Jesse Ball is an American poet and novelist. His prose includes The Way Through Doors (Vintage 2009), Samedi the Deafness (Vintage 2007), Vera & Linus (Nyhil 2006), and Parables & Lies (Cupboard 2008). His verse includes March Book (Grove 2004) and The Village On Horseback (Milkweed 2011). Work of his appeared in Best American Poetry 2006. In 2008, he won the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for the novella The Early Deaths of Lubeck, Brennan, Harp & Carr. He published a book of drawings, Og svo kom nottin, in Iceland in 2006. He is known both domestically and abroad for a bleak but lyrical style. He lives in Chicago and teaches in the graduate writing program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Sandra Beasley is the author of I Was the Jukebox, winner of the 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize, selected by Joy Harjo and published by W. W. Norton. Her first collection, Theories of Falling, won the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize. Her nonfiction has been featured in the Washington Post Magazine and she is working on Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, forthcoming from Crown. She lives in Washington, D.C.
Oni Buchanan is the author of Spring, a Poetry Honors winner of the 2009 Massachusetts Book Awards and selected by Mark Doty for the 2007 National Poetry Series. Her first poetry book, What Animal, was published in 2003 by the University of Georgia Press. Oni is also a concert pianist.
Playwright and poet Teddy Jefferson is the librettist for Martha Clarke’s Miracolo d’Amore; author of “The Wedding” (a play in verse) and “The Insomniac,” performed at the Prtithvi Theater in Mumbai; and “One Inch Leather,” just published by Pendulum Books. His essay “Rorschach Tempest” is featured in the Spring 2009 Shakespeare Quarterly. Mr. Jefferson’s translation of Pirandello’s “However You Want Me” (Come tu mi vuoi) won the PEN Translation Prize his essay “The P in Farsi” on the poetics of the Persian language will be published in the collection The Shores of Artificial Lake in late 2010.
Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, art critic, editor, and curator. He is the author of nine books of poetry, including Cabal of Zealots (1988, Hanuman Books), Understanding Objects (2000, Hard Press), and Rapid Departures (2005, Ateliê Editorial). He won the 2005 National Translation Award, given by the American Literary Translators Association, for his book of translations from Latin, The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius (2004, Princeton University Press). He was awarded a Rome Prize Fellowship in Literature at the American Academy in Rome for 2001-2002. He had a one-month residency at the American Academy in Berlin in Spring, 2006. He is the editor of the poetry and arts journal VANITAS and of Libellum books.
Deborah Landau is the author of The Last Usable Hour, a Lannan Literary Selection published by Copper Canyon Press, and Orchidelirium, which won the Anhinga Prize for Poetry. A third collection of poems, The Uses of the Body, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon. Her poems and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, The Best American Erotic Poems, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and elsewhere, and have been translated into Mongolian, Romanian, Russian, and Greek. She was educated at Stanford, Columbia, and Brown, where she was a Javits Fellow and received a Ph.D. in English and American Literature. She directs the Creative Writing Program at New York University, and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, sons, and daughter.
Mark Levine has written three books of poems, “Debt” (1993), “Enola Gay” (2000), and “The Wilds” (2006), as well as a book of nonfiction, “F5” (2007). His poems have been in many magazines and anthologies, and he has written nonfiction prose for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, New York, and other places. He is on the faculty of poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and lives in Brooklyn.
Olga Livshin was born in Odessa in 1978 and moved to the United States with her family in 1993. Her award winning poems and translations of Russian contemporary poets appear in Jacket Magazine, REFLECT/KUADUSESHCHT and other journals, as well as Russian Contemporary Poetry: An Anthology (2008). A series of her translations of Nina Iskrenko was staged by Caffeine Theater (Chicago). She teaches Russian at University of Alaska Anchorage.
Irina Mashinski (Mashinskaia, Mashinskaya) is a bilingual poet and translator, the author of seven books of poetry and a book of translations. Her poetry has been translated into Serbian, Italian, English, Spanish, and French and is regularly featured in most of the leading literary periodicals and anthologies in Russia and abroad. Her most recent Russian books of poems, Volk (Wolf, Selected Poems) and Raznochinets and Other Poems came out in 2009 in Moscow and New York respectively. She graduated from Lomonosov Moscow University where she studied Physical Geography and Paleoclimatology, and holds an MFA in Poetry and Poetics from New England College. In the US, she has taught Mathematics, Science, Meteorology, Russian History, and The History of European Culture in high schools, colleges, and universities of New York and New Jersey. Irina Mashinski is the winner of several literary awards, including the First Prizes at the Russian America (2001), Maximilian Voloshin (2003), and other poetry contests. She is the co-founder and co-editor (with Oleg Woolf) of the Cardinal Points literary journal published in the US in English and Russian and serves on the editorial board for the NYC based translation project “Ars-Interpres.”
Poet Susan Miller has been published in Iowa Review, Black Warrior Review, Commonweal, Sewanee Theological Review, Meridian, Calyx, and in the Portable Boog Reader 4. She received her MFA in poetry from NYU in 2001 and has studied with poet Marie Ponsor since 2002. Her manuscript was a semifinalist in the Alice James Kinereth Gensler Awards and a finalist for the autumn House Book Prize in 2009. She has also just won a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg prize for poetry. She teaches poetry and writing at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and lives in Brooklyn.
Cecily Parks is the author of the poetry collection Field Folly Snow and the chapbook Cold Work. Her poetry, reviews, and essays appear in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Orion, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.
Vera Pavlova was born in Moscow. She graduated from the Gnessin Academy, specializing in the history of music, and is the author of fourteen collections of poetry, four opera librettos, and lyrics to two cantatas. Her works have been translated into eighteen languages. Her first collection in English, If There Is Something to Desire, was published in 2012 by Alfred A. Knopf.
Katherine Shonk is the author of The Red Passport, a collection of short stories set in contemporary Russia, chosen as Book of the Year by the Chicago Tribune. One of the stories appeared in the anthology Best American Short Stories 2001. Her novel, Happy Now? was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in early 2010. She lives in Chicago with her husband and daughter, and she works as an editor and writer for Harvard University.
LB Thompson’s poetry chapbook Tendered Notes: Poems of Love and Money won the Center for Book Arts’ annual chapbook competition in 2003. Her poems have appeared in Fence, Pool, Lyric, The Women’s Review of Books and The New Yorker. She received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and her M.F.A. in Poetry from New York University and was a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. Her essay about her long period of illness, “Torpor: Metaphors of Hibernation,” appeared in Prairie Schooner in 2009. Ms. Thompson teaches English to college freshmen, works as a free-lance copyeditor and lives on the North Fork of Long Island. She recently completed a poetry manuscript entitled The Dark Skirt of the Universe, and is at work on a novel and a collection of essays.
Tom Thompson is the author of Live Feed (2001) and The Pitch (2006). His poems and essays have appeared in Boston Review, Colorado Review, The Hat, Volt and other journals. He lives with his wife and two sons in New York City and Coxsackie, NY. He currently works at an advertising agency.