HOWARD ALTMANN recently published his second collection of poems, In This House (Turtle Point Press). Born and raised in Montreal, he lives in New York City.

NORAH CHARLES writes fiction and memoir in Boulder, Colorado. In 2006, she received a Thompson Award for Western American Writing in memoir. Her fiction has also appeared in Hawaii Review. She recently completed a book-length memoir about life with her husband prior to his death in Honolulu in 2003.

ISABEL FARGO COLE is a United States–born, Berlin-based writer and translator. Her translations include Boys and Murderers by Hermann Ungar (Twisted Spoon Press, 2006), All the Roads Are Open by Annemarie Schwarzenbach (Seagull Books, 2011), and The Jew Car by Franz Fühmann (forthcoming from Seagull Books, 2012). She is the initiator and co-editor of www.no-mans-land.org, an online magazine for new German literature in English.

GERI DORAN is the author of two poetry collections, Sanderlings (Tupelo Press, 2011) and Resin (Louisiana State University Press, 2005). Recipient of the Walt Whitman Award and the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, she currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon. Most recently, her poems have appeared in Poetry International, Image, and Subtropics.

ROBIN EKISS is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford, the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers, the author of The Mansion of Happiness (University of Georgia Press, 2009), the winner of the Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize, and a finalist for the Northern California and California Book Awards.

CARYN FRIEDLANDER was born in New York City in 1955. Since then, she has lived in the Aleutian Islands, Seattle, and Japan. Francine Seders Gallery has shown her art since 1996. Her work is included in a number of public collections, including those of the New York Public Library, Swedish Hospital, Washington State University, and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. She lives in Bellingham, Washington, with her husband and three cats.

FRANZ FÜHMANN (1922–84) spent his childhood in the contested Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia and served in the Wehrmacht signal corps from 1941 to 1945. In a Soviet POW camp, he embraced socialism and cast his lot with the new German Democratic Republic. Gradually, however, he became an outspoken critic of the regime and the unofficial patriarch of a new dissident literature. Fühmann’s work—which spans everything from essays to children’s literature—departed more and more from Socialist Realist norms, blending and bending genres and exploring the intricacies of mythology, Romanticism, and Expressionism.

BRENDAN GRADY lives in Wallingford, Pennsylvania. This is his first publication.

JENNIFER GROTZ is the author of two books of poems, The Needle (Houghton Mifflin, 2011) and Cusp (Houghton Mifflin, 2003). She has also translated from the French The Psalms of All My Days by Patrice de La Tour du Pin, forthcoming this winter from Carnegie Mellon University Press.

DAVID GUTERSON is the author of seven books, including the novels Snow Falling on Cedars (Harcourt, 1994), East of the Mountains (Harcourt, 1999), Our Lady of the Forest (Knopf, 2003), The Other (Knopf, 2008), and Ed King (Knopf, 2011). He lives near Seattle.

IHAB HASSAN has received two Guggenheim and three Fulbright Fellowships and two honorary doctorates from the Universities of Uppsala and Giessen. He is the author of fifteen books of essays and memoirs and of many short stories, published in such journals as New England Review, Antioch Review, Agni, Alaska Review, Confrontation, Fiction International, Nimrod, Pleiades, Wasafiri, and others.

MARGAREE LITTLE’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Bloom, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Missouri Review. Originally from Rhode Island, she now lives in Tucson, Arizona.

SARA MAITLAND grew up in London and Scotland. The author of several books, including Book of Silence (Counterpoint, 2009) and Daughter of Jerusalem (Henry Holt, 1995), she won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1978 and studied English at Oxford University. She currently lives in Newton Stewart, United Kingdom.

STEPHEN O’CONNOR is the author of four books, most recently Here Comes Another Lesson (Free Press, 2010), a collection of short fiction. He teaches in the Columbia and Sarah Lawrence M.F.A. programs.

JOHN POCH’s most recent book is Dolls (Orchises, 2009). His poems have recently appeared in Poetry, Agni, Image, and other journals. He is a Professor of English at Texas Tech University.

ANNE RAEFF wrote Clara Mondschein’s Melancholia (MacAdam/Cage, 2002), and her stories have also been published in New England Review, Guernica, Oasis, and other journals. Her essay in this issue is part of a collection entitled On My Way Into the Earth.

CRAIG REINBOLD’s work appears in recent or forthcoming issues of Iowa Review, Guernica, Post Road, and High Country News. He and Ms. Mason currently reside in Tucson with their dog, Olive.

MARK RUDMAN has published many books of poetry, which include the five volumes of The Rider Quintet, beginning with Rider (Wesleyan University Press, 1994), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books include The Motel En Route to Life Out There: Selections from the Rider Quintet (Salt Publishing, 2010) and The Book of Samuel: Essays on Poetry and Imagination (Northwestern University Press, 2009). He received the Max Hayward Award. The pieces in this issue are from “Identification of a Woman,” a large poem written “around” the life and work of the filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni.

GEORGE SANTAYANA [Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás] (1863–1952) was an American philosopher and the author of such books as The Sense of Beauty (1896), The Life of Reason; or the Phases of Human Progress (5 vols., 1905–6), and The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel (1936).

ADRIENNE SHARP is the author of the story collection White Swan, Black Swan (Random House, 2001) and the novels The Sleeping Beauty (Riverhead, 2005) and The True Memoirs of Little K (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010).

LEATH TONINO writes about nature and adventure for Orion, Sierra, and other magazines. He’s recently finished a yearlong exploration project, and an accompanying series of essays, entitled Seven Lengths of Vermont. He has been the recipient of scholarships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Colorado College, the U.S. Antarctic Program, the Ritt Kellogg Memorial Fund, and the U.S. Forest Service (not all for writing). This is his first piece of published fiction.

MYLES WEBER is the author of Middlebrow Annoyances: American Drama in the 21st Century (Gival Press, 2003) and Consuming Silences: How We Read Authors Who Don’t Publish (University of Georgia Press, 2004). His literary criticism appears frequently in such journals as Georgia Review, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, Salmagundi, and Michigan Quarterly Review. He is an Associate Professor of English at Winona State University in Minnesota.

JAKE ADAM YORK is the author of three books of poems, including A Murmuration of Starlings (Southern Illinois University Press, 2008) and Persons Unknown (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), part of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry. An Associate Professor at the University of Colorado Denver, York co-edits Copper Nickel.