FIELD, The Kenyon Review, Slate, Ploughshares, The New Republic, Shenandoah, and The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of Fellowships in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council. She is co-editor of The Journal, for which she and Michelle Herman were awarded the 2004 Ohioana Award for Editorial Excellence.

MARLON FRISBY has a BA from Ohio Wesleyan University where he studied Creative Writing and Humanities-Classics. His works of fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The Wa: The Ohio Wesleyan Literary Journal, and The Denver Post. With  his free time he enjoys two-footed slide tackles, drinking all of the wine and expounding on Godard at your dinner party, and writing about himself in the third person.

MEGAN GANNON's poems have appeared in publications such as Pleiades, Ploughshares, Crazyhorse, Notre Dame Review, and Best American Poetry 2006, as well as on Verse Daily and Poetry Daily.  She is a PhD candidate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she is completing her first novel, entitled Cumberland.

GEOFFREY GATZA is the editor and Publisher of BlazeVOX [books] and the author of seven books of poetry, including Kenmore: Poem Unlimited and Not So Fast Robespierre (Menendez Publishing), and HouseCat Kung Fu: Strange Poems for Wild Children (Meritage Press). He is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, NY (1993) and Daemen College, Amherst, NY (2002), and served as a U.S. Marine in the first gulf war. He lives in Kenmore, NY, with his girlfriend and two cats.

BEN GEORGE is the editor of the journal Ecotone, and of the anthology The Book of Dads: Essays on the Joys, Perils, and Humiliations of Fatherhood (Ecco, 2009). His nonfiction has appeared in Tin House, Ninth Letter, The Believer, and elsewhere. He teaches at UNC-Wilmington.

BARBARA HAMBY is the Writer-in-Residence at Florida State University and the author most recently of All-Night Lingo Tango. For more on her photography, go to www.barbarahamby.com.

RAYMOND HAMMOND is a poet, critic, and editor of the New York Quarterly magazine.

T. R. HUMMER is the author of many books of poetry, including The Infinity Sessions, Useless Virtues, and Walt Whitman in Hell, all from Louisiana State University Press. Hummer has edited The Kenyon Review and New England Review. He currently teaches at Arizona State University.

WILLIAM HURST teaches in the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. Previous publications include articles in The China Quarterly, Studies in Comparative International Development, China Information, and Issues and Studies. He is currently working on several articles, including  two analyzing results of a large-scale survey on rural protests and petitioning in several Chinese provinces. His broader ongoing research focuses on the political analysis of courts and legal institutions in China and Indonesia. After completing extensive fieldwork on the topic in rural and urban areas of four Chinese provinces, he is based at Airlangga University in Surabaya Indonesia to continue the project throughout the 2009-10 academic year.

SABUHI JIWANI is a writer and researcher living in Mumbai. She has a worked as an arts journalist and critic, and has written about the visual arts, theatre, and film.

KENT JOHNSON is currently about to have a nervous breakdown, trying to put together three online courses for the Fall semester at his community college. Michael Theune discusses his work further in the current issue of Pleiades.

MARY KASIMOR's work has appeared in Cannot Exist, Reconfigurations, Otoliths, GutCult, moria, MIPOesias, and elsewhere. She has two books of poetry, silk string arias (BlazeVOX [books]) and & cruel red (Otoliths).

ALEXANDER KEEFE is a critic and writer.  He has written for Artforum.com, Tank Magazine, Marg, Mint, ART India, Camerawork Delhi, and many others.  He blogs at jugaadoo.blogspot.com, and has curated shows of contemporary Indian art in Shanghai, New York, and New Delhi.  He did graduate work in Sanskrit and Persian at Harvard University, worked in the Indian Art department at the Sackler Gallery there, carried out research in India as a Fulbright fellow, taught courses in critical theory and Asian religions at The Ohio University, and has divided his time between the United States and India since 1995.

ANTHONY KEY was born in South Africa, of Chinese ethnicity, and is now living in London. He received his M.A. in Fine Art from Brighton University and his  PhD in Fine Art from Winchester School of Art, Southampton University. He founded Cable Street Gallery, has worked as a studio assistant to artist Ken Kiff, and was granted a residency at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2005. His work is held in several public and private collections internationally including The Arts Council collection and The Irish Museum of Modern Art.

DAVID KIRBY teaches English at Florida State University and is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock 'n' Roll. There's more at www.davidkirby.com.

JACOB KNABB edits Another Chicago Magazine and is a minion of the devil. He lives in Chicago.

MIRIAM N. KOTZIN writes both poetry and fiction that has appeared in more than 100 print and online publications; her poetry received three nominations for a Pushcart Prize. She writes both formal poetry and free verse; her fiction ranges from flash fiction to a blognovel. She has been a contributing editor of Boulevard since its inception. A teacher of creative writing and literature, she directs Drexel University’s Certificate Program in Writing and Publishing and is a former director of the Literature Program. She is the author of A History of Drexel University and the poetry collection Reclaiming the Dead. Her book reviews appeared in numerous publications ranging from College Literature to The Daily Planet. From 1973-1982 she was a juror for the American Film Festival and has also judged competitions in poetry, the literary short story and the popular short story for the Mad Poets Review and the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference. She received her BA in English, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Pennsylvania, and her Ph.D. in English with distinction from New York University.

MAYA KOVSKAYA is a Delhi- and Beijing-based writer, art critic, curator, translator, scholar and consultant with over a decade of experience in China. She has curated numerous exhibitions in China, the USA, India, and Europe, and her art criticism appears regularly in art catalogues, international art magazines and academic journals. Her book, China Under Construction: Contemporary Art from the People’s Republic (2007), is available in bookstores worldwide.

NICHOLAS MANNING, an Australian-born poet residing in Paris, is the author of Novaless (Otoliths, 2008), and chapbooks from Achiote Press (2007) and Ypolita Press (forthcoming). His poetry and criticism have appeared in Jacket, Verse, The Argotist, Fascicle, Cordite, BlazeVox, Free Verse, Stylus, Eratio, Otoliths, MiPOESIAS, Dusie, Shampoo, FourW: New Writing, Imago, and elsewhere. He teaches comparative literature at the University of Strasbourg, France, maintains the weblog The Newer Metaphysicals, and edits the video-forum for contemporary poetry, The Continental Review.

C. J. MARTIN lives in Lockhart, TX, where he co-edits Dos Press with Julia Drescher. He is a contributing editor for Little Red Leaves and LRL e-editions, and is the author of three chapbooks: WIW?3: Hold me tight. Make me happy (Delete Press, 2009), Lo, Bittern (Atticus/Finch, 2008) and CITY (Vigilance Society, 2007). His work has appeared or will in Antennae, Broke (with Julia Drescher), try! (withJulia Drescher), Coconut, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, P-Queue, kadar koli, American Letters and Commentary, The Argotist Online, zafusy, the tiny, and Damn the Caesars.

ANNE MCPEAK is the managing editor at A Public Space.

NAEEM MOHAIEMEN is a writer and artist working in Dhaka and New York. He uses photo, video, and archives to explore histories of the international left, utopia/dystopia slippage, and post-partition South Asia. His work has been shown at the Finnish Museum of Photography, Scope Basel, Frieze Art Fair, Dubai Third Line, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, among other places. He writes on Bangladesh’s religious and ethnic minorities for the ASK Annual Human Rights Report (askbd.org). As part of this work, “Muslims or Heretics: My Camera Can Lie” was screened in a side-session of the UK House of Lords. Essays include "Islamic Roots of Hip-Hop" (Sound Unbound, MIT Press, 2008), "Adman Blues" (Indian Highway, Serpentine Gallery, 2009), "Everybody Wants To Be Singapore" (La Buena Vida, ICA, 2008). He is also co-author, with Doug Ashford, of Collectives in Atomised Time (Idensitat, 2006). For more, visit shobak.org.

CRAIG NOVA is an award-winning author of twelve novels. His writing has appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, and Men’s Journal, among others. He has received an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2005 he was named Class of 1949 Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He lives in North Carolina.

DANIELE PANTANO's work, including translations from the German by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Georg Trakl, and Robert Walser, have appeared or will in Absinthe: New European Writing, The Adirondack Review, ARCH, The Baltimore Review, The Book Of Hopes And Dreams (Bluechrome 2006), The Cortland Review, Gradiva: International Journal of Italian Poetry, Italian Americana, Jacket, Lilliput Review, The Mailer Review, The Pedestal Magazine, Poetenladen, Poetry International, 32 Poems Magazine, Poetic Voices Without Borders 1 and 2 (Gival Press 2005, 2009), Style: A Quarterly Journal of Aesthetics, Poetics, and Stylistics, The White Whale Review, and elsewhere.

ALYSSA PELISH reads, writes, and teaches in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. Her literary reviews appear frequently in Rain Taxi, and her creative work is pretty much always forthcoming. The etymology of associative thought is something of a hobbyhorse of hers.

RANDALL RADIC is an Old Catholic Priest, former pastor and ex-felon. He lives in Northern California, where he writes, reads, smokes good cigars, drinks fine wines, and enjoys visiting San Francisco as often as possible.

CHUCK RICHARDSON's novel, Smoke, was published by BlazeVOX [books] in 2009. BlazeVOX will publish another of his, So It Seams, in 2010.

T. P. SABITHA, born in 1975, is a scholar, researcher, art critic, and poet in English and Malayalam. She teaches English Literature in a campus college in Delhi University. Her poems in Malayalam were first published when she was sixteen, in Keralakavita, edited by the leading modernist poet Ayyappa Panikkar. She has published her poems in the leading journals in Malayalam — such as Mathrubhumi and Malayalam as well as in English in The Little Magazine and Indian Literature. She has also translated selected poems of Pablo Neruda and contemporary Afghan poetry into Malayalam. She has been doing research on early women’s journals in Malayalam and on Romantic period painting of Indian landscapes. She writes on art and publishes book reviews as well as academic articles.

MITHU SEN was born in 1971 in Burdan, West Bengal, and studied fine art in Santiniketan and Glasgow. She is a young but already influential figure in the contemporary art scene in India. Ms. Sen's practice involves construction, installation, and painting. She has had numerous international exhibitions, most recently in India, China, South Korea, Kenya and the United States. Ms. Sen has been the recipient of several international awards including the UNESCO Ashberg Scholarship for Brazil and the Charles Wallace India Trust Award in the UK. The artist currently lives and works in New Delhi.

TEJAL SHAH is a visual artist who works with video, photography, sound, installation, and performance. Her interests lie in the areas of sexuality, gender, disabilities and the interrelation between humans and nature. In 2003, she co-founded Larzish — India's first international film festival of sexuality and gender plurality. Her first solo show, "What are You?", debuted in India and the USA in 2006. Shah was born in Bhilai (central India), graduated with a B.A. in commercial and illustrative photography from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (2000), and was a visiting scholar at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1999-2000). Currently, she lives and works in Bombay, India.

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).

MARCUS SLEASE is the author of Godzenie (BlazeVOX [books]) and This is the Motherfucking Remix (Scantily Clad Press). As a member of The Lucifer Poetics Group, he has participated in reading tours through North Carolina, Washington DC, Brooklyn, Ithaca, Atlanta, and Philadelphia. He has performed his work at the La Langoustine Est Morte reading series and the Openned Reading series in London. He is the co-editor of a special issue of Past Simple on innovative British and Irish poetry. He teaches literacy to refugees and asylum seekers in London. Some of his poetry, criticism, musings, and multimedia projects can be found at www.marcusslease.blogspot.com

MARK SMITH-SOTO is a Costa Rican-American Professor of Romance Languages and Director of the Center for Creative Writing in the Arts at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he edits International Poetry Review. A 2005 winner of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in creative writing, his poetry has appeared in Nimrod, The Sun, Poetry East, Quarterly West, Callaloo, Literary Review, Kenyon Review and many other literary journals. The author of two award-winning poetry chapbooks, his first full-length collection, Our Lives Are Rivers was published in 2003 by the University Press of Florida.

CHRISTOPHER SPRANGER lives and thinks and aphorizes in Santa Barbara, California, a place where the weather is always perfect.

JODEE STANLEY is the editor of Ninth Letter at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her fiction has appeared or will in 580 Split, Margin, Electric Velocipede, and elsewhere. She lives with her daughter in Urbana, Illinois.

IDA STEWART holds and MFA from Ohio State University and is currently in the PhD in Creative Writing program at the University of Georgia. Her poems have appeared at several national literary journals.

ELIZABETH SWITAJ's writing has appeared or will in The Iconoclast, spooncore,Seeking The Lotus, Indefinite Space, HazMat Review, Neon Highway, Eratio, Diagram, Electric Yeti, and Tin Lustre Mobile. She completed her BA in 1999 at The Evergreen State College and her MFA at New College of California in 2003. Currently she resides in Anjo City in Japan's Aichi Prefecture. Elizabeth is the author of Magdalene & the Mermaids (Paper Kite Press), Shanghai (has more capital (Gold Wake Press), and The Broken Sanctuary: Nature Poems (Ypolita Press). She has also presented papers on subjects ranging from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to James Joyce and has written reviews for Galatea Resurrects, Experimental Fiction & Poetry, and Mad Hatter’s Review.

GEORG TRAKL began writing poetry at the age of 13. In 1912, Trakl's poem "Vorstadt im Föhn" was published in the Innsbruck cultural and political journal Der Brenner. All subsequent poetic work by Trakl appeared in the monthly issues of this journal. In 1913, Trakl's Der jüngste Tag was published. Trakl subsequently volunteered for service during World War I, where he served on the Eastern Front in the Galician town of Grodek as a medical officer. He died following a nervous breakdown in 1914. Today, Trakl is considered one of the most important exponents of Austrian Expressionism.

TONY TRIGILIO is a member of the Core Poetry Faculty at Columbia College in Chicago and co-editor of the poetry journal Court Green.  He holds a PhD in English from Northeastern University in Boston. He is the author of the poetry collection The Lama's English Lessons (Three Candles Press, 2006); the chapbooks With the Memory, Which is Enormous (Main Street Rag Press, 2009) and Make a Joke and I Will Sigh and You Will Laugh and I Will Cry (Scantily Clad Press, 2008); and two books of criticism, Allen Ginsberg's Buddhist Poetics (Southern Illinois University Press, 2007) and "Strange Prophecies Anew": Rereading Apocalypse in Blake, H.D., and Ginsberg (Fairleigh, Dickinson University Press, 2000). He  is co-editor, with Tim Prchal, of the anthology Visions and Divisions: American Immigration Literature, 1870-1930 (Rutgers University Press, 2008). Tony's poems have been anthologized in The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (Cracked Slab, 2006); Digerati: 20 Contemporary Poets in the Virtual World (Three Candles, 2006); America Zen (Bottom Dog Press, 2004); and A Gathering of Poets, a volume commemorating the students killed at Kent State University and Jackson State University (Kent State University Press).

DAN VENNE wields his guitar and formidable melodic sensibilities in the international epic-emergency post-rock sensation known as Cougar. His other band, New York-based Hans Blix, has successfully played dozens of shows without ever playing the same note twice. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and New York University, Dan lives in Brooklyn with his wife.

MILES WAGGENER lives in Omaha with his wife Meg and their son Manny.

JOSHUA WARE lives in Lincoln, NE where he is pursuing his PhD in poetry and poetics.  He is the co-author of I,NE: Iterations of the Junco (Small Fires Press), as well as the author of A Series of Ad Hoc Permutations, or Ruby Love Songs (Scantily Clad Press) and the forthcoming Excavations (Further Adventures Press, 2010).  His work has appeared or will appear in many journals, such as American Letters & Commentary, Colorado Review, EOAGH, Laurel Review, New American Writing, and Quarterly West.

JJ XI and CAI YUAN (of MAD FOR REAL) were both born in China in 1956 and 1962, respectively, and have been working in Britain since the 1980s. Some of their first performances as a collaborative, their 1999 "interventions" in Tracey Emin’s Bed and Duchamps Fountain generated numerous newspaper accounts, further exemplifying the way in which successful acts of intervention gain their own narrative momentum, in turn transforming the historical understanding of the original objects. They have been working together since that time producing radically political works that intervene in various contemporary political narratives and belief systems. For more, visit www.madforreal.com.cn.

 

 

 

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