MARK BIBBINS’s third book of poems, They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They’re Full, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2014.
CONSTANT (1778–1845), whose full name was Louis Constant Wairy, served as principal personal valet to the emperor Napoleon for fourteen years. His memoirs originally appeared in 1830 as Mémoires de Constant, premier valet de chambre de l’empereur, sur la vie privée de Napoléon, sa famille et sa cour and were translated into English and published as Recollections of the Private Life of Napoleon.
MARIAN CROTTY is a Ph.D. candidate in fiction writing at Florida State University and was a 2012–2013 Fulbright Scholar in the United Arab Emirates. Her writing has appeared in journals such as Guernica, Third Coast, and Michigan Quarterly Review and is forthcoming in the Southern Review and the Atlantic. She lives in Tallahassee, where she is at work on a novel.
STEPHEN DIXON’S sixteenth novel and thirtieth book of fiction, His Wife Leaves Him, was published in fall 2013 by Fantagraphics Books, which previously published his story collection What Is All This? (2012). That same year Fugue State Press brought out his novel Story of a Story and Other Stories: A Novel, after it had lain in various trunks and drawers for forty-two years. “Cochran” is part of a huge interlinked story collection called Late Stories that he’s been writing for two years. He has retired after teaching in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins for twenty-seven years and lives in Ruxton, Maryland.
JOACHIM DU BELLAY (c. 1522–1560) was a French poet, critic, and translator. As a member of the literary group La Pléiade he wrote La Défense et illustration de la langue française (The Defense & Illustration of the French Language), published in 1549, in which he argued that the French language was capable of producing great literary works equal to the classics of ancient Greece and Rome. He advocated borrowing from the literary forms of antiquity and works of the Italian Renaissance and, a follower of Petrarch, published numerous collections of odes and sonnets. After returning from four years in Rome, a city in which, suffering from illness, he experienced a sense of exile, in 1558 he published a series of forty-seven sonnets collected as Antiquités de Rome, a book that was later rendered into English by Edmund Spenser as The Ruins of Rome (1591).
AMANDA HAAG lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with her husband and son. “Little Girl’s Point” is her first publication.
CAITLIN HAYES earned her M.F.A. in fiction from Syracuse University. She is a recipient of the Joyce Carol Oates Award for short fiction and a work-study scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Currently the Olive B. O’Connor Fiction Fellow at Colgate University, she has another story forthcoming in the Southern Review.
SEAMUS HEANEY (1939–2013) was an Irish poet, playwright, translator, and recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. His most recent poetry collections are Electric Light (2001), District and Circle (2006), and Human Chain (2010). Several of his poems were published previously in New England Review, including “Field Work,” which appeared in the first issue of the magazine, Volume 1, #1.
CODY HEARTZ grew up in New Hampshire. Currently, he lives in New South Wales, Australia, with his wife and their dog. “Nor’easter” is his first published poem. He’d like to thank his family, friends, and mentors for their support.
LINDSAY HILL was born in San Francisco and graduated from Bard College. Since 1974, he has published six books of poetry, and his work has appeared in a wide variety of literary journals. Sea of Hooks, his first novel, is the product of nearly twenty years of work and was composed concurrently with his other writing and editorial projects. These included the production of a series of recordings of innovative writing under the Spoken Engine label, and the co-editing, with Paul Naylor, of the literary journal Facture. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife, the painter Nita Hill. Sea of Hooks will be brought out by McPherson & Company in fall 2013.
ELLEN HINSEY’S forthcoming books include Mastering the Past: Reports from Central and Eastern Europe and Magnetic North: Conversations with Tomas Venclova (Suhrkamp). She is also the author of three books of poetry, including Update on the Descent, which was awarded the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. She edited and translated The Junction: Selected Poems of Tomas Venclova (Bloodaxe, 2009), and her translations of contemporary French fiction and memoir have been published with Riverhead/Penguin. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, NER, Paris Review, Poetry International, and numerous other journals. A former Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, she has been the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Award and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award. She lives and teaches in Paris.
LAURA KASISCHKE has published eight novels and eight collections of poetry. For her most recent collection, Space, in Chains, she received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Chelsea, Michigan, with her husband and son.
T. L. KHLEIF has an M.F.A. from the University of Michigan, where an earlier version of “The Damascus Players” was awarded a prize in the Avery Hopwood and Jule Hopwood Contest for 2010. She is the recipient of a MacDowell Colony Fellowship and is currently working on a novel set in Damascus, Syria.
DANA LEVIN is the author of In the Surgical Theatre (1999), Wedding Day (2005), and Sky Burial (2011), all from Copper Canyon Press. Her poetry and essays have appeared recently in the New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, American Poetry Review, and Poetry. A recipient of fellowships and awards from the Rona Jaffe, Whiting, and Guggenheim foundations, Levin teaches at Santa Fe University of Art and Design in New Mexico.
NORMAN LOCK this year won a fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, saw his play The House of Correction revived in Istanbul, and published a new collection of stories, Love Among the Particles (Bellevue Literary Press), featuring three fictions originally published in New England Review.
EMILY MITCHELL’S first novel The Last Summer of the World, (W. W. Norton), was a finalist for the 2008 Young Lions Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly, and previously in NER. She teaches fiction at the University of Maryland.
GEORGE MONTEIRO’S Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil and After: A Poetic Career Transformed was published by McFarland in 2012. His Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop, published in 1996 by the University of Mississippi Press, has recently been reissued in translation as Conversas com Elizabeth Bishop by Autêntica Editora of Belo Horizonte/São Paulo (2013).
PAUL MULDOON is Howard G. B. Clark ’21 Professor at Princeton University and Poetry Editor of the New Yorker. His most recent collections are Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), Horse Latitudes (2006), and Maggot (2010). His essays on Fernando Pessoa and Emily Dickinson have appeared in previous issues of NER.
PETER PLAGENS is a painter who has shown with the Nancy Hoffman Gallery in New York since 1974 and is also represented by the Texas Gallery in Houston. The staff art critic for Newsweek from 1989 to 2003, he now writes for the Wall Street Journal and other publications, including NER. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Arts Journalism Program. His book Bruce Nauman: The True Artist is forthcoming from Phaidon in 2014, and his novel The Art Critic is available from Hol Art Books. Other publications include Sunshine Muse: Modern Art on the West Coast, 1945–1970 (University of California Press, 2000), Moonlight Blues: An Artist’s Art Criticism (UMI Research Press, 1986), and an earlier novel, Time for Robo (Black Heron Press, 1999).
MEGAN STAFFEL is the author of two novels, The Notebook of Lost Things (Soho, 1999) and She Wanted Something Else (North Point, 1987), and two collections of short stories, including the recently published Lessons in Another Language (Four Way Books). Her stories have been published in numerous journals including New England Review, Ploughshares, and the Common. She teaches in the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
RICHARD TILLINGHAST is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Wayfaring Stranger (World Palace, 2012) and Selected Poems (Dedalus, 2009), as well as Dirty August (Talisman House, 2009), translations from Turkish poet Edip Cansever, in collaboration with his daughter, Julia Clare Tillinghast. His latest nonfiction books are Istanbul: City of Forgetting and Remembering (Haus, 2012) and Finding Ireland (Notre Dame, 2008). He was a 2010–2011 Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. He lived in Ireland for five years and now divides his time between Hawaii and Tennessee. One project on which he is currently working is a new nonfiction book that includes “From Venice to Tipperary.”
GREG VITERCIK has taught in the Music Department at Middlebury College for more than twenty-five years. He is the author of The Early Works of Felix Mendelssohn: A Study in the Romantic Sonata Style (Routledge, 1992). His current research focuses on the political, social, and philosophical contexts in which Richard Wagner created his Ring of the Nibelung. The essay in this issue was adapted from a talk for the Performing Arts Series Society at Middlebury College that preceded a performance by the Escher String Quartet, March 8, 2013.
ROSS WHITE’S poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2012, Poetry Daily, and the Southern Review, among other publications. With Matthew Olzmann, he edited Another & Another: An Anthology from the Grind Daily Writing Series (Bull City Press, 2012). A graduate of the Warren Wilson College M.F.A. Program for Writers, he has received scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and now teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
MARGARET WITHERS’S paintings have been shown extensively in the United States, Europe, China, and Russia, and she has received numerous awards including residencies to the Vermont Studio Center and the Millay Colony. At present, she is working on a visual and sound installation for a solo show at Landau Gallery in Belmont, Massachusetts, entitled “one mind’s imaging into another.” Her exhibition schedule and artwork can be seen at www.MargaretWithers.com. The painting on the cover of this issue of NER is available through William Baczek Fine Art, in Northampton, Massachusetts.
DAVID WOJAHN’S eighth collection of poetry, World Tree, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2011 and was the winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize. A new collection of his essays on contemporary poetry, From the Valley of Saying, is forthcoming. He teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and in the M.F.A. in Writing Program of the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
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