Contributor Bios
[Zoland Poetry No. 2]

Jeffrey Angles is an assistant professor at Western Michigan University, where he teaches Japanese literature and directs the Japanese language program. He earned a PhD at Ohio State University in Japanese literature in 2004. His translations of Japanese modernist prose have appeared in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature and Critical Asian Studies, and several more are forthcoming in the short-story collection Modanizumu in Japanese Fiction. He is the coeditor of the short-story anthology Japan: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (2006) and translator of the forthcoming From a Woman of a Distant Land: Poetry and Prose of Tada Chimako.

Román Antopolsky (poet, essayist, literary translator; b.1976, Argentina) published his first book of poems, ádelon (eidolon), in 2003. His translation work spans Spanish, Russian, German, and English, and an array of genres and cultures. He publishes in literary journals and periodicals in Argentina and throughout Latin America, including Tsé=Tsé, Cronopios, Mnemozyne, Le Monde Diplomatique Edición Argentina, and Intemperie. 

Bei Dao was born in Beijing in 1949. In 1978, he cofounded the first unofficial literary journal in China since 1949, called Today (Jintian). Bei Dao has lived and taught in England, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, France, and the United States. His work has been translated into thirty languages, including five poetry volumes in English—Unlock (2000), Landscape Over Zero (1996), Forms of Distance (1994), Old Snow (1992), and The August Sleepwalker (1990). His writing has also appeared in English in the collection of stories Waves (1990) and the volumes of essays Blue House (2000) and Midnight’s Gate (2005).

Polish poet MLB (Milosz Biedrzycki) was born in 1967 in Slovenia and trained as a geophysical engineer. One of the principal poets of the “brulion” generation, MLB has published six volumes of poetry and received several prestigious Polish poetry prizes. English translations of his poems have appeared in, among others, Trafika, Chicago Review, Fence, and the anthology Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird: Poetry from Poland (Zephyr Press, 2004). The poems included here are from his 2006 volume 69, which encompasses his poetic output from the fall of communism to the present, allowing the reader to trace the process of personal and artistic development during the rapidly changing post-communist years.

Coral Bracho is one of Mexico’s most influential contemporary poets. Her early work simply altered the landscape of Mexican poetry (on par with Ashbery’s work in the U.S.). New Directions will bring out a selected poems of her work in Forrest Gander’s translations in late Spring 2008: Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems of Coral Bracho. Born in Mexico City in 1951, Bracho has published five books of poetry: Peces de piel fugaz (1977), El ser que va a morir (1981), Tierra de entraña ardiente (in collaboration with painter Irma Palacios, 1992), La voluntad del ámbar (1998), and Ese espacio, ese jardín (2003), which won the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize. Among other places, selections from her work appeared in Mouth to Mouth: Poems by Twelve Contemporary Mexican Women (Milkweed Editions, 1993) and Reversible Monuments (Copper Canyon, 2002).

Steve Bradbury is Associate Professor of English at National Central University in Taiwan, where he edits Full Tilt: a journal of East-Asian poetry, translation and the arts. He has published poems, translations, and essays in Chain, Jacket Magazine, Raritan, Tinfish, and elsewhere, as well as three volumes of poetry in translation, most recently Feelings Above Sea Level: Prose Poems from the Chinese of Shang Qin (Zephyr Press, 2006).

Carolyn Brown began translating from Bengali when she was translation coordinator and editor for University of Iowa’s International Writing Program in the 1990s. She is currently a production editor at Stanford University Press. Her translations of poems by Mohammad Rafiq can be found in the Iowa Review, Missouri Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, and 100 Words; additional translations, available online, include a 26-poem sequence from Rafiq’s Kirtinasha (in Parabaas), as well as “Open Poem” and a selection from Biskhale Sandhya (in 91st Meridian, May 2005).

Miles Champion’s recent poems appear in No: A Journal of the Arts and Shiny, and in the one-shot publication Monday 2 April 2007 (with Tim Atkins and Trevor Winkfield). A full-length collection is due from Adventures in Poetry later this year.

Eduardo Chirinos (b.1960, Lima) is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Escrito en Missoula (Written in Missoula (2003) and No tengo ruiseñores en el dedo (I Have No Nightingales on My Finger (2006). In addition to his poetical works, Chirinos has published books of literary criticism as well as translations of Mark Strand and Louise Glück. Chirinos is associate professor in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures at the University of Montana—Missoula.

Andrea Cohen is the author of The Cartographer’s Vacation. Her writing has appeared in and is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, Glimmertrain, and Memorious. She writes about marine research at MIT and directs the Blacksmith House Reading Series.

William Corbett lives in Boston’s South End and teaches writing at MIT. A poet who has published a memoir, a book on the painter Philip Guston, and a book on literary New York, he has also edited the letters of the poet James Schuyler. He directs the poetry press Pressed Wafer and is on the advisory board of Manhattan’s CUE Art Foundation. In 2008 Hanging Loose will publish his new book of poems Opening Day.

Connie Deanovich is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, the GE Award for Younger Writers, and other distinctions. She is the author of Zombie Jet, Watusi Titanic, and many poems that appear in literary magazines and anthologies. She calls both Chicago and Madison, Wisconsin home.

Mitchell L. H. Douglas is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), a cofounder of the Affrilachian Poets, and a Cave Canem Fellow. His poetry appears in The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (University of Georgia Press), Callaloo, and The Louisville Review and is forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review. Poetry editor for PLUCK: the Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture, his poetry manuscript Cooling Board was a semifinalist for the Crab Orchard Review First Book Award in 2006.

Haines Eason is a recent graduate of the University of Montana. His poems appear in Colorado Review, Yale Review, and New England Review. He lives in San Francisco.

John Estes is a doctoral student and instructor at the University of Missouri-Columbia. His poems have appeared in Circumference, Ars Interpres, The Journal, Notre Dame Review, Literary Imagination, and other places. A chapbook, Breakfast with Blake at the Laocoön, is available from Finishing Line Press.

Elena Fanailova has published four collections of poetry in Russia, including With a Special Cynicism (S osobym tsinizmom), which appeared after she had won the Andrei Belyi Prize in 2000. Her most recent book is The Russian Version (Russkaia versiia, 2006), which includes examples of her acerbic prose (art reviews and interviews) as well as much new poetry. One of the poems published here, “The Numbers,” is from that new collection. Formerly a doctor and teacher of art and psychology in Voronezh, she is a correspondent for Radio Liberty and a major poet, now living in Moscow. A bilingual edition of her poetry with translations into English is in preparation at Ugly Duckling Presse, edited by Genya Turovskaya.

Ernest Farrés is the author of three volumes of poems: Hit or Miss (1996), Mosquitoes (1998), and Edward Hopper (2006), which won the Englantina d’Or dels Jocs Florals. He has also edited 21 Poets of the 21st Century: An Anthology of Young Catalan Poets (2001). A journalist for the newspaper La vanguardia, he lives in Barcelona.

Forrest Gander is a poet, translator, and essayist. His recent books include Eye Against Eye (poems, New Directions, 2005) and Faithful Existence (essays, Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005). His latest translations are Firefly Under the Tongue: Selected Poems of Coral Bracho and, with Kent Johnson, The Night: A Poem by Jaime Saenz. The recipient of A Whiting Award for Writers, the Howard Foundation Award, National Endowment Fellowships, and two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative Writing, Gander has authored critical essays for numerous journals, including The Nation, Boston Review, and The Providence Journal.

Lorand Gaspar was born in 1925 in Transylvania (now in Romania) to a Hungarian family. In 1944 he was deported to a Nazi labor camp, from which he escaped a year later and emigrated to France. He studied medicine in Paris, then took a job as a surgeon in Jerusalem, where he lived for sixteen years. After 1970 he practiced medicine in Tunis, and at present he lives in Paris where he is still involved in medical research. Gaspar is an award-winning poet, essayist, photographer and translator from five languages. He is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, among which Le quatrième état de la matière (1966), Sol absolu (1972) and Patmos (2004).

Michelle Gil-Montero is a graduate of Brown University and The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was awarded an Academy of American Poets’ University Prize in 2006. Her poems, translations, and essays can be found in recent issues of Jacket, Colorado Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Conjunctions, Mar Con Soroche, and Cipher.

Merrill Gilfillan has lived in Colorado for twenty-five years. He is the author of two books of stories and five books of alfresco essays. Recent collections of poetry include Small Weathers (Qua Books, 2004), Undanceable (Flood Editions, 2005), and Selected Poems 1965–2000 (Adventures in Poetry, 2005).

Lee Harwood was born in 1939 and grew up in Chertsey, Surrey. In 1967—after living ten years in London—he moved to Brighton and Hove on the Sussex coast. This has been his home ever since, other than a few years here and there spent in the USA and Greece. Since the early 1960s he has published over 20 volumes of poetry and prose, as well as translations. The most recent are Collected Poems (Shearsman Books, 2004) and, as translator, Tristan Tzara—Chanson Dada: Selected Poems (Black Widow Press, 2005).

Janis Butler Holm lives in Athens, Ohio, where she has served as Associate Editor for Wide Angle, the film journal. Her essays, stories, poems, and performance pieces have appeared in small-press, national, and international magazines.

Hsia Yü (sometimes spelled Xia Yu) grew up in Taiwan, but has spent many years abroad, first in New York and later in France. She now lives in Taipei, where she makes her living as a translator and lyricist and coedits the avant-garde journal Xianzai Shi, or Poetry Now. She has published five volumes of verse, most recently Pink Noise, and a Chinese translation of the novel that inspired François Truffaut’s Jules et Jim.

Daniela Hurezanu has published a book on the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot, and has translated W. S. Merwin’s The Miner’s Pale Children into French. Her essays and book reviews appear regularly in Rain Taxi, The Redwood Coast Review, The Chattahoochee Review and The Women’s Review of Books, and her translations from French and Romanian have appeared in dozens of magazines. Her translation (with Stephen Kessler) of Raymond Queneau’s Eyeseas is forthcoming from Black Widow Press.

Ito Hiromi (b.1955, Tokyo) is one of the most important and highly regarded poets in Japan. Since her sensational debut in the late 1970s as a free-spirited and intelligent female poet with shamanisitic qualities, It? has published more than ten collections of poetry including such monumental works as Oume (Green Plums, 1982), Watashi wa Anjuhimeko de aru (I am Anjyuhimeko, 1993), and Kawara Arekusa (Wild Grass upon a Riverbank, 2005), which won the prestigious Takami Jun Award.

Stephen Kessler’s most recent books of translations include a new version of Pablo Neruda’s “Alturas de Machu Picchu” in Machu Picchu (Bulfinch); Aphorisms by César Vallejo (Green Integer); Save Twilight, selected poems of Julio Cortázar (City Lights); and Written in Water: The Prose Poems of Luis Cernuda (City Lights; Lambda Literary Award). He was also a major contributor of translations to the Selected Poems of Borges (Penguin) and The Essential Neruda (City Lights). His most recent books of original poetry are After Modigliani and Tell It to the Rabbis (Creative Arts). He edits The Redwood Coast Review in Northern California.

Steve Langan is the author of Freezing and Notes on Exile & Other Poems. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska, where he is executive director of a nonprofit health agency and a member of the teaching and residency faculty of the University of Nebraska MFA in Writing program.

Alexis Levitin has published his translations, mostly from the Portuguese, in well over two hundred literary magazines. His twenty-four books of translation include the short fiction of Clarice Lispector´s Soulstorm and the poetry of Eugenio de Andrade´s Forbidden Words (both published by New Directions). His most recent books include a co-translation of Wallace Stevens’ “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” into Portuguese and a co-translation of Georgi Gospodinov’s And Other Stories from the Bulgarian into English (Northwestern University Press, 2007). He is currently working on an anthology of Ecuadorian poetry and on collections by the contemporary Brazilian poets Astrid Cabral, Salgado Maranhão, and Leonor Scliar-Cabral.

Timothy Liu is the author of six books of poems, most recently Of Thee I Sing and For Dust Thou Art. An Associate Professor of English at William Paterson University and a member of the Core Faculty in Bennington College’s Writing Seminars, Liu lives in Manhattan.

Deborah Meadows teaches in the Liberal Studies department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Her works of poetry include: involutia (Shearsman), Thin Gloves (Green Integer), Representing Absence (Green Integer), Itinerant Men (Krupskaya), and chapbooks, The Draped Universe (Belladonna* Books), Growing Still and “The 60’s and 70’s: From The Theory of Subjectivity in Moby-Dick” (both Tinfish Press).

Peter Minter is a poet, editor, and writer living in Sydney, Australia, where he teaches Indigenous Studies at the Koori Centre, University of Sydney. His first book Rhythm in a Dorsal Fin was shortlisted for the 1996 New South Wales Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize; he received the Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship for Poetry in 1999; and in 2000 he was awarded The Age Poetry Book of the Year for Empty Texas. His work appears in The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry and a wide range of other Australian and international electronic and print publications. His most recent book, blue grass, was recently published by Salt Publishing.

Ryan Murphy is the author of Down with the Ship (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions). He lives and works in New York.

Katie Peterson was born in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her book, This One Tree, was published by New Issues/Western Michigan University Press in 2006. She finished a doctorate at Harvard and wrote her thesis on Emily Dickinson. She teaches at Deep Springs College in Deep Springs California, where she is Robert B. Aird Professor of Humanities and Poet in Residence.

Aleksandra Petrova (b.1964, Leningrad) studied in Tartu, emigrated to Jerusalem, and since 1998 has lived in Rome. She was short-listed for the Andrei Belyi Prize in 1999. Her two volumes of Russian poetry are A Separated Line (Liniia otryva, 1994) and Residence Permit (Vid na zhitel’stvo, 1999). A substantial third collection is in press in Moscow. Of the two poems included here, “beyond the horizon” comes from her new book; the other, “the silence of the tree is singing,” is from A Separated Line. Petrova has also published a “philosophical operetta” entitled Dolly the Shepherdess (Pastukha Dolli, 2003) that recounts a tale of cloning in pastoral terms.

Anne Porter is the widow of artist Fairfield Porter. They raised five children together and she often served as the subject of his drawings and paintings. Though she has written poetry throughout her lifetime, she did not seek to publish her works until long after her husband’s death. Her first collection of poems, An Altogether Different Language, was a 1994 National Book Award finalist.

G. J. Racz is associate professor of Foreign Languages and Literature at Long Island University, Brooklyn. He recently translated two Spanish Golden Age dramas, Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna (forthcoming, Norton Anthology of Drama) and Calderon de la Barca’s Life Is a Dream (Penguin Classics, 2006). In addition to editing Three Comedies by Jaime Salom (UP of Colorado, 2004) in which his translation "Rigmaroles" appears, Racz has published translations of Eduardo Chirinos in some twenty journals and anthologies.

Mohammad Rafiq was born in Baitpur, a small village in the Bagerhat district of pre-partition Bengal in 1943. He has taught for many years in the Department of English at Jahangirnagar University in Savar, Bangladesh, and has won his country’s major literary awards. “This Moon, This Water” first appeared in the 1986 volume, Gaodiya, the sixth of Rafiq’s collections (more than a dozen) of poetry. Rafiq has also published a memoir of his experiences as a participant in University of Iowa’s International Writing Program in 1993.

Elizabeth Robinson is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Apostrophe (Apogee Press) and Under That Silky Roof (Burning Deck Press). The Golem, a chapbook, is soon forthcoming from Phylum Press. Fence Books is slated to publish The Orphan and Its Relations in 2008.

Augusto Rodriguez was born in Guayaquil in 1979. He has spent half his life in Ecuador, half his life in Chile. He has published the following collections of poetry: Absence (1999), While She’s Killing Mosquitos (2004), Wild Animals (2005), and The Beast That Dwells Within (2005). His work has appeared in various anthologies in Ecuador and in other Spanish-speaking countries. He is the winner of the David Ledesma Vásquez National Poetry Prize (2005) the Efrain Jara Idrovo National University Prize (2005), and he was awarded an Honorable Mention in the César Dávila Andrade National Poetry Competition (2005). He is the founder of the Guayaquil-based cultural organization “Buseta de papel” and editor of the literary review El Quirófano. His work has been published in Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, and Spain. This is his first publication in the United States.

Stephanie Sandler is Ernest E. Monrad Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She has written on Pushkin, including Commemorating Pushkin: Russia’s Myth of a National Poet (2004), and about issues of gender, sexuality, and identity in Russian culture. Her current work focuses on contemporary Russian poetry, including essays on individual poets and a book in progress, Breaking Down the Walls: Russian Poetry Since 1972.

Jennifer Scappettone is the author of From Dame Quickly, forthcoming in 2008 from Litmus Press, and of several chapbooks: Abluvion Almanac (Outside Voices), Err-Residence (Bronze Skull), and Beauty [Is the New Absurdity] (Dusie). She is now at work on Exit 43, an archaeology of the landfill and opera of pop-ups, commissioned by Atelos Press. She has translated extensively from the Italian poetry of Amelia Rosselli, and guest-edited Aufgabe 7, which features a dossier on contemporary Italian experiment. She is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Chicago. “Thing Ode” is for Judith Goldman, in response to “Notes Against the Forms of Appearance.”

Farhad Shakely lives with his family in Sweden. He is a professor of Kurdish Language and Literature at Uppsala University. A prominent poet and linguist, he is one of the pioneers who established a strong foundation for the modern Kurdish poetry and prose poetry. He has published a number of poetry books and critical work, and has been translated into the major European languages.

Sherlock is the name of the infinitely obedient Apple Inc. Macintosh file and web-searching program that Hsia Yü used to make the Chinese versions of the 33 English poems in her recent bilingual volume of verse Pink Noise (2007).

If there is a New York School of Poetry, Tony Towle has been involved in it for over forty years, having taken workshops with Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara at the New School in 1963. In 1970, he received the Frank O’Hara Award, in conjunction with which his first major collection, North, was published. The History of the Invitation: New & Selected Poems 1963–2000 was published by Hanging Loose Press in 2001. Memoir 1960–1963 (Faux Press, 2001) is a chronicle of Towle’s early years as a poet in New York. His twelfth book of poems, Winter Journey, will be published by Hanging Loose in early 2008. He lives in downtown Manhattan with actress Diane Tyler.

Lawrence Venuti is a translator as well as a translation theorist and historian. His recent translations include Antonia Pozzi’s Breath: Poems and Letters (2002), the anthology Italy: A Traveler’s Literary Companion (2003), and Massimo Carlotto’s crime novel Death’s Dark Abyss (2006). He is the author of The Translator’s Invisibility (1995) and The Scandals of Translation (1998) and is the editor of The Translation Studies Reader (2nd ed., 2004). He is professor of English at Temple University.

Frank L. Vigoda is a literary translator based in Riverside, California. He translates from the Polish, primarily poetry. His translations have appeared in a variety of publications including Modern Poetry in Translation, Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, Lyric Poetry Review, Chicago Review, Absinthe: New European Writing, Circumference, and Fence. Longtime translation projects include the work of Aleksander Wat, Rafal Wojaczek, Urke Nachalnik, MLB, and two young poets—Marcin Jagodzinski and Kamil Zajac. Vigoda recently completed a translation of 69, a collected volume of poetry by MLB.

Abdurrahman Ahmad Wahab lives in Erbil City, Kurdistan, with his wife Randa. He received his master’s degree in American Literature from UMass Boston as a Fulbright Fellow from Iraqi Kurdistan. He writes short stories and poetry in Kurdish and English and translates between the two. His work has been published in The Watermark and the Journal of Kurdish Studies.

Joan Walsh, a former executive at Time magazine, is the author of Retreat from Learning, a critique of educational theories and their practical application, as well as short stories, one of which, “Johnny’s Dying,” won the Virginia Quarterly Review’s annual Emily Clark Balch prize for fiction. Her poems have appeared in Commonweal and Confrontation. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband George, a biographer and military historian.

Eliot Weinberger’s books of literary essays include Works on Paper, Outside Stories, Karmic Traces, and, most recently, An Elemental Thing. His political articles are collected in What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles. He is the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry and World Beat: International Poetry Now from New Directions. Among his translations are the Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges’ Selected Non-Fictions, Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor, and Unlock by Bei Dao.

Jeffrey Yang works as the poetry editor for New Directions Publishing. He has published a translation of classical Chinese poems titled Rhythm 226 (Tioronda Books), and his translation of Su Shi’s East Slope is available from Ugly Duckling Presse. His book of poems, An Aquarium, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press.