Biographies of Contributors

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HANS SACHS was born in Nuremberg in 1494. After an apprenticeship as a shoemaker, he became a Meistersinger, and had a very successful career as a poet and playwright. He is the subject of one of Wagner's operas. He died in Nuremberg in 1576.

NELLIE SACHS 1966 Nobel winner, best known work in English is O the Chimneys, poems of the Holocaust.

JAMES SACRÉ is one of the leading poets in France today. (His first name is common in the part of rural France where he grew up.) He has published close to thirty books, ten of them solid volumes with major publishers like Gallimard and Éditions du Seuil, the others smaller art books, often in collaboration with well-known artists. His poetry has appeared in innumerable journals and reviews, and has been recognized by a prize from the Académie Française; he also won the prestigious Prix Apollinaire and two other poetry prizes in France, where he was named Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters—all remarkable achievements for a poet who has made his home in the United States for over thirty years. He is Doris Silbert Professor in the Humanities at Smith College.

HANS SAHL (1902-1993) was born in Dresden, Germany and received a doctorate in art history before becoming arts critic for Das Tagebuch in the 1920s. In 1933 he fled to Prague, then to Zurich and France, where he was interned in 1939. In 1941, he came to the U.S. as a political refugee and a novelist, poet, and essayist.

HAGIWARA SAKUTARO (1886-1942) was among the first to write poetry in Modern Japanese. His collections of poetry include Howling at the Moon (1917), Blue Cat (1922), and Island Ice (1922). The pieces translated in this issue appear in Howling at the Moon.

MARK SANDERS is Assistant Professor of English and American Literature at Brandeis University. He is the author of Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (Duke University Press, 2002) and his work has appeared in Law Text Culture, Diacritics, and Modern Fiction Studies.

ANA REGINA FARIA DOS SANTOS PhD candidate in Brazilian literature, with a minor in Modern Spanish Literature, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

SAPPHO composed lyric and choral poetry in Aeolic Greek, on the island of Lesbos, ca. 600 B.C.E.

JOSEBA SARRIONANDIA was born in Iurreta (Bizkaia, Euskal Herria) in 1958. He studied Basque philology and became a professor of phonetics. His first book of poetry Izuen Gordelekuen Barrena (Dentro de los escondites de los miedos) was published shortly before his arrest and incarceration for his membership in ETA. In 1985, he escaped from prison hidden inside a speaker. Since then, he travels the world writing, translating, and publishing his work. A collection of his poems (1985-1995) has the Swiftian title Hnuy illa nyha maja yahoo (Donostia: Elkar, 1995). Another anthology of his work in which his voice can be heard on a CD is Hau da ene ondasun guzia (Nafarroa: Txalaparta, 1999).

HIROAKI SATO Leading translator of Japanese poetry. He is currently at work on an anthology of the writings of Japanese women poets from ancient to modern times.

IGIABA SCEGO was born in Rome in 1974. Her parents sought asylum in Italy after Siad Barre's coup d'état in 1969 put an end to a brief spell of democracy in Somalia. She holds a degree in language and literature from Rome's La Sapienza University and has worked with various magazines including Latinoamerica, Carta, and Migra. In 2003 she won the Eks&tra literary prize for best immigrant writer. Her novels include La nomade che amava Alfred Hitchcock and Rhoda. She is pursuing graduate study in the fields of Peacekeeping and Security Studies and Intercultural Education at Università Roma Tre.

LESLIE SCHENK Has served in the UN around the world, has published widely. He is on the Honor Roll of the Best American Short Stories, Bernard Ashton Raborg Essay Award in 1994, as well as being a finalist in several other competitions.

MARIO SCHIAVATO was born in 1931 in Quinto di Treviso but has lived since 1943 in Dignano, Istria. A writer of over thirty books of poetry, short stories, novels, dramas, children's literature, travel diaries, Schiavato uses the dialect of Dignano, with elements of standard Italian, the dialect of the Veneto region, and Ciakavo, a Croatian dialect to shape a unique voice.

WOLFDIETRICH SCHNURRE was born in Frankfurt in 1920 but moved to Berlin as a boy. He spent the last part of WWII in a penal unit for caricaturing the military and attempting to desert. After returning to West Berlin, he became a very successful writer of poetry, stories, and radio plays, who illustrated his own works. He received many German prizes, including the Büchner Prize in 1983. Ill with polyneuritis for the last twenty-five years of his life, he became more and more reclusive and died in relative obscurity at Kiel in 1989.

GEORGE SCHOOLFIELD is Professor Emeritus of German and Scandinavian Literatures at Yale University.

SOLVEIG VON SCHOULTZ (1907-1996) Belonged to the small minority of Swedish speaking families in Finland. In 1995 she told a reporter: "I am looking for the immediate expression that simultaneously is ambiguous and nuanced, a sorting out of all things unnecessary and loose... to find a language that is identical with what I want to say..." She wrote sixteen collections of poetry, eight collections of short stories, two novels, a biography of her mother and drama for the stage, radio and television. The poems included here are from a collection published the year she died, at the age of ninety.

NINA M. SCOTT is Professor of Spanish and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Spanish and Portugese at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is a specialist on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and has published a translation of Autobiography and of the early novel, Sab, of the nineteenth century Cuban writer Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda (University of Texas Press, 1993). She also published the bilingual anthology, Madres del Verbo/Mothers of the Word. Early Spanish American Women Writers (University of New Mexico Press, 1999) which covers works from 1556 to 1867.

GIACOMO SCOTTI (1928- ) Born in Naples, he settled in Fiume (Istria) in 1947. He published his first poetry collection in 1963, the beginning of his prolific and versatile literary production: poet, novelist, essayist, historian, reporter, editor, with more than a hundred publications to his credit. His account of Tito's gulag, Goli Otok, in which many Italians were imprisoned, first came out in 1991 and has gone through three editions and subsequent reprints. He has published both in Italian and in Serbo-Croatian.

MADELEINE DE SCUDÉRY (1607-1701), was a novelist and salonnière known in her circle as "Sapho." Her romance novels, some of which were published under the name of her brother Georges de Scudéry, include Ibrahim, ou l'illustre Bassa (1641), Artaméneou le grand Cyrus (1649-53), Clélie, histoire romaine (1654-60) and Almahide, ou l'Esclsave-reine (1660-63). These were enormously popular throughout the seventeeth century; their characters are said to be portraits of her contemporaries.

Born in Algeria when it was still a French colony, LEILA SEBBAR moved to France at the age of seventeen. Between 1978 and 2002, she published ten novels, four collections of short storie,s and four books of essays. Her work often deals with Algerian women who have immigrated to Europe, themes of identity and exile. Her essays include On tue les petites filles (They Are Killing Little Girls), 1980; and Lettres parisiennes: autopsie de l'exil, 1986, 1999 (with Nancy Huston). Her novel Le Silence des rives won the Prix Kateb Yacine in 1993.

GEORGE SEFERIS (1900-1971), one of Greece's foremost poets of the twentieth century, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963. Known also for his essays, diaries, and one novel, Seferis had a distinguished diplomatic career, which culminated in his position as Ambassador to Great Britain.

JAROSLAV SEIFERT (1901-1986) Czech poet and Nobel Prize winner (1984).

DIANA SENECHAL began translating Tomas Venclova's poetry in 1989. She is currently completing her dissertation at Yale University on Nikolai Gogol, and lives in San Francisco, where she works in legal CD-ROM publishing and engages in writing, music, and computer programming.

BORIS SEREBRENNIKOV Russian writer and TV documentary producer now living in Springfield, MA.

CARL SESAR holds a degree in Greek and Latin, and a doctorate in Chinese and Japanese. His publications include Poems to Eat, translations of the modern Japanese tanka poet Ishikawa Takuboku, and Selected Poems of Catullus, translations of the ancient Roman lyric poet Gaius Valerius Catullus. He is at work on a second book of Takuboku's poems.

ANNE SEXTON (1928-1974) became a poet after suffering from post-partum depression and enrolling in a poetry workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for her collection Live or Die. She is the author of numerous volumes of poetry including: To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), and 45 Mercy Street (1976), the last volume published before her suicide in 1974.

ELIF SHAFAK was born in Strasbourg, France, in 1971. She spent her teenage years in Spain, before returning to Turkey. Her first novel, Pinhan (The Sufi) which she published at age twenty-seven, was awarded the Rumi Prize—a recognition given to best works in mystical/transcendental literature. The novel tells the story of a hermaphrodite mystic—a little known but revered tradition—inside the Sufi orders. Her second novel, The Mirrors of the City, is about a Sephardic Jew who moves to seventeenth century Istanbul after being expelled from Spain, and about estrangement and deterritorialization. Titled Mahrem (The Sacred), her third novel is about the gaze, the sacred, and the body that must search for its elusive autonomy while being encroached upon by the gazes of others; it received the Turkish Novel Award. Her fourth novel, The Flea Palace, weaves together the stories of all the inhabitants of an apartment building to develop the theme of visible and unseen degradation—moral, physical, social and cultural—lived in the heart of the aging and beautiful city of Istanbul. In three months the book sold over 22,000 copies. All of her novels have been reprinted multiple times, and her work is being translated into German, Greek, and English. A political scientist who specializes in Gender and Women's Studies, Shafak is also a scholar, media critic, and journalist. Most recently she was a visiting scholar at the Five College Women's Studies Research Center in South Hadley in 2002-2003, and she is at present a visiting scholar teaching at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

TAREK SHAMMA, a Syrian scholar and translator, is Assistant Professor of Translation at United Arab Emirates University.

NADINE SHAMS's few published short stories have earned her a place in what some critics have called the "1990s generation" of Egyptian writers. Her stories reflect some of the major concerns of these young writers: disillusionment with "grand causes," a turn to the personal and the subjective, technical experimentation, a preoccupation with the fragmented and ambivalent nature of experience and self, and the willingness to challenge social and sexual taboos. In recent years, she has focused her creative energy on screenwriting.

NORMAN R. SHAPIRO, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Wesleyan University and Writer-in-Residence at Adams House, Harvard, is a widely published translator of French theater, poetry, and prose. Among his many works are Négritude: Black Poetry from Africa and the Caribbean, Four Farces by Georges Feydeau, The Fabulists French, Selections from 'Les Fleurs du Mal' of Baudelaire, several volumes of the fables and tales of La Fontaine, and, most recently, two dramas by the Francophone American Creole, Victor Sejour. He has received the MLA's Scaglione Prize for his translations of Paul Verlaine and various other honors.

K. SHAVER was, for more than twenty years, CEO of advertising and of the public relations firms she founded. Her commitment to civic and professional involvement has included directorships and other leadership roles, and she was Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Spalding University. Since 1993, as a business consultant and trainer, she has been assisting private companies in Romania and Russia to understand and implement sound business and marketing practices. She has taught senior level graphic design at the University of Louisville and pursued her interests in creative writing, theatrical costuming, piano studies, and portraiture.

WILL SHEARIN recently completed a dissertation on speech acts in Lucretius' De rerum natura ("On the Nature of Things") at the University of California, Berkeley. He currently teaches at the University of Oregon.

KAZUKO SHIRAISHI is one of Japan's foremost poets, and certainly the most internationally acclaimed. She has published more than twenty books of poetry and numerous volumes of essays, and has received all of Japan's major literary awards. Born in Vancouver in 1931, she was taken to Japan by her family in 1938, just prior to World War II. After the war, at the age of seventeen she became a member of the VOU surrealist group led by Katsue Kitaono, a Pound correspondent. In 1951, she published her first book of poems, The Town that Rains Eggs. In the sixties, she emerged as a strong voice in her own right. She was a pioneer in the call for freedom of expression, for uninhibited spiritual and sexual liberation. She began a jazz-poetry revolution in Japan, reading to the accompaniment of jazz music. Following such poets as Kenneth Rexroth and Allen Ginsberg she advanced the jazz-poetry performance to an art form in Japan, in response to the avant-garde movement of such musicians as John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and others. In 1973, she was guest poet at Iowa's International Writing Program. In 1975, New Directions published Seasons of Sacred Lust, a volume of translations of her poetry edited by Rexroth. She has been invited to international poetry festivals and conferences throughout the world, traveling to the United States, as well as to Australia, The Netherlands, the Philippines, France, Italy, India, South Africa, Greece, England, Europe, and Southeast Asia. Her poems have been translated into more than twenty languages. Her latest book, My Floating Mother, City, was published in Tokyo in January, 2003. It has received rave reviews.

MURANO SHIRO (1901-1975) is regarded in Japan as a Modernist poet, whose poetry is often characterized by a satirical stance rare in Japanese poetry. In a celebrated volume on sports, the poet sees athletes as trapped in a mechanistic world. Throughout his life the poet attempted to insulate himself from the sentimental tendency in much Japanese poetry. As an undergraduate student, he opted for a major in Economics and German; afterwards he pursued a satisfying career in business.

MARCI SHORE is a doctoral student in Modern Eastern European History at Stanford University. She translates from Czech and Polish.

CAROLYN SHREAD is a PhD candidate in French at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, after degrees at the University of Sussex, UK and St. Anne's College, Oxford. Several of her academic translations in the field of economics have been published by Routledge, UK. Her MA dissertation "Translating the Matrix: The Process of Metamorphoses in the Notebooks of Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger" appeared in Versus (Leeds, UK, 1994) and an interview with Francophone author Nancy Huston was published by Sites, Vol. 2, Fall 1998. In 1992, her article "The Marché de la poésie: the Rendez-vous of France's Small Press" was published by Professional Translator and Interpreter. Her poems have been published in the British small press.

MAURICE Z. SHRODER holds a PhD from Harvard University and has taught at Harvard University, the University of Rochester, and Barnard College/Columbia University. His published works include Icarus: The Image of the Artist in French Romanticism, essays on Balzac, Flaubert, and the Nouveau Roman, and many reviews. He collaborated with Patricia Terry on translations of four Mallarmé poems which were published in Stéphane Mallarmé: Selected Poetry and Prose, edited by Mary Ann Caws (New Directions, 1982.) Their collaboration includes the cook's aid, Kitchen Tables and Cooking Hints. He has also worked as a narrator for Talking Books and as a computer consultant.

ANDY SHUPALA majored in Philosophy and Chinese languages and literature at Ohio State University, and subsequently studied Creative Writing and took masters degrees in Social Work and in English Composition and rhetoric. He has taught ESL in Jiangxhi, China, at Gannan State Teachers College, and is about to embark on a doctoral program in Education.

RIBKA SIBHATU was born in 1962 in Asmara (Eritrea). In 1978 she served a one-year prison sentence under Menghista Salemariam's regime; she was forced to go into exile, but she was imprisoned again by the ex-guerilla warriors of the Eritrean lowland, where she lived for one-and-a-half years. In 1981 she was able to reach Ethiopia, and in 1985 she received her high school diploma in Addis Abeba. She was married in 1986 and fled to France, first to Paris and then to Lyons, where her daughter Sara was born. She then moved to Rome, where she earned a degree in Modern Languages and Literatures from La Sapienza University and is now completing a Doctorate in Comparative Literature. She has participated in several cultural events as a jury member, workshop facilitator, and guest speaker. Some of her poems have been included in the anthology Quaderno africano I, which belongs to the Cittadini della poesia series (Firenze: Loggia de' Lanzi, 1998). She has also published a poetry collection, Aulò, Canto poesia dell'Eritrea (Roma: Sinnos, 1993).

AURA SIBISAN is a lecturer at the Unversity of Brasov in Romania, where she teaches American Studies.

AÏSSATA G. SIDIKOU is Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and French at Princeton University. Her research focuses on African women's oral narratives and she has recently published Recreating words, Reshaping Worlds: The Verbal Art of Women from Niger, Mali and Senegal (Africa World Press, 2001).

LEIF SJÖBERG (1925- ) was formerly Professor of Scandinavian Studies and Comparative Literatures at SUNY Stony Brook. He has translated Gunnar Ekelöf (with W.H. Auden), Tranströmer (with May Swenson) and many other Swedish poets. Aniara, an epic science fiction poem (with Stephen Klass) was published by Story Line Press in 1999. He was interviewed by Eva Claeson in Metamorphoses, vol.1, No.2.

JAN SKÁCEL (1922-1989) In his landscapes, Skácel is no less mystical than his fellow Moravian Reynek, even if he apprehends the natural world with a pagan sense of its awesome strangeness. Despite the years spent as editor of the literary journal Host do Domu, in Brno, Skácel was a loner, impervious to the dictates of artistic trends. Surrounded by silence, his poems burrow under history to reach arcane territories inhabited by myth. His strategy of radical subtraction aims at creating a form of absolute transparency to let through being with the immediacy of a physical sighting. In the last year of his life, Skácel received the Petrarca Prize for Poetry and the Prize for Central European Literature. He died ten days before the Velvet Revolution. We are indebted to Promeny (27/1/1990) for the Czech text of the Lethean quatrain, the poet's epitaph, and for the Teiresias poem. The other poems come from Noc s Vestonickou Venusi (A Night With the Venus of Vestonice, 1990).

ADAM SMALL, a prolific South African writer, has to his credit several plays, collections of poetry, and philosophical treatises. His works have been translated into French, Dutch, and German, and his plays have been performed in South Africa and the U.S. Born in 1936, he retired recently from his position as Senior Professor and Head of the Department of Social Work at the University of the Western Cape. In the early 1990s, Small was awarded the Order of Excellent Service (Gold) by then President de Klerk and was selected for membership in the South African Academy of Science and Art. His publications include: Krismis van Map Jacobs (1983); Heidesee (1978); The Orange Earth (Drama, 1978); Joanie Galant-hulle (1978); Oh Wide and Sad Land (Poetry, 1973); Oos Wes Tuis Bes Distrik Ses (1967); Se Sjibbolet (1965); Kitaar My Kruis (1963); Die Eerste Steen (1961); Klein Simbool (Poetry, 1958); Verse van die Liefde (1957).

CURTIS SMALL has a PhD in French Studies from New York University, and is a specialist in French and Caribbean literature. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

VENIAMIN SMEKHOV is an actor, director, and writer. He has appeared in countless roles on stage and screen including Woland and Claudius in Liubimov's productions of Master and Margarita and Hamlet at the Taganka Theater. He has published numerous studies on theater and is the author and producer of an ongoing series on Russian television, "The Theater of My Memory." Most recently, he directed the operas Queen of Spades at the Prague National Theater and Falstaff in Lubeck. He will teach a course on contemporary Russian drama in the Department of Russian at Smith College in fall 2002.

CAROLYN SMITH's interest in Greek lyric poetry stems from her early years in a Foreign Service family, which included postings to Rome and Athens. She received a BA in Classical Civilization from Oberlin College and an MA in Classics from New York University. A freelance writer and editor living in New York City, she is a member of the Vera Lachmann Reading Group, which meets regularly to translate and discuss the Homeric texts.

DONNY SMITH's poems and translations have appeared in Calapooya, Coe Review, Connecticut Review, Lilliput Review, Natural Bridge, Poet Lore, Sinister Wisdom, and elsewhere. Section 7 of "Gorgon" was previously published in 580 Split. His academic articles have appeared in Art Documentation, Alternative Library Literature, and Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery & Information Supply. He is a librarian at Indiana State University.

NATHANIEL SMITH has taught French and other Romance languages at Smith College, the University of Georgia, and Boston University. Now an administrator at Franklin and Marshall College (Lancaster PA), he teaches an annual first-year seminar in reading and writing poetry. He has written several books on medieval literature, and published poems and translations in many journals, including Catalan Review, Chelsea, Edge City Review, Exchanges, International Poetry Review, The Lyric, Metamorphoses, Paintbrush, Paragraph, Potpourri, The Prose Poem, Seneca Review, Sparrow, and Visions International.

PAMELA J. OLÚBÙNMI SMITH is Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha where she teaches English Composition, Humanities and Women's Studies courses in the Goodrich Scholarship Program and in the English Department. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and her research interests are in translation. Yorùbá language and literature, Anglophone and Francophone African and Caribbean literatures and Commonwealth literature. She is currently Secretary of the Association of African Women Scholars.

SHIRLEY SMITH holds a PhD from Harvard University and is Associate Professor of Italian at Skidmore College. She has published on Anna Maria Ortese, Anna Banti, and Francesca Duranti. Her article on "Lavinia Lost" (Italica, forthcoming) posits the text as musical score, in which the author/reader recreate the cadences of an eighteenth century score with the assistance of Zanetta and Orsola. Smith is currently writing a book on Italians in China in the early 20th century.

STEVEN K. SMITH is Associate Director of Global Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A former contract interpreter for the U.S. State Department, Smith has worked on a wide variety of translations and interpretations. He is also currently completing his dissertation in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Madison, on contemporary activist theater in the city of São Paulo, Brazil.

JEAN M. SNOOK is Associate Professor of German at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She has translated Else Lasker-Schüler's Concert (University of Nebraska Press, 1994), Luise Rinser's Abelard's Love (University of Nebraska Press, 1998), Evelyn Grill's Winter Quarters (Ariadne Press, 2004), and Gert Jonke's Homage to Czerny: Studies for a Virtuoso Technique (Dalkey Archive Press, 2008).

ANATOLY SOBCHAK Presently the mayor of St. Petersburg, Russia. He was among the dissident intellectuals demanding major political changes in the country's political system, which ultimately led to the dissolution of the Soviety Union.

MAHMUD SOBH was born in Safad, Palestine. In 1948, he was expelled from his homeland in the Nakba. Having read Ibn Zaydun's poetry as a child, he found that he shared the famous Cordoban poet's feelings of exile. Sobh went on to write his doctoral dissertation for the University of Madrid on Andalusian love poetry, focusing particularly on Ibn Zaydun and Wallada. In addition to translating and writing about classical Arabic poetry, he writes poetry in Arabic and Spanish. In 1985 he published an edition with translation into Spanish of Ibn Zaydun's poetry (Madrid: Instituto hispano-Ãrabe de cultura, 1985). He won the Premio Álamo de Poesia in 1975 and the Premio Vicente Aleixandre in 1978.

CHAE-PYONG SONG, Assistant Professor of English at Marygrove College in Detroit, Michigan, has taught postcolonial literatures in English, Asian literature, and literary theory. He has published on Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee, and English education in the age of globalization. He has also served as a columnist for Literature and Thought, a monthly literary review published in Korea.

JAN SONNERGAARD was born in 1963 and grew up in Virum near Copenhagen. He completed a Master's degree in literary studies and philosophy at Copenhagen University. In 1997 he burst upon the Danish literary scene with the short story collection Radiator, which soon also appeared in German, Italian, Norwegian, and Icelandic. His next collection, Sidste sondag i oktober, came out in 2000, and Jeg er stadig bange for Caspar Michael Petersen three years later, all with Gyldendal. An edition combining the three volumes was issued as Trilogien in 2004 and subsequently came out in Dutch. Since then Sonnergaard has published several new stories and produced a play, "Liv og dod pa Cafe Olfert Fischer," which was performed in fall 2006. He currently lives and writes in Copenhagen.

GÖRAN SONNEVI (1939- ) has published fourteen individual books of poems in addition to three collections, and he has translated the poetry of Ezra Pound, Paul Celan, Osip Mandelstam, and others into Swedish. He has won numerous awards and has received a life-time grant from the Swedish government, bestowed on 125 artists in honor of their contributions to the nation's culture. The first full book-length selection of his poetry in English was published in 1993 under the title A Child is Not a Knife: Selected Poems of Göran Sonnevi, edited and translated by Rika Lesser.

ADAM J. SORKIN's recent volumes of translation include The Bridge by Marin Sorescu, poems written over the last weeks of the poet's life (Bloodaxe Books), The Past Perfect of Flight: Selected Poems by Marin Sorescu (Romanian Cultural Institute Publishing House), and Lunacies by Ruxandra Cesereanu (Spuyten Duyvil / Meeting Eyes Bindery)—all published in 2004. Daniela Crasnaru's The Grand Prize and Other Stories (Northwestern UP), appeared in early 2005. Sorkin is the recipient of an NEA Poetry Fellowship in Translation for 2005-06.

FERNANDO SORRENTINO is an active and well known Argentine writer, contributing to journals, newspapers, and e-zines as well as publishing books. His novel Sanitary Centennial, is available in English, as are numerous short stories that have appeared in anthologies or on various websites. He has also published two books of interviews: Siete conversaciones con Jorge Luis Borges (1974) and Siete conversaciones con Adolfo Bioy Casares (1992). He contributes essays on a regular basis to the Buenos Aires daily La Nación and to Trujamán, a Spanish online journal specializing in issues related to literary translation. A new collection of his short stories is coming out soon in Spain.

ERSI SOTIROPOULOS is a fiction writer and poet from Greece. She has published ten books of fiction, seven of which are novels, and one book of poetry. Her novel Zigzag Through the Bitter-Orange Trees was the first novel to win both the Greek National Literature Prize and the Book Critics Award. It was subsequently translated into French, Spanish, German, Swedish, and English. In addition to her fiction and poetry, Sotiropoulos has written scripts for film and television and participated in exhibitions of visual poetry. She lives in Athens.

MILADA SOUCKOVÁ (born Prague, 1899, died Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1983) Novelist, short story writer, poet and literary scholar, Soucková was the most complete and cosmopolitan Czech woman of letters in her time. Her literary career runs the span of years represented by the nine poets in her section. In 1934, her novella, První Písmena (First Letters), immediately admitted her into the Prague Linguistic Circle. Her experiments with the novelistic form anticipate the postmodernist assault on the narrative line. The poems presented here come from her last volume of verse, Sesity Josefiny Rykrové (The Notebooks of Josephine Rykrová, 1981). In a prose coda to another poem in the collection she writes (in English, next to her Czech poem): "Since I was a teenager I wanted to be a writer. I preferred prose and I never though I could write poetry. I preferred prose because it spoke of people other than myself." Yet she did write poetry, publishing five volumes during her years in Cambridge. The Notebooks, the most original of them, cast autobiography into a form that mixes poetry with prose comment, in a mutual exchange of attributes. The speaker, moving in and out of her chosen persona, notes the patina on lived-in things and places, searching for the elusive present through layers of memory.

KARIN SPEEDY has recently completed a doctorate in French Studies and currently teaches French at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Her research interests include French and Creole linguistics, cross-cultural communications and literary translation.

SAVIANA STANESCU was born in Bucharest in 1967. A unique dramatic voice, postmodern, feminist, humorous, and sly, she is a poet and playwright; she is also a drama critic, a cultural journalist with a TV talk show, and an editor at the Romanian Literature Museum, Bucharest. Stanescu has published two books of poetry, Love on Barbed Wire (1994) and Advice for Housewives and Muses (1996), one book of what the author calls a "stagy poem," Outcast (1997), as well as a play, The Inflatable Apocalypse (2000), which won Best Play of the Year in Bucharest. Her dramatic works have been performed or presented as readers' theater in Bucharest, Cluj, Galati, and Tîrgu Mures, Romania; Ruhr and Munich, Germany; and Paris. After grants in England and Vienna, she is coming to NYU this fall on a Fulbright fellowship in performance studies.

CARMINE STARNINO is a Montreal poet, critic, and editor. Forthcoming in 2004 are his book of criticism on Canadian poetry, A Lover's Quarrel, from Porcupine's Quill Press, and, from Gaspereau Press, his third book of poems, With English Subtitles. Carmine's first book, The New World (Vehicule Press, 1997), was nominated for the 1997 QSPELL A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry, the 1998 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book, and was selected by Quill & Quire as one of the best Canadian books of 1997. His second book, Credo (McGill-University Press, 2000), won the 2001 Canadian Authors Association Prize for Poetry and the 2001 David McKeen Award for Poetry. His poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in a large number of national and international publications. Since 2001 he is also the poetry editor for Vehicule Press's Signal Editions.

The Roman poet STATIUS (PUBLIUS PAPINIUS STATIUS) was born at Naples, but lived and wrote at Rome. He was roughly contemporary with the Emperor Domitian (51-96 CE), during whose reign (81-96 CE) he composed all his works. These include the Thebaid, an epic about the war between the sons of Oedipus for the throne of Thebes; the Silvae, a collection of occasional poems; and the unfinished Achilleid, an epic on the life of the hero Achilles. The Silvae celebrate the private lives and public careers of his friends and those in power, including the Emperor. Typically these are long poems and often contain marvelously detailed descriptions—one friend's villa on a cliff overlooking the Bay of Naples, another's villa straddling a river at Tivoli, a newly installed colossal equestrian statue of the Emperor, and so on. Statius pioneered this kind of descriptive poetry and was the first Roman poet to celebrate luxury rather than condemn it. These poems also sometimes include witty mythological vignettes in which the gods intervene in the lives of Statius' friends, as when Venus plays matchmaker between a fellow-poet and his bride-to-be. "The Insomniac's Prayer" (Silvae 5.4, usually titled "Sleep") seeks divine intervention rather than telling about it, and is also unusual in being both brief and personal.

PAUL STATT holds a BA in European Studies from Amherst College. He has taught mathematics at the high school level, edited computer magazines, and written essays and reviews for trade publications. He is currently the director of Media Relations at Amherst College. This is his first published translation.

ILAN STAVANS Novelist and critic, teaches at Amherst College and is currently editing The Oxford Book of Latin American Essays. His books include The Hispanic Condition (Harper Collins) and The Invention of Memory and Other Stories (University of New Mexico Press).

ELENA STEFOI is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Starting Line (1996), from which these poems are taken. Other titles include Daily Rehearsal (1986), Sketches and Stories (1989), and A Few Details (1990). Her work has been honored by the Romanian Writers' Union and she was one of the four Romanian poets who appeared in Michael March's groundbreaking Penguin Anthology, Child of Europe. She has been an editor of the important political-cultural journal Dilema and a correspondent for Radio France (with daily reports from Bucharest) and the French language L'Invitation in Bucharest. Until early 2000, she was General Consul at the Romanian Consulate in Montréal, Québec. Her poetry has previously appeared in English in Adam J. Sorkin's collaborative versions in Dominion Review, Frigate, Pif Magazine, Pennsylvania English, Apostrof and Romanian Civilization.

BRITA STENDAHL (1925- ) was born and educated in Sweden. She has written biographies in English of the Danish philosopher Sören Kierkegaard and of the Swedish nineteenth century author Fredrika Bremer, she has translated poems by the Swedish twentieth century poet Gunnar Ekelöf and others, has taught and lectured (among other things) on Scandinavian literature and history and together with Krister Stendahl on the subject of Humor and Religion (1991).

MARIO RIGONI STERN was born in 1921 in Asiago, in the Veneto, the site of his novel Giacomo's Seasons. He has published eleven books with Einaudi Press. His Il sergente nella neve (Sergeant in the Snow, 1953), considered one of the great novels about the Italians at the Russian front during World War II, is widely studied in Italian schools. He has won numerous awards, including the Campiello Prize, the Pen Club Prize, and for Giacomo's Seasons (1995) the Grinzane Cavour Prize in 1996.

ERNESTINE J. STIEBER was born and raised in Austria and lived a number of years in Switzerland. She moved to the U.S. in 1966 and graduated from Smith College in 1980 with a BA in French, having also studied German, Italian, and Spanish literature. She received an MA degree in French Language and Literature (1988) from Smith College with a thesis on La Voix dans la Poésie Lyrique de Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. From 1989 to 1996, she was a Lecturer in German at Smith College. Now retired, she lives in Northampton and does freelance editorial work in German and English.

THEODOR STORM (1817-1888) His work reflects the natural environment of his native North Sea littoral. A lawyer, administrator, and later a judge, as well as a prolific writer, Storm wrote lyric poetry and prose. His early novellas are lyrical, melancholy evocations of mood; his later work, characterized by bourgeois realism, deals with the tragedy of destiny, and might be compared to Thomas Hardy's novels.

CAMERON A. STRACHER Amherst '83; Harvard '87; U. of Iowa Writing Workshop '91. He lives in Iowa City where he practices law, teaches at the College of Law and is writing a novel.

ANNA STROWE was born in Ann Arbor, MI in 1981 and began studying Italian at Smith College. She finished her undergraduate work in 2003 with a BA in Italian Language and Literature, a minor in Mathematics, and a strong interest in pursuing translation studies. In 2006 she received her MA in Translation Studies with distinction from the University of Warwick in Coventry, England. She is currently an intern at the University of Massachusetts Translation Center.

KRISTIÁN SUDA (born 1946) He lives in Prague, where he teaches literature at the Film Institute (FAMU). Apart from poetry, Suda has published essays, short stories, and a novella (Roch, 1994). He is currently engaged on a critical edition in twelve volumes of the Collected Works of Milada Soucková. The two poems from his latest volume Závorky (Parentheses, 1998) display a rich subjectivity reined in by verbal discipline wielding the delicate scalpel of irony.

ROBERT G. SULLIVAN is Associate Professor of German and Scandinavian Studies and Adjunct Professor of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His teaching and scholarly interests include medieval spirituality, the Crusades, and the representation of the Muslim world in Europe during the Middle Ages and today. He holds degrees from McGill University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

GIOVANNA SUMMERFIELD is a native of Catania, Sicily. She holds a BA in Political Sciences from the University of Maryland, an MA in French Literature and a PhD in Romance Languages from the University of Florida. Currently she is working on a book on patois and linguistic pastiche and on a translation of poems and fables by Domenico Tempio. She is Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian and French and Director of the Languages Across the Curriculum program at Auburn University.

VICTORIA SURLIUGA (1972- ) grew up in Turin, Italy. She completed her undergraduate work at Mount Holyoke College, and earned an MA in Italian Studies from Brown University and a PhD from Rutgers University. She now teaches Italian Language and Literature at Rice University. She is the author of two poetry collections, Risposte del silenzio [Answers of Silence] (Piacenza: Farnesiana, 1994) and Allergia alla notte [Allergy to the Night] (Udine: Campanotto, 2000). She is currently writing a monograph on Giampiero Neri's poetry.

MARIO SUSKO Born in Croatia, he has plied between his native land and the U.S., where he currently teaches at Nassau Community College. The author of poetry in his own right, he is also known for many translations of American writers and as a compiler of anthologies.

ZUHURA SWALEH was born in Karai near Nairobi in 1947, and is the first female musician in Kenya to cut a taarah music album (1982). She has toured in East Africa, Europe and the Arab Gulf; currently she lives in Kisauni, Mombasa where she continues to perform.

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