MARIE-CÉLIE AGNANT was born in Port-au-Prince (Haiti) and has been living in Montreal since 1970. She has published two novels, La Dot de Sara (1995) and Le Livre d'Emma (2001), a collection of short stories, Le Silence comme le sang (1997), and a collection of poetry, Balafres (1994).

DAVID BALLS's Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology (1927-1984) received the MLA's Scaglione prize for literary translation in 1996. He has translated books by Pierre Loti and Pierre Louÿs; his poetry translations have appeared in many journals. In Cities (2001) is the most recent chapbook of his own poetry. Professor Emeritus of French and Comparative Literature at Smith College, his articles have appeared in journals such as Les Temps Modernes, Revue de Littérature Comparée, Modern Philology; on translation, in Germanic Review, Translation Review and elsewhere. He is Vice-President of the American Literary Translators Association.

NICOLE BALL was born, raised and educated in Paris, but lives in Massachusetts. She has translated two books from French to English (Catherine Clément, The Weary Sons of Freud and Maryse Condé, Land of Many Colors) a thriller from English to French (Jonathan Kellerman, La Sourde), and many smaller French texts in various journals. She teaches French at Smith College.

For GEORGES BAUDOUX, see article, within.

CALIXTHE BEYALA was born in Cameroon in 1960. Since 1987, she has published eleven novels, a number of which have been translated into English. She has won two prestigious French literary awards: the Prix François Mauriac for her novel Assèze l'Africaine (1994), and the Grand Prix du Roman de l'Academie Française for her novel Les Honneurs perdues (1996). One of the most influential African voices in Paris, where she lives, Beyala is the founder and president of Collectif Égalité, an organization dedicated to promoting fair representation of French people of African descent in the French media.

An Associate Professor of Language and Literature at Wenzao College of Languages, Taiwan, ASSELIN CHARLES has taught at several institutions in North America and in Haiti, and worked as a translator for the Quebec Ministry of Education. He has translated short stories by René Depestre and Antenor Firmin's nineteenth-century masterwork, De l'Égalité des races humaines.

Born in Egypt in a Lebanese-Syrian family, ANDRÉE CHEDID is a French citizen who has lived in Paris since 1946. Her work includes numerous volumes of poetry, short stories, novels and theater. She is one of the most prominent contemporary Francophone writers and is the recipient of the 2002 Bourse Goncourt for Poetry. Her writings are in French, but the mythology underlying them is both Western and non-European. "The Lost Garden" is a poem about the myth of Adam and Eve and Paradise Lost, but Chedid brings her own vision to this biblical and foundational myth of Western societies.

JULES CHOPPIN, JOSEPH DÉJACQUE, CHARLES CHAUVIN BOISCLAIR DELÉRY, EDGAR GRIMA: Francophone poets from nineteenth-century Louisiana: see introduction and biographies, within.

Born in Jacmel, Haiti, in 1926, the poet, activist, journalist, teacher, novelist and scholar RENÉ DEPESTRE has spent most of his life as an exile, first in France, then -- invited by Che Guevara -- in Cuba for many years, then again in France. Active in Casa de las Americas, an important center for Caribbean literature and culture, he broke definitively with Castro in 1978, and worked for UNESCO in Paris for the next ten years. Although no longer a Communist, he is known as a poet (and novelist) engagé. He has written many books of poetry, translated into half a dozen languages and often anthologized in French and Spanish. His Anthologie personnelle won the Prix Apollinaire in 1993 and his novel Hadriana dans tous mes rêves (1988) the Prix Renaudot, both in France.

FRANKÉTIENNE (the pen name of Franck Étienne) is a leading Haitian poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, stage actor, and painter. One of the major figures of contemporary literature in the Caribbean and Latin America, he has published some forty works in French and Creole. A founder of the Spiralist literary movement of the late sixties and early seventies, the trail-blazing sixty-seven-year-old Frankétienne is the author of the first important novel in Creole, Dezafi (1975), a narrative which mined all the esthetic possibilities of the Creole language and presaged the linguistic achievement of Pèlen-tèt (1978).

DAWN FULTON holds a Ph.D. in French Literature from Duke University, and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of French Studies at Smith College. Her field of research is Francophone Caribbean literature, and she has published articles on such writers as Maryse Condé, Michèle Lacrosil, Raphaël Confiant, and Edouard Glissant.

DANIELA HUREZANU is a Lecturer in French at Arizona State University. She has two books coming out in 2003: a translation from French into Romanian and a book of literary criticism in French. The translation of Chedid's poem stemmed from a group project in her graduate Literary Translation class: Sapna Bhagwat, Emile Legendre, Terri Schroth, Addie Olsen, Lori Yachimovitch.

MARJOLIJN DE JAGER translates from both French and Dutch, with a special interest in African literature. Her published translations include authors such as Calixthe Beyala, Ken Bugul, Tahar Djaout, Assia Djebar and Werewere Liking. Born in Indonesia and raised in the Netherlands, she has spent most of her adult life in the USA. She teaches at NYU's Center for Foreign Languages and Translation.

The Congolese writer KAMA KAMANDA, currently living in exile in Luxembourg, has published ten collections of poems, including La Somme du néant and Quand dans l'âme les mers s'agitent, four collections of tales, and one novel, Lointaines sont les rives du destin. His literary production has been published in Paris by L'Harmattan and Présence Africaine. Kamanda has won many prize for his work, including the Grand Prix littéraire de l'Afrique noire, the Prix Paul Verlaine, and the Prix Théophile Gautier de l'Academie Française.

From 2000 to 2001, STANLEY KUNITZ was U.S. Poet Laureate for the second time. He has edited the Yale Series of Younger Poets, is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and is founding president of Poets House in New York. According to the New York Times Book Review, he is "Perhaps the most distinguished living American poet." His Collected Poems was published by W. W. Norton & Company. He and his artist wife Elise Asher live in New York and in Provincetown, where he cultivates a renowned seaside garden.

NICOLAS KUTOVITCH . See article, within.

Born in Haiti, author and critic YANICK LAHENS studied at the Université de Paris and taught at the École Normale Supérieure of Haiti when she returned there. She has published essays: l'Exil. Entre l'ancrage et la fuite: l'ecrivain haïtien. Port-au-Prince: Éditions Henri Deschamps, 1990; short stories, Tante Résia et les dieux. Paris: L'Harmattan, 1994 and La petite corruption, Port-au-Prince: Éditions Mémoire, 1999 and Paris: Le Serpent à Plumes, 2001, which also published Dans la maison du père in 2000. Her work has been awarded a prize in Germany, the Literatur Preis.

YZABELLE MARTINEAU (Ph.D., McGill University) has taught French literature and Quebec culture in the University of Western Ontario. She works as a translator and editor for various publishing houses in Quebec and teaches Quebec literature and culture at Concordia University (Montreal). She has just published a book on plagiarism, Le faux littéraire: Plagiat littéraire, intertextualité et dialogisme (Quebec, Nota Bene, 2002). She has also published articles on plagiarism and New-Caledonian literature.

BEVERLY MATHERNE is director of the Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.) program in Creative Writing at Northern Michigan University in Marquette. Her fourth bilingual book of poetry, Le blues braillant (The Blues Cryin'), is available from Cross-Cultural Communications (CCC) in book and CD format, the latter with fiddle and slide guitar accompaniment. She has done over 120 readings and blues poetry performances across the United States, Canada, and France. Her translation of The Salt Kingdom, a book of poetry by Stanley Kunitz, is forthcoming from CCC in 2003.

GASTON MIRON (1928-1996) was born in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts in the Laurentians, north of Montreal. Some consider him the "national poet" of French-speaking Quebec. A passionate defender of Quebecois language and literature, and a fierce separatist, he composed a body of poetry at once intimate and combative, and applied the unique structures and sounds of Quebecois syntax and vocabulary to create a poetic language that became his signature. He is best known for his anthology, L'homme rapaillé (1970). Among his literary prizes are the Prix Apollinaire (France) and the prix du Québec, Athanase David.

THALIA PANDIRI, Editor-in-Chief of Metamorphoses, is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Smith College and Director of the Smith College Junior Year Abroad in Florence, 2002-2003. She has published numerous translations from Modern Greek and Medieval Latin.

GISÈLE PINEAU Born in Paris (1956); a truly transatlantic writer. As in her own childhood, her fictional characters go back and forth between France and the Caribbean, French and Creole, hope and disillusionment. Her novels include La Grande Drive des esprits (1993), L'Espérance-macadam (1995), L'Exil selon Julia (1996), L'Âme prêtée aux oiseaux (1998); she has published an essay, Femmes des Antilles (1998), and two children's books.

TEGAN RALEIGH studied French at Reed College, and is pursuing an M.F.A. in literary translation at the University of Iowa, where she also teache rhetoric.

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 stories 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.

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.

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

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.

CORINE TACHTIRIS obtained an M.F.A. in Translation from the University of Iowa under an Iowa Arts Fellowship. She specializes in literature of the French Caribbean. She recently completed a translation of La petite corruption, stories by Haitian author Yanick Lahens.

VÉRONIQUE TADJO, born in Paris of an Ivorian father and a French mother, was raised in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. She lives in Johannesburg, RSA, where she writes (poetry, novels and children's literature) and paints. L'Ombre d'Imana (The Shadow of Imana), published by Actes Sud in 2000, was written as a result of a trip to Rwanda (1998); there she was able to speak with many survivors of the genocide and thus become a witness to the unspeakable horror of what the population has suffered.

PAULA VARSANO is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Smith College. A specialist in classical Chinese poetry and poetics, she taught until 1997 at the Université de Montréal, where she became acquainted with the arts and literature of Québec. She has just completed a book on the Chinese poet Li Bo, Tracking the Banished Immortal: The Poetry of Li Bo (701-762) and its Critical Reception, currently in press. Her translation of François Jullien's book on Chinese philosophy and aesthetics, Éloge de la fadeur (In Praise of Blandness) is also due to appear this year.

CHRISTINA VANDER VORST is a doctoral student in Romance Languages at the University of Oregon who is doing research on sub-Saharan literature of war.

ABDOURAHMAN A. WABERI was born in Djibouti in 1965 and has lived in France since 1985. Two collections of short stories and his novel Balbala, a Djibouti trilogy, were published in Paris in 1996; short prose texts in Cahier nomade, 1994 and 1999, all by Le Serpent à Plumes. His poems Les nomades, mes freres, vont boire a la Grande Ourse appeared in 2000 and his "novelistic variations" the next year: Rift Routes Failes (Paris: Gallimard), as did a collection of short texts for Rwanda: Terminus. He won the Grand Prix litteraire de l'Afrique noire in 1996.

MAY GWIN WAGGONER, Laborde-Neuner Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Louisiana Lafayette, specializes in Louisiana Francophone language and literature and Louisiana Acadian music. Recent publications include Une fantaisie collective: anthologie du drame louisianais cadien (University of Louisiana Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, 1999). Her critical edition of Camille Thierry's Les Vagabondes will appear this fall. She is a published poet in French and American journals and has won numerous awards for her poetry and short stories. La mer attendra (poems) was published in Grenoble in 1990.

MYRIAM WARNER-VIEYRA. Born in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe (1939), she has lived in Senegal for more than thirty years. Her first novel was Le quimboiseur l'avait dit... (As the Sorceror Said), 1980; her second, Juletane (1982), is still in print in English translation. Both describe tragedies awaiting young women who leave Guadeloupe in search of intellectual or emotional fulfillment. Juletane's portrayal of polygamy problematizes Negritude's "return to Africa." Femmes echouées (1988), in which the story in this issue appears, was never previously translated into English.

M. LYNN WEISS is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at the College of William and Mary. She edited and presented two plays by francophone Louisiana Creole of color, Victor Séjour, The Jew of Seville and The Fortune Teller. She is the author of the study, Gertrude Stein, Richard Wright: The Poetics And Politics Of Modernism.

LAUREN YODER is the Chair of the French department at Davidson College, where he teaches African and Caribbean literature. He lived in Africa for five years. His translations of a book of tales by Kama Kamada (Tales Vol. 1) and a collection of Kamada's poems (Wind-Whispering Soul) appeared in 2001. He is currently translating a second volume of tales (La Nuit des griots) in which the story in this issue of Metamorphoses will appear.