Contributors to Issue 75

Milton Acorn, “the People’s Poet,” was born in Charlottetown, P.E.I., in 1923. He spent his life writing and working in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, although he died at his birthplace, in 1986. He was the author of fifteen books of poetry, among them Jawbreakers and I’ve Tasted My Blood. In 1975, Acorn was awarded the Governor General’s Award for Poetry for The Island Means Minago.

Martin Berkovitz is a painter, draftsman, and printmaker. His work has been exhibited in Toronto, at the Pollock Gallery, the Moos Gallery (no relation), and Gallery One, as well as in the United States and Europe. He lives in New Mexico.

Alastair Bland, a twenty-six-year-old San Francisco native, is a frequent contributor to publications such as the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the British quarterly Petits Propos Culinaires, and the food website Egullet.com. His writing often details his travels, from living off the land in Baja, California to his two-thousand-mile “sustainable living” bike trip. Bland has a degree in anthropology and geology from U.C. Santa Barbara.

Roo Borson’s Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2004 and won the Governor General’s Award. With Kim Maltman and Andy Patton, Borson is a member of the collaborative writing group Pain Not Bread, whose Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei was published in 2000 by Brick Books.

Born in England, Rosalind Brackenbury now lives in Key West, Florida. Her latest novel is The House in Morocco, published by Toby Press in 2003, and she has just finished the novel The Third Swimmer.

Amit Chaudhuri has written four novels (the most recent of which is A New World), a book of short stories, and an acclaimed critical study of D. H. Lawrence’s poetry. Chaudhuri has won several awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Indian government’s highest literary honour, the Sahitya Akademi Award.

Kevin Connolly was one of the founding editors of what, the seminal magazine of arts and criticism that ran between 1984 and 1990. He has published three collections of poetry, the most recent of which, drift, has just been released by House of Anansi Press.

In March 2004, Brad Cran was awarded the inaugural Vancouver Arts Award commission in writing and publishing. He is currently at work on the book-length version of Cinéma Vérité.

Rackstraw Downes’s work can be found in the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1999 he was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York.

Michael Elcock lives on Vancouver Island with his wife Marilyn Bowering. His non-fiction book A Perfectly Beautiful Place has recently been published by Oolichan Books, and is distributed by the University of Toronto Press.

Carolyn Forché’s most recent book, Blue Hour (HarperCollins, 2003), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She teaches at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

Jim Harrison’s new collection of novellas, The Summer He Didn’t Die, will be released in August 2005 by Grove/Atlantic.

Michael Helm was born in the wilds of Saskatchewan. He is now an editor at Brick. His novels are The Projectionist and In the Place of Last Things.

Abbey Huggan is a part-time mature student in printmaking, bookbinding and papermaking at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto.

Apart from mounting art exhibitions, Av Isaacs published books and records of contemporary music and sponsored poetry readings, underground film screenings, mixed media concerts, and happenings. Over a period of close to fifty years, the Isaacs Gallery was a driving force of the Toronto art scene.

Pico Iyer, currently lost somewhere in the Himalayas, is the author, most recently, of Sun after Dark, a book of travels to the poorest corners of the world, and a novel, Abandon, which bears no relation at all to the work of John Fowles.

Nadine McInnis is the author of three books of poetry; a book of literary criticism; and a collection of short stories, Quicksilver, published by Raincoast Books in 2001. She has recently completed the poetry manuscript Two Hemispheres, which includes the essay by the same title. Her bilingual collection of new and selected poems, First Fire / Ce feu qui dévore, will appear in 2005.

W. S. Merwin, in over fifty years of writing, has published almost thirty books of original poetry, as well as works in translation. This year will see the publication of a new collection entitled Migration: Selected Poems 1951-2001, in addition to Present Company, a book of new poems. Both books will be published by Copper Canyon Press.

Leilah Nadir is an Iraqi-Canadian living in Vancouver, British Columbia. She has written a play, Heavenly Bodies; a collection of short stories, Bazaar; and a novel, Still. Since the invasion of Iraq, she has been a commentator on Iraq for the cbc, the Globe and Mail, and the Georgia Straight.

Kent Nussey is the author of The War in Heaven and is a frequent contributor to Brick. His most recent book is the novel A Love Supreme. He lives in Toronto.

Don Paterson, Scottish poet and musician, won the 2004 T. S. Eliot Award for Landing Light. He is poetry editor at Picador and teaches at the University of St. Andrews. He is the author, most recently, of The Book of Shadows, a collection of aphorisms.

Vasco Ray has lived with the BaAka for twenty years, recording their music and writing about them. There are many books on the BaAka and other pygmy groups in central Africa, and numerous recordings of their music. Two publications that combine text, photos, and music recordings are Seize the Dance! by Michelle Kisliuk and Bayaka by Louis Sarno.

Donald Richie, ex-curator of film at the New York Museum of Modern Art, is best known as the leading Western authority on Japanese film, but he has also written on many other aspects of the country in books such as The Inland Sea and the collection released in 2001 as The Donald Richie Reader. During his more than fifty years residence in Japan, Richie kept a detailed record of his life there, which has been collected in his book The Japan Journals.

Dominic Sansoni has worked as a photographer in Sri Lanka since 1980. He has just completed work on a book on Sri Lankan architecture and interiors, and will next finish work on a small book on colour in Sri Lanka. What he likes doing best is travelling in Asia with no agenda.

Norman Mailer has called Michael Silverblatt “the best reader in America.” As host of kcrw’s Bookworm, a show he created in 1989 for the station, Silverblatt has interviewed more than a thousand authors, covering the entire landscape of arts and letters. He lives in Santa Monica, California.

Susan Sontag, the American writer and critic, was the author of seventeen books, among them, Against Interpretation, and The Volcano Lover. Sontag’s novel In America won the American National Book Award in 2000. She died in December of 2004, at the age of seventy-one.

Chris Ware is the author of Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, which received the Guardian First Book Award in 2001 and was also included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. He recently edited the thirteenth issue of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and a collection of his dismissible humorous material, The ACME Novelty Library, will be released in the fall.

Lawrence Weschler was a staff writer at The New Yorker for twenty years and is now the director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at nyu, where he has founded the magazine Omnivore. His most recent book, Vermeer in Bosnia, came out with Pantheon Books last year, and this fall McSweeney’s Publishing will release his new work, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences.

Christopher Zinn is the executive director of the Oregon Council for the Humanities. He has taught at Reed College, and lectures and writes frequently about American literature and culture.