Contributors' Notes Ned Balbo's Lives of the Sleepers (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), received the Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize and ForeWord magazine's Book of the Year Award in poetry; his first collection, Galileo's Banquet, received the Towson University Prize for Literature. He is the recipient of two Maryland Arts Council grants in poetry and has published prose as well, including "My Father's Music," an essay on adoption, ethnicity, and popular culture, in Our Roots Are Deep with Passion: Creative Nonfiction Collects New Work by Italian-American Writers (Other Press, 2006).
Lynn Aarti Chandhok 's first collection, The View from Zero Bridge (Anhinga Press, 2007), won the 2006 Philip Levine Prize. She received the 2006 Morton Marr Poetry Prize from The Southwest Review and a 2007 Glenna Luschei Prize from Prairie Schooner. Her poems have appeared in journals including The New Republic, The Hudson Review, The Antioch Review, and The Missouri Review, on Poetry Daily, and in the anthologies Poetry Daily Essentials 2007 and Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House (forthcoming November 2008). She teaches high school English in Brooklyn, New York.
John W. Evans's poems appear in Boston Review, Best New Poets 2006, Poetry East, and Hayden's Ferry Review. He writes a blog at http://howtolikeit.blogspot.com. He will be a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University this fall.
Rob Griffith is the editor of Measure. His work has appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and The Oxford American, among others. His latest book is A Matinee in Plato’s Cave (2008).
Stephen Kampa has had poems published in The Southwest Review, Smartish Pace, The Sewanee Theological Review, and Measure. He currently lives in Baltimore.
Len Krisak's latest book is a complete translation of The Odes of Horace (Carcanet, 2006). The recipient of the Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, and Robert Frost prizes, he is a four-time champion on Jeopardy!
A. McHugh has been educated at The Ohio State University, Boston University and, most recently, at the University of Arkansas, where she is currently pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing; additionally, she is a co-editor of Linebreak. She most enjoys thinking about the things she should be doing, but is—in fact—not. She finds this most pleasurable while drinking whiskey..
Susan McLean is a professor of English at Southwest Minnesota State University. Her poetry chapbook, Holding Patterns, was published in 2006 by Finishing Line Press. Her poems and translations from Latin and French have appeared in Measure, Arion, Literary Imagination, and elsewhere.
Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), Lord Chancellor of England, was "a man of an angel's wit and singular learning. . . . a man of marvelous mirth and pastimes," according to Robert Whittington in 1520. As a young man, More translated many epigrams from the Greek Anthology into Latin, as well as composing humorous Latin epigrams of his own. The great Dutch humanist Erasmus dedicated his Encomium Moriae (Praise of Folly) to his friend More, the title punning on More's name. More reportedly made jokes even at his own execution, when he was beheaded for refusing to take an oath that would recognize King Henry VIII, not the Pope, as head of the Church in England.
Rick Mullin is a business journalist and painter whose poetry has appeared in print and online journals including Umbrella Journal, Measure, Light Quarterly and The Shit Creek Review. His Chapbook, Aquinas Flinched, is available from Modern Metrics.
Richard Newman is the author of the poetry collection Borrowed Towns (Word Press, 2005) and several chapbooks, most recently 24 Tall Boys: Dark Verse for Light Times (Snark Publishing/Firecracker Press, 2007). His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry, Boulevard, Crab Ochard Review, Pleiades, Poetry East, The Sun, and 32 Poems. He lives in St. Louis, where he edits River Styx and directs the River Styx at Duff's Reading Series.
Francis Raven is a graduate student in philosophy at Temple University. His books include Shifting the Question More Complicated (Otoliths, 2007), Taste: Gastronomic Poems (Blazevox 2005) and the novel, Inverted Curvatures (Spuyten Duyvil, 2005).
Although most famous for his verse sequences Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (Austrian-born, 1875-1926) achieved his breakthrough transitional work in the New Poems of 1906/07, a large collection of “thing poems” and portraits that brought late-nineteenth century poetic sensibility to the frontiers of the modernist movement represented by his rough contemporaries Eliot and Yeats. These pieces, artfully sequenced, almost all employ rhyme and meter (many are sonnets) to meditate on the essence of the material world. In some sense, Rilke may be said to have seen into the metaphysics of plants, animals, cathedrals, and statuary (he was for a brief time personal secretary to Rodin). The three translations below follow Rilke’s original rhyme schemes, and, as much as possible in English, his meters.
David J. Rothman lives near Boulder, Colorado with his family. In academia but not of it, he teaches part-time at the University of Colorado and publishes poetry, essays and journalism on a wide range of subjects, from film theory, to education, to mountain sports. He is a co-founder of the Crested Butte Music Festival, which he ran for several years, and has worked as a small press publisher and editor, a private school dean and headmaster, a musician, and the executive director of a small scholarly group, The Robinson Jeffers Association.
Sarah J. Sloat grew up in New Jersey, and after university lived in China, Kansas and Italy. For more than 16 years, she’s lived in Germany, where she’s an editor for a news agency. Sarah’s poetry has appeared in Third Coast, Caffeine Destiny, Barn Owl, Bateau and Front Porch, among other publications.
François Villon, a thief, murderer, and perhaps the original poète maudit, was born in 1431, probably in Paris. After a life of crime, Villon was sentenced to die on the gallows, and he wrote the translated ballade as an appeal for his life to King Charles VII. Though the poem successfully spared Villon’s life, he was sentenced to banishment and, after leaving Paris in 1463, was never heard from again.
Ryan Wilson holds an MFA in poetry from The Johns Hopkins University and is currently continuing his graduate work at Boston University, where he recently received the Schmuel Traum Translation Prize for his versions of Rilke, Verlaine, and Jules Laforgue. Recent work has appeared in Measure and The Lyric.
Poet and fiction writer Marly Youmans lives in Cooperstown, New York. Her most recent novel is The Wolf Pit (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001 - The Michael Shaara Award), her most recent young adult fantasy is Ingledove (FSG, 2005), and her first book of poems is Claire (Louisiana State, 2003). Val/Orson, a novel of twins and treetops, will appear in September, 2008 from P. S. Publishing, U.K.