Contributors to Issue 76

Dionne Brand is a poet, novelist, and essayist living in Toronto. Her latest novel, What We All Long For, was published earlier this year to great acclaim in Canada.

Richard Dittami is a writer, traveller, mechanic, and a retired construction worker. He lives in Pugwash, N.S., and Valparaiso, Chile (when he has airfare). He writes poetry, short fiction, and children’s books.

Geoff Dyer’s many books include But Beautiful, Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, and, most recently, The Ongoing Moment.

William Faulkner was the author of The Sound and the Fury; Go Down, Moses; and Light in August, among many other celebrated novels. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, and died in 1962.

Jim Harrison’s new collection of novellas, The Summer He Didn’t Die, has just been released by Grove/Atlantic. [NB: The Sarah MacLachlan mentioned in Mr. Harrison’s piece is a publishing type associated with building Anansi, not the Sarah McLachlan who is a singing type associated with “Building a Mystery.” Thank you, we’re here all week. Try the veal.]

Fanny Howe has published several books of fiction and poetry, and one book of essays, The Wedding Dress. Her most recent collection of poetry, On the Ground, was published by Graywolf Press. She has a forthcoming collection of prose from Nightboat Books.

Maya Jaggi is a profile writer for the London Guardian newspaper’s “Saturday Review,” and an award-winning journalist and critic. She reviews widely for the British press and radio, and has been a judge of literary awards, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. She wrote and presented the BBC TV documentary Isabel Allende: The Art of Reinvention (2003), and is an executive member of the writers’ association English PEN.

August Kleinzahler is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently The Strange Hours Travelers Keep, which won the 2004 International Griffin Poetry Prize and the 2004 gold medal for poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California. He lives in San Francisco.

Norman Levine was born in Poland in 1923, but soon emigrated to Ottawa. He served in the RCAF, and used to say that the war made him the writer he was. He loved Chekhov, and the company of painters in St. Ives, England. He was married twice and had three daughters. He died June 14, 2005.

Cecily Moôs is naked in Denmark.

Martin Helmut Reis specializes in black-and-white photography and alternative photographic processes. He lives in Toronto with a garage teeming with bicycles and a fridge full of film.

Damian Rogers was born and raised in suburban Detroit, and has worked at many fine establishments over the years, including Jack Cauley Chevrolet, Drag City Records, CosmoGIRL!, and Poetry magazine. She now lives in Toronto, where she is the arts editor at eye Weekly and aspires to be a competent gardener. These are her first published poems.

Henryk Ross was born in Warsaw in 1910. He was a general press photographer before World War II, and during the war was one of two official photographers in the Lodz Ghetto. As a member of the ghetto clean-up squad, Ross was still in the ghetto when it was liberated in 1945 and was able to reclaim the photographs he had buried there. Ross catalogued his photographs in 1987, and died in Israel in 1991.

Oliver Sacks is the author of nine books, including Awakenings and Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. He lives in New York City, where he is a clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, adjunct professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine, and consultant neurologist to the Little Sisters of the Poor.

Kenneth Sherman’s book-length poem Black River is forthcoming from Porcupine’s Quill. His essays have appeared in AGNI, Partisan Review, and Queen’s Quarterly, and he has been a frequent contributor to this journal.

Esta Spalding’s most recent book of poetry is The Wife’s Account (House of Anansi Press). She has never been locked in an outhouse by a gorilla or a baboon, although she is an editor at Brick and does come to the meetings.

Donna Tartt is a novelist, essayist, and critic. Most recently, she is the author of The Little Friend (Vintage). Her first novel, The Secret History, has been published in twenty-three languages.

Colm Toíbín’s five novels include The Blackwater Lightship and The Master.

Eleanor Wachtel is the host of CBC Radio’s Writers & Company and The Arts Tonight. Three collections of her interviews have been published: Original Minds (HarperCollins), Writers & Company (Knopf Canada and Harcourt Brace U.S.), and More Writers & Company (Knopf Canada).

Darren Wershler-Henry lives and writes in Toronto. His yellow Labrador retriever, Georgia, does not type, but is reasonably adept with the DVD remote control.

Marlena Zuber is a freelance illustrator and artist. Her illustrations have appeared in the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, Ms. magazine, and Print magazine.