AGHA SHAHID ALI (1949 - 2001) was most recently a member of the poetry faculty of the M.F.A. & Ph.D. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Utah, and has previously taught at Hamilton College and the University of Massachusetts. He has held visiting appointments at Princeton, SUNY-Binghamton, and Jammu (India). His seven collections of poetry include The Half-Inch Himalayas (Wesleyan University Press), A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (SUN/gemini Press), A Nostalgist’s Map of America (W. W. Norton), The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (Viking Penguin), and -- most recently -- The Country Without a Post Office (W. W. Norton), a collection that focuses on the current turmoil in his native Kashmir. He is also translator of The Rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz (University of Massachusetts Press) as well as the author of T. S. Eliot as Editor (UMI Research Press). His poems appear regularly in Antioch Review, Chelsea, Denver Quarterly, Field, Grand Street, London Magazine, The Nation, Paris Review, Poetry, Tri-Quarterly, and Yale Review. A recipient of Guggenheim and Ingram-Merrill fellowships, he has also won fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, and the New York Foundation for the Arts -- as well as a Pushcart Prize. He has recently finish editing Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English.

KAREN ALKALAY-GUT was born in London, England, during the last night of the Blitz and grew up in Rochester, New York. In 1972 she moved to Israel. She has published many books of poetry in English. Four books of her poems have also appeared in Hebrew translation. She has also translated poems from Hebrew, Yiddish and Arabic.

ARTUR ALLIKSAAR (1923-1966) studied law, but his career was cut short when Estonia was occupied by Germany and then the Soviet Union. He began writing when he was young and a few of his poems appeared in newspapers. In 1949 he was imprisoned by the Russians on questionable charges. After his release in 1957 he became an irreverent, bohemian habitué of the cafés in Tartu, Estonia’s university town. Despite repression by the Soviet authorities he saw the publication of a few more of his poems, and his writing took a turn away from the classical forms of his youth to free verse of limitless fantasy. Towards the end of his life, and while suffering from tuberculosis, he wrote one play, Island Without a Name, which he lived to see produced by a student group just before he died. After his death, more poems were published and his passion and recklessness inspired a new generation of poets. In 1997, in a free Estonia, Lavishing Sunlight, a complete collection of his poems, appeared and became a best seller.

WARREN ANDERSON (1920 - 2001) studied Classics as an undergraduate at Haverford College. In 1942 he began graduate school at Harvard University, but interrupted his education to fight in World War II. He returned to take an M.A. at Harvard and, after spending two years reading classical Greats at Oxford, to study as a doctoral student at Harvard under Werner Jaeger. A professor of Classics until 1967, he then went to the University of Iowa as a Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and from 1970 until he retired, he taught Comparative Literature and Classics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Critic, translator, a leading expert on ancient Greek music, he has translated Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, and the Character Sketches of Theophrastus (Kent State, 1970). His books include Matthew Arnold and the Classical Tradition (Michigan U.P.); Victorian Essays (a volume which he co-edited and to which he contributed); Ethos and Education in Greek Music: The Evidence of Poetry and Philosophy (Harvard U.P. 1966); and Music and Musicians in Ancient Greece (Cornell U.P. 1994).

GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE (1880-1918) was part of the avant-garde in France that included Picasso and Braque. His best-known lyric poems are collected in Alcools (1913) and Calligrammes (1918). His only play, Les Mamelles de Tirésias (1918) is one of the earliest examples of surrealism.

NICOLE BALL has translated books by Catherine Clement (The Weary Sons of Freud) and Maryse Condé (Land of Many Colors) into English from French. Most recently she has translated a Jonathan Kellerman thriller (Survival of the Fittest) into French. She currently teaches French at Smith College.

RON BANERJEE, poet, essayist and translator, is author of Far From You (Toronto, 1981); Poetry from Bengal (Unesco, 1989); L’Antica Fiamma (Galleria Pegaso Editore, 1995); and Sonnets for the Madonna (Florence, Maschietto & Musolino, 1999). Born in Calcutta, he was educated at Edinburgh, Rome and Harvard Universities. He has taught English and Comparative Literature at various American Universities, including Smith College and the Five-Colleges; and he has been a Fulbright Professor in India.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE (1821-1867), French symbolist poet and critic. Les Fleurs du mal (1857, enlarged 1861, 1868), the only volume of his poems published during his lifetime, was publicly condemned as obscene. Best known for these poems, which came to be recognized as a work of original genius, Baudelaire has been a major influence in the Western poetic tradition. A collection of poetic prose pieces was published posthumously as Petits poèmes en prose (1869). His criticism was collected posthumously in Curiosités esthétiques (1868) and L’Art romantique (1869).

MARTIN WILMOT BENNETT's collection of poems, Loose Watches, was published by the University of Salzburg Press. He has had three stories read on BBC World Service and other works appear in Modern Poetry in Translation, Stand, Wascana Review, and elsewhere. Some of his poetry is available on www.unf.edu/mudlark.

WOLF BIERMANN, born in Hamburg in 1936, moved to the German Democratic Republic in 1953. Banned from performing and publishing there since 1965, he was expatriated during a concert tour to West Germany in 1976, causing many East German artists to leave the country in his wake. This poet, singer/songwriter and essayist has been one of the most eminent and prickly literary figures and critics of Germany before and since the reunification in 1989. Biermann received the Nationalpreis for his work in 1998.

ANNIE BOUTELLE, born and raised in Scotland, was educated at the University of St. Andrews and New York University. Author of Thistle and Rose: A Study of Hugh MacDiarmid's Poetry, she has written numerous scholarly and popular essays. She teaches in the English Department at Smith College, whose Poetry Center she founded in 1998. Her sequence of poems based on the life of Celia Thaxter was a finalist for the 1999 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, and she has published poems in Poetry, Yankee, Ekphrasis, The Green Mountains Review, and The Hudson Review. Poems are forthcoming in The Larcom Review, American Poets and Poetry, Poet Lore, Iris, Painted Bride, and Nimrod.

ROSA ALICE BRANCO is completing a doctorate in the Psychology of Perception at the New University in Lisbon. She is an editor at the literary magazine Limiar. Her four collections of poetry are: Beloved Woman, Animals of the Earth, Short Monadology, and The Happy Hand. Some of her poems, translated by Alexis Levitin, appear or will appear in Prairie Schooner, Artful Dodge, The Hollins Critic, Osiris, and The Temple.

DIANA BROWN is Associate Professor at Dana College in Blair, Nebraska. She received her Ph.D. at L’Alliance Francaise, La Sorbonne. In 1996, her book-length translation into both English and Italian of Olga Bressano de Alonso’s Fugacidad y otros poemas was published in Argentina.

MANLIO CANCOGNI was born in Bologna of Tuscan parents but later transferred to Rome, where he completed his doctoral studies in history and philosophy and began publishing short stories before becoming special correspondent for L’Europeo, L’Espresso, Il Corriere della Sera, Il Giornale and later La Fiera Letteraria. At present he contributes to L’Osservatore Romano. He taught at Smith for twelve years, in the Italian Department. He has published about thirty books, winning some literary prizes (Bagutta, Campiello, Strega, Viareggio). 1999 saw the publication, in a bilingual edition, of his translation into Italian of Ron Banerjee’s Sonnets for the Madonna.

RAFFAELE CARRIERI was born in Taranto, Southern Italy in 1905. From adolescence he embarked on a life of travel and a variety of jobs, from taxman to art critic. Friendly with D’Annunzio in Italy and Blaise Cendrars and other figures of the avant garde in the Paris of the nineteen-twenties, he published several collections of poetry, and Mondadori published a volume of selected poems in 1976.

CHANG CHI, a T'ang Dynasty poet, contemporary of Li Po, Wang Wei and Tu Fu, was from a town now in the province of Hubei. Like other scholar-poets in China, he held a government office. His poetry integrates Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism.

EVA CLAESON was one of the founding editors of Metamorphoses and is still a contributing editor. She guest-edited a special issue on Swedish literature in Spring 2000. She has published several books of translations, and her translations of two works of poetic prose by Margareta Ekström will be published in 2001, as will the translation of the classic novel The Serious Game by Hjalmar Söderberg.

STEPHEN CLINGMAN is Professor of English and Director of the Interdisciplinary Seminar in the Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts. He has published a book on the South African Nobel Laureate, Nadine Gordimer, and edited a collection of her non-fiction. His most recent book, Bram Fisher: Afrikaner Revolutionary, won the Alan Paton Prize, South Africa’s premier award for non-fiction.

BARBRO DAHLIN was a psychiatrist, a poet and also a novelist. During the last years of her life she was almost blind, but continued to be very productive until her death last year. Her collections of poetry received excellent reviews. She lived in Stockholm. From the late fifties on she published ten collections of poetry and two novels. Eva Claeson’s translation of a chapter from Sundance , one of her novels, was published in the Scandinavian Review about 15 years ago, and her poems have been published in other literary journals including Metamorphoses.

PUROSHOTTAM LAXMAN DESHPANDE (1919-2000), writer, performer, and the "conscience" of Maharashtra, his State in India. A beloved figure, he was the winner of most of the prestigious State and National awards in his home country.

EMILY DICKINSON (1830-86), the reclusive Amherst poet underestimated during her lifetime, is now considered one of the greatest poets in American literature and perhaps the most original.

POLINA DIMCHEVA DIMOVA was born in Varna, Bulgaria in 1977 and began her undergraduate study at the English and American Studies Department at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria. She then transferred to Smith College where she graduated with a B.A. in Comparative Literature in 2001. While at Smith, she devoted a considerable amount of time to music, taking classes in violin performance and composition. In her senior year, she studied the literature of exile as a Kahn Institute Student Fellow. She will be attending the doctoral program in Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley this fall. There she will work in English, German and Slavic literatures, concentrating on poetry and searching for the sources of human creativity.

INNA FELDBACH is an Estonian citizen and a graduate of Tartu University. She has translated books, plays, and stories from English and Spanish to Estonian, including works of Sylvia Plath and Camilo José Cela.

ALESSANDRO FERACE was born in Bengasi (Libya) and lives in Florence. He works as editor in the publishing house La Nuova Italia, and is a poet as well as a translator.

COLA FRANZEN's 16 published books of translation to date include poetry, fiction, and scholarly work. She has also translated many essays on art cfriticism and photography. Authors whose creative work she translates regularly are Alicia Borinsky and Saúl Yurkievich, both Argentine born; Juan Cameron, Chilean; and Antonio José Ponte, Cuban. Recent publications include Horses in the Air and Other Poems, a bilingual selection of poems by Jorge Guillén, winner of the 2000 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets (City Lights); The Collapsible Couple, poems, bilingual, by Alicia Borinsky, in colaboration with the author (Middlesex University Press); and In the Cold of the Malecón, short stories by the Cuban writer Antonio José Ponte, translated in collaboration with Dick Cluster. More than 60 translations of Saúl Yurkievich's poetry and prose have appeared in journals in the United States, Canada, and England. Background Noise, poetry will be published by Green Integer/Sun & Moon as well as two small volumes of prose, Figurations and Spectacles.

ROBERT FROST (1874-1963) is arguably the most popular, beloved and widely anthologized American poet of the twentieth century, perhaps because his poems, ostensibly about the character, people and landscape of New England, seem accessible on the surface. Frost was imbued with a classical education, however, and recent criticism has brought to light how complicated, obscure and multi-layered many of even the most apparently simple poems are, if a reader knows enough to see and hear references to the emperor Augustus and to Virgil’s Aeneid in a poem about a dog named Gus, for instance, or to the Bacchae in a poem about grapes. Twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize (in 1924 and 1943), he received close to twenty honorary degrees, including D. Litt. honoris causa from Oxford and Cambridge; in 1963 he was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry.

MADELEINE GAGNON was born in 1938 in Amqui, Québec. Member of PEN International, and recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the 1991 Governor General's Prize for Poetry for Chant pour un Québec lointain, Gagnon has published over twenty books of poetry and prose. Her most recent book, Les Femmes et la guerre (VLB Éditeur, 1999; Éditions Fayard, 2001) develops the theme of women and history in the context of contemporary political reality. Rêve de pierre (VLB Éditeur, 1999) explores the interrelationship of womankind and nature and the role of political suppression and violence in creating a people's aesthetic consciousness.

MICHAL GLOWINSKI is a professor at the Institute of Literary Research at the Polska Akademia Nauk (Polish Academy of Sciences) in Warsaw and the author of over twenty books, with subjects ranging from literary criticism and theory to the language of communist propaganda to Greek mythology.

SUNIL GOKHALE holds a doctorate in Physics and a diploma in Journalism. He has contributed to various publications on social and cultural themes in Marathi (Sakal, Maharashtra Times) and English (Times of India, Indian Express).

ALMUNDENA GRANDES was born in Madrid, Spain in 1960. She is the author of four novels: Las edades de Lulú, for which she won the prize La Sonrisa Vertical for erotic fiction and which was later made into a film directed by Bigas Luna; Te llamaré Viernes; Malena es un nombre de tango, later made into a film directed by Gerardo Herrero; and Atlas de geografía humana. She is also the author of a collection of short stories entitled Modelos de mujer. In 1997 she was awarded the Rossonoe d’oro prize in Italy.

SAMUEL GROLMES is a professor of Japanese at the College of San Mateo, CA. He was a Fulbright Instructor in Japan, and later taught American Literature at Tezukayama Gakuin University, Osaka. He has published numerous poems in literary journals in America and Japan. In collaboration with his wife Yumiko Tsumura, he has published translations of modern Japanese poetry and fiction in literary journals as well as New Directions Annuals. Also with Yumiko Tsumura, he has published Poetry of Ryuichi Tamura, 1998, and Tamura Ryuichi Poems 1946-1998. A collection of translations of the poetry of Kazuko Shiraishi, Let Those Who Appear, is due out from New Directions in 2002.

KYRIAKOS HARALAMBIDIS has published eight volumes of poetry, and has won both the Cypriot and the Greek National Book Awards for poetry. Until recently, Haralambidis was Director of Cultural Programming at Cyprus State Radio. He lives in Nicosia.

ZYGMUNT HAUPT (1907-1975), multilingual author and painter, like other gifted Poles had a promising career interrupted by World War II and the absorption of his country into the Soviet sphere of influence. In 1947 he moved to America, and spent most of his working life as a translation editor for the U.S. Information Agency in Washington. But he continued to write, paint, and indulge the love of horses that came from his training in the Polish cavalry. His stories appealed to readers in America and Poland, and his reputation was extremely distinguished among Polish emigrés in France.

YEHUDIT BEN ZVI HELLER was born in Petach-Tikva, Israel, and was educated in Jerusalem, where she worked as a teacher specializing in learning and behavioral problems in female adolescents. Since 1984 she has resided in Amherst. At the University of Massachusetts, she served for many years as Associate Director of the Hillel Foundation and has also taught numerous courses on myth and folklore and on Jewish and Israeli literature. Her poetry in Hebrew has appeared in a number of Israeli literary reviews. Yehudit's first book of poetry, The Woman in a Purple Coat, was published in 1996 by Eked Publishing, Tel Aviv; a second collection of poems in Hebrew will be published in the fall of 2001.

JAYADEVA lived and wrote in Bengal in the 12th century and was the most illustrious of the "five jewels" at the Court of Lakshman Sen of Gaur. His lyrical masterpiece Gitagovinda stands as the last great work in Sanskrit poetic tradition. Songs from it, which he set to music, have been sung all over India for centuries and are still sung today. Again, since the middle ages, yearly festivals in both Bengal (Kanduli, his birthplace) and Orissa (which also claims him), celebrate Jayadeva through recitals from the Gitagovinda, enacting the Krishnalila through his poetry and music.

MICHEL JOURDAIN (1938- ) was born in Paris, studied architecture, and taught French in Algeria for eight years until forced to return to France in the late nineteen-sixties. Until his retirement in 1998, he was Professor of Classics in Paris. An author of novels, experimental theater, experimental prose and poetry, he has consistently challenged aesthetic norms and political complacency.

HA-YUN JUNG is the Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Creative Writing Institute. Her fiction has appeared in Story Quarterly, Prairie Schooner and Best New American Voices 2001. She has also won the 31st Korean Literature Translation Award.

JAAN KAPLINSKI (1941- ) is the only living Estonian poet who has achieved an international reputation. His poems have been translated into a dozen languages. Best known abroad for The Same Sea in Us All (Portland 1985, London 1990), at home he is recognized for his stories, philosophical essays and political writings, as well as his poems. Upon Estonia’s regaining independence he served in its parliament from 1992 to 1995. A gifted linguist, he wrote a book of poems - I am the Spring in Tartu (Vancouver 1991) - directly in English, and has translated literary works from French, Spanish, English, Swedish and Chinese to Estonian. He has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

CLARENCE KENNEDY (1892-1972) was for all his working life professor of Art History at Smith College. He was photographer to Duveen, Mackay, et al., and known especially for his photographs of sculptures from the Italian Renaissance. He was particularly interested in making reproductions of art of high quality available to the general public and was consultant to Polaroid, Eastman Kodak and Meriden Gravure.

MELINDA KENNEDY was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, and spent much of her youth in Italy. Editor, translator, writer, she retired from teaching in 1989 and thereafter became co-editor of Metamorphoses. Her poems have appeared in such journals as The Southern Review and The Massachusetts Review. She lives now in a former station in the Underground Railroad with her dog Simeon Aristides Doggett.

CHARLES KILLINGER is Patricia Havill Whalen Professor of History at Valencia Community College and adjunct professor of Italian history at the University of Central Florida. He has an M.A. from the College of William and Mary and a Ph.D. from Florida State University. A specialist in the history of modern Italy, he has published extensively on the subject in the United States and in Italy. He is the author of Rebel in Two Worlds: Gaetano Savemini in Italy and America and A History of Italy.

STEPHANIE KRAFT (1944-) A journalist who first visited Poland in 1988, she has returned regularly and observed the redevelopment of the country's economy and politics in the post-communist era. She holds a doctorate in English from the University of Rochester, with a specialty in Victorian literature, and is translating Emancypantki, a novel about feminism by the eminent nineteenth century Polish author, Boleslaw Prus.

ALEXIS LEVITIN has published translations of poetry (from Portuguese) in 200 magazines, including Partisan Review and American Poetry Review, and 15 books in translation, including seven volumes of poetry by Eugenio de Andrade, which won him the first Pessoa translation prize from Columbia University. His translation of Soulstorm by Clarice Lispector was published by New Directions. His work has been supported by grants from the Witter Bynner Poetry Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.

OSIP MANDELSTAM (1891-1938) is one of the major Russian poets of the 20th century. Mandelstam’s first collection (Stone ) was published in 1913. Like Akhmatova, he was a member of the Acmeist movement. Mandelstam’s prose works include "The Noise of Time" and "The Egyptian Stamp." He was arrested during the Stalinist terror and died in a Soviet labor camp in 1938. His work, translated into many languages, has had extraordinary impact on several generations of Russian readers.

MARGALIT MATITIAHU writes poetry in Hebrew and Ladino. She has published research articles on the Ladino press in Thessaloniki, Greece between 1860-1940, and has been a regular participant for 25 years on Israel’s Radio Ladino program. Since 1986, she has lectured at Bar-Ilan University. She is the winner of the Fernando Jeno Award (1994), the international prize for Jewish literature given by the Jewish community of Mexico; of the Ateneo de Jaen Award (1996), the international literature prize for poetry in Jaen, Andalusia, Spain; and of the Priminster Literature Award (1999), Israel. Since 1986 she has served as secretary-general of the Writers’ Union in Israel and she has participated in the International Congress of Poets all over the world since 1991. She has published numerous collections of poetry in both Hebrew and Ladino, in Spain and Israel.

VLADIMIR MAYAKOVSKY (1893-1930) Leading poet of the Russian Revolution in the early Soviet period. At the age of fifteen he joined the Russian Democratic Workers' Party and was repeatedly jailed for subversive activity. He began to write poetry in 1909 while in solitary confinement. He later attended the Moscow Art School, joined the Russian Futurist movement and became one of its leading spokesmen. 1912 saw the publication of a manifesto, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. By 1913 he was writing poetic dramas and major poems, using colloquial language and introducing technical innovations. He developed a declamatory, didactic style suitable for public recitation, and was extremely popular, particularly after the Revolution. In 1924 he wrote a 3000 line elegy on the death of Lenin, but in the last years of his life he openly criticized the government, and Stalin, in satirical plays and other works. He committed suicide in 1930.

MARTIN MCKINSEY collaborated with K. Haralambidis on translations of his poetry as a Visiting Fellow of the Program in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University. His translations of Modern Greek include Late into the Night: The Last Poems of Yannis Ritsos (Oberlin UP) and Andreas Franghias’ The Courtyard, which won the 1996 Greek State Prize for Translation.

CHRISTOFOROS MILIONIS (1932-) was born in Ioannina, Greece. A classical philologist and literary critic as well as a prolific writer of fiction, he has taught in Greece and Cyprus and served on the editorial boards of several pioneering literary journals. In 1986 he won the First National Short Fiction Prize for his collection of short stories, Kalamas and Acheron. In 2000 he received the Diavazo Magazine prize for fiction for his collection The Ghosts of York. In addition to several volumes of critical essays, he has published two novels, a collection of novellas, and nine collections of short stories. His work has been translated into Russian, Italian, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Hungarian and English.

ANDREA MOORHEAD was born in 1947 in Buffalo, New York. Editor of Osiris and co-director of the Deerfield Academy Press, Moorhead publishes poetry and prose in both English and French. Her most recent collections of poems are From A Grove Of Aspen (1997, University of Salzburg) and le vert est fragile (1999, Écrits des Forges). Her translations include The Edges of Light, selected poems of Hélène Dorion (1995, Guernica Editions) and Updates, poems by Françoise Hàn (1999, Éditions en Forêt/Verlag Im Wald). She is preparing a translation of Madeleine Gagnon's Rêve de pierre.

FATIMA MUJCINOVIC is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Westminster College, Salt Lake City. She was born and raised in Sarajevo, Bosnia, and in 1994 she was forced to leave her country and come to the U.S. to continue her undergraduate studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

JEONG-HUI OH is one of the most acclaimed writers of the post-Korean War generation and her short stories often deal with the interior landscape of women. Since making her debut in 1968, she has published four short story collections, the latest one in 1994, and has won many prestigious literary awards in Korea including the Yi Sang Literature Award in 1979.

LYDIA ORAM holds a degree from Smith College and is a graduate student in Italian and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

THALIA PANDIRI, Editor-in-Chief of Metamorphoses, is a Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Smith College. She has published translations from Modern Greek and Medieval Latin.

KONSTANTIN PAVLOV was born in Popovo, later Vitoshko, now at the bottom of Studena Lake, Bulgaria in 1933. He studied law at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria. He was an editor of Radio Sofia, the Publishing House Balgarski Pisatel, and Literaturen Front. He also worked in Bulgarian cinematography. Poet, satirist and screenplay writer, he wrote the screenplays of many Bulgarian movies, and published six books of poems: Satires (1960), Verses (1965), Old Things (1983), Appearance (1989), You, Sweet Agony (1991), and the anthology of his poetry Elegiac Optimism (1993). For about twenty years, he was banned from the public literary space in Bulgaria, persecuted, fired, and left in isolation. His works were frowned upon and, consequently, consciously overlooked and not published. He was a contemporary of the sixties but the rejection of his poems at that time dislocated him into the nineties when his poetry could finally be published and read.

INA PFITZNER received a Ph.D. in French Literature from Louisiana State University. She continued work in Paris this summer, with a scholarship from the Institut de Washington, on the subject of exile and translation in works by Panaït Istrati, Samuel Beckett and Paul Celan. Her literary translations have appeared in Chelsea and Exquisite Corpse.

KATHLEEN RETTIG is Assistant Professor at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska and has worked as Chief Editor of the Nebraska English Journal, The Midlands Conference Journal and the Patrick Kavanagh Journal. She has published on Shakespeare and contemporary women authors. She is the interim director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Co-major at Creighton University.

RAINER MARIA RILKE (1875-1926) was born and educated in Prague, where he published his first collection of poems in 1894. He traveled widely in Europe before arriving in Paris in 1902 to work as secretary for the sculptor August Rodin. He kept this job for less than a year, but lived and wrote in the city, supported by patrons, until 1909. His signature poetic compositions, Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, were both published in 1923. It was only after this achievement that Rilke, living in Switzerland and battling terminal illness, wrote his cycle of French poems about the rose. Les Roses was published, along with another French cycle, Les Fenêtres, in 1927. His French verse remains obscure relative to his well known and extensively translated German work.

PIERRE DE RONSARD (1524-1585) was courtier-poet who began his career as a page and then a squire at the French court, but became leader of the Pléiade at the Collège de Coqueret. As poet royal, he wrote odes in the Pindaric and Horatian tradition, Petrarchan sonnets, elegies, eclogues, songs, love lyrics, patriotic poems, and even attempted an epic (La Franciade) which remained unfinished. The most famous of his love poems appear in Sonnets pour Hélène (1578).

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

KAZUKO SHIRAISHI (1931- ) is one of Japan's foremost poets. She has published more than twenty books of poetry (the first, The Town That Rains Eggs, at the age of twenty in 1951), and numerous volumes of essays. A member of the VOU surrealist group as a very young student, in the sixties she emerged as an independent voice, a proponent of freedom of expression, and of uninhibited spiritual and sexual liberation. She began a jazz-poetry revolution in Japan, influenced by such poets as Kenneth Rexroth and Allen Ginsberg. In 1975, New Directions published Seasons of Sacred Lust, a volume of translations of her poetry edited by Kenneth Rexroth. A volume of her poetry in German translation, with an introduction by Gunter Kunert, has appeared earlier this year in Berlin. She has been invited to many international poetry festivals and conferences throughout the world and has been the recipient of many prestigious awards.

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

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.

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

ADAM J. SORKIN has published 13 books of translation and numerous poets and poems in over 200 literary journals. Recent books include Sea-Level Zero, poems by Daniela Crasnaru, from BOA Editions (1999); The Triumph of the Water Witch, prose poems by Ioana Ieronim from Bloodaxe (2000); and Bebop Baby by Mircea Cartarescu in the Poetry New York series (1999). His collaborative translation with Christina Illias-Zarifopol of Marta Petreu poems won the 1999 Kenneth Rexroth Memorial Translation Prize, and Liliana Ursu’s The Sky Behind the Forest (Bloodaxe, 1997, with Ursu and Tess Gallagher) was short-listed for the Weidenfeld Prize. His translations of Stanescu's poems are out or forthcoming in The Temple and the Canadian literary magazine, Filling Station.

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.

LASZLO TIKOS, founding editor of Metamorphoses and professor emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, is a prolific translator, especially from the Russian. His books include Gogol's Art: A Search for Identity (Bati 1997).

ALAN TREI is an American of Estonian ancestry who has worked in advertising in the United States and Europe. A graduate of Columbia and Harvard Business School, he has written plays and articles and done commercial translation into English for Estonian companies.

YUMIKO TSUMURA was born and educated in Japan. After entering the PhD program at Kwansei Gakuin University, she moved to The University of Iowa to complete an MFA in Poetry and Translations at the Writer's Workshop. She has taught in universities in Japan and in America, and is currently a professor of Japanese at Foothill College in Palo Alto, CA. She has published original poems in English in various literary journals, and has collaborated with Samuel Grolmes in the translation of modern Japanese poetry and fiction. Her publications include Poetry of Ryuichi Tamura, 1998, and Tamura Ryuichi Poems 1946 - 1998. A collection of translations of the poetry of Kazuko Shiraishi, Let Those Who Appear, is due out from New Directions in 2002.

BORIS VIAN (1920-1959) Poet, novelist, playwright, translator, singer, jazz musician, composer and "Prince of the St.-Germain-des-Prés" artist quarter in Paris. As opposed to Sartre and others, Vian refused to be "engagé" and co-founded the Collège de Pataphysique to mock the literary establishment. Boris Vian has been an idol of French youth, especially for his surrealist love story L'Ecume des Jours (Froth on a Daydream) and for his anti-War song "Le déserteur." Suffering from a heart condition, Vian tried to sleep as little as possible to benefit from life to the utmost. He calculated that at the age of 40, he would have lived as long as someone 102 years old who had slept normally. "Je suis Snob" is one of his many recordings, and the translation is meant to be sung just as the original.

PETER WORTSMAN's translations include a critically-acclaimed edition of Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, by Robert Musil; the 19th century German Romantic classic, Chamisso’s Peter Schlemiel; an historic treatise in defense of freedom of expression, Recommendation Whether to Confiscate, Destroy and Burn All Jewish Books, by the 16th century German humanist Johannes Reuchlin (Paulist Press, 2000). Recipient of the 1985 Beard's Fund Short Story Award, he has also published a book of short fiction, A Modern Way To Die and a stage play, "The Tattooed Man Tells All."

SERGEY YESENIN (1895-1925) Russian lyric poet of the early Soviet period, whose suicide in 1925 had a large impact on other Russian poets and intellectuals at home and abroad.

SAÚL YURKIEVICH was born on November 27, 1931 in La Plata, Argentina, where he was educated and began his literary and academic career. His first books of poetry and literary criticism were published there. In the mid-1960s he moved to Paris where he was appointed professor of Latin American literature at the Université de Paris VIII, a post he still occupies. He has taught and lectured extensively at universities in Europe, Latin America, and in the United States at such institutions as the universities of Maryland, Pittsburgh, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Chicago, and most recently at UCLA. He was a close friend of Julio Cortázar, who named him in his will as executor of his papers. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the academic year of 1987-88 to work on the papers, a task that continues today. Throughout his career he has successfully combined writing both critical work as well as poetry and creative prose. He has published 15 volumes of poetry, the first in 1961 and the most recent, El sentimiento del sentido, (Ediciones ERA, México) in 2000. He has also published 14 volumes of criticism; two of the best known are Fundadores de la nueva poesía latinoamericana, 1971, enlarged and reissued in 1984 (Barcelona), and Summa crítica, 1998 (México). In addition to translations into English by Cola Franzen, three bilingual Spanish-French selections of poetry have appeared, and poems have been translated and published in German and Italian anthologies.

KARIM ZAIMOVIC was born in 1971 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He studied Fine Arts and Comparative Literature at the University of Sarajevo. His interest in journalism and creative writing manifested itself early; When he was only fourteen years old, he started working for Radio Sarajevo and the local paper Our Days. During the war in Bosnia, he worked on two novels and presented his creative writing on the independent radio station "Wall." in August 1995, three months before the final cease-fire, Karim was fatally wounded during a Serbian shelling of Sarajevo. He left behind two unfinished novels, numerous essays, short stories, newspaper articles, and artwork. His first collection of short stories and essays, The Secret of Raspberry Jam, was published posthumously and awarded a literary prize by the Soros Foundation.

SETH ZIMMERMAN is a professor of mathematics whose current areas of research are combinatorial geometry, probability densities, and anthropological simulations. His illustrated, rhymed translation of Dante’s Inferno is available on the web at http://home.earthlink.net/~zimls/.