Contributors to Issue 78

Brother Anthony of Taizé became a naturalized citizen of Korea in 1994 and lives in Seoul with other brothers of the Taizé community. A professor at Sogang University, he has translated more than twenty volumes of Korean poetry.

Baziju is a pen name of Roo Borson and Kim Maltman. Roo Borson’s most recent book is Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida; Kim Maltman’s is Technologies/Installations. Both are members of Pain Not Bread, whose most recent book is Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei.

John Berger is a novelist, essayist, and painter. Among his works are the trilogy of novels Into Their Labours, and Ways of Seeing, a collection of essays about how and why we view art. His most recent book is Here Is Where We Meet.

Sandow Birk’s recent books include In Smog and Thunder and Incarcerated. He has just completed a feature film, Dante’s Inferno, which was featured at several film festivals in 2006. Besides being a painter and visual artist, he is also an avid surfer. He lives in Long Beach, California.

After twenty or so books of a highly personal nature, very little is not known about Clark Blaise, and what little bit might still be out there is covered by the essay in this issue of Brick. He lives in New York and San Francisco, has retired from teaching, and now writes full-time.

Scott Carruthers was a co-founder and exhibiting artist in the Impure collective, and contributed work to the Toronto exhibition Quantal Strife (2006).

Gary Gach is the editor of the anthology What Book!?: Buddha Poems from Beat to Hiphop and the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Buddhism. He lives in California.

Barry Gifford’s novels include Wild at Heart, Night People, and Wyoming, and he has written the films Lost Highway and City of Ghosts, among others. His newest book of fiction, The Stars Above Veracruz, was published in January 2006 by Thunder’s Mouth Press.

Jim Harrison is a woebegone geezer writer who divides his year between the Mexican border and Montana. His new book is Saving Daylight from Copper Canyon Press.

Robert Hass is a poet and essayist. His poetry books include Praise, Field Guide, and Sun Under Wood. His forthcoming book of poems is tentatively titled Time and Materials.

Raoul Hausmann (1886–1971) was a leading Berlin Dadaist and a friend of the Hannover-based Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948), with whom he collaborated, travelled, and performed. Hausmann described their first meeting in 1918 as revealing a “probably mineral affinity” between the two men. On June 14, 1929, a pleasant summer evening in Berlin, Schwitters was in town, and they might have gone to see a German-Russian mountaineering documentary called Pamir: The Roof of the World, which started at 9:15 P.M. and lasted sixty-eight minutes.

Steven Heighton’s most recent book, the novel Afterlands, has just appeared in Britain, Australia, Holland, and Germany. This fall, Palimpsest Press will publish a limited-edition chapbook of some of his revised Asian poems, first published in 1989.

Jack Hirschman was appointed Poet Laureate of San Francisco in 2006. He is co-editing and co-translating an anthology of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s poetry and prose to be published by City Lights.

Jane Jacobs was born in 1916 in Pennsylvania, and later moved to New York City, where she lived until 1969. Anxieties over the Vietnam War precipitated her move to Toronto in that year with her husband and three children. She lived in Toronto until her death in April 2006. She was the author of numerous provocative and influential books, including The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Systems of Survival, and Dark Age Ahead.

Young-moo Kim published two volumes of poems in Korean and one in English, and co-translated numerous Korean authors into English. He was a professor at Seoul National University from 1981 until his death in 2001.

Dennis Lee lives in Toronto. His recent poetry collections are Un (2003), and SoCool (2004), a volume for younger teenagers.

Jeannie Marshall is a freelance writer who lives in Rome with her husband and their son.

Palash Krishna Mehrotra was born in Bombay in 1975 and educated at Balliol College, Oxford. He is a regular contributor to Tank magazine in London, and has two books forthcoming from Penguin India: a collection of stories called Eunuch Park and an anthology called The Penguin Book of Schooldays. He teaches at Doon School, and lives in Dehradun with his grandmother.

W. S. Merwin, in more than fifty years of writing, has published almost thirty books of poetry, as well as works in translation.

John Mighton is the author of the plays Possible Worlds and Half Life, among others. He is also the founder of JUMP, a math tutoring program for inner-city children.

Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in Bologna in 1922. Best known as the director of such films as The Decameron and The Gospel According to St. Matthew, Pasolini was also an actor, poet, journalist, linguist, painter, playwright, and songwriter. A committed social activist all his life, Pasolini was forever in trouble with the Italian authorities, and spent time in prison for some of his activities. He was brutally murdered at a beach in Ostia, near Rome, in 1975; the killing has never been satisfactorily solved. He was buried in Casarsa wearing the jersey of the Italian Showmen National Team.

Nelofer Pazira is a journalist and filmmaker based in Toronto. She starred in Kandahar and was featured in Return to Kandahar, which she also co-produced and co-directed. She has been a regular contributor to the CBC’s nightly newscast, The National. She has also set up a charity—Dyana Afghan Women’s Fund—to provide education and skills-training for women in the cities of Bamiyan and Kandahar. Her memoir of Afghanistan, A Bed of Red Flowers, was published in 2005.

Justine Picardie writes for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and the Daily Telegraph. She is the author of the non-fiction memoir If the Spirit Moves You, the collection of memoirs Truth or Dare, and the novel Wish I May. She lives in London with her husband and two sons.

Sylvia Plath was the author of four collections of poetry, including The Colossus and Ariel, as well as two works of prose: The Bell Jar and Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. She died in England in 1963 at the age of thirty. Almost all of Plath’s work was published posthumously.

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

Marcus Sanders was born in Canada and moved to San Francisco in 1988. He is a contributing editor to Surfline and Surfing magazine, and assisted on The Encyclopedia of Surfing. His work has appeared in such magazines as Big, Surfer, and The Surfer’s Path.

Peter Dale Scott is a former Canadian diplomat and professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. A poet, he translated Zbigniew Herbert and other Polish poets with Czeslaw Milosz. His own books of poetry include the trilogy Seculum (Coming to Jakarta, Listening to the Candle, and Minding the Darkness).

Damion Searls has translated Ingeborg Bachmann, Uwe Johnson, Peter Handke, and Rainer Maria Rilke; co-translated Jon Fosse’s Melancholy from Norwegian with Grethe Kvernes; and written Everything You Say Is True and Lives of the Painters. He is currently compiling a one-volume selection from Thoreau’s journal for the New York Review of Books.

Kenneth Sherman has two books forthcoming: Black River (poetry) and Rescuing Isaac: The Imagination Under Duress (essays).

Tracy K. Smith is the author of The Body’s Question (Graywolf Press, 2003) and Duende (Graywolf Press, 2007). She teaches at Princeton University.

Sarmishta Subramanian has worked as an editor for Saturday Night, The Walrus, and This Magazine, among other publications. She currently edits for Maclean’s and for Guilt & Pleasure Quarterly. Her essay “Prank Caller” was published in the anthology TurboChicks: Talking Young Feminisms.

Ko Un was born in 1933 and grew up in Korea during the Japanese occupation. During the Korean War, he was conscripted by the People’s Army. In 1952 he became a Buddhist and lived a monastic life for ten years. For his activism in confronting South Korea’s dictatorial military government, he was imprisoned four times. He has published more than 125 books in Korean.

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 Canada), Writers & Company (Knopf Canada), and More Writers & Company (Knopf Canada).

David Young was a Sherpa at Coach House Press for his formative years. He began his writing career with fiction (Agent Provocateur and Incognito), moved on to plays (Glenn and Inexpressible Island), films (Swann), and has lately been writing for television to pay for his elaborate new garden. An avid outdoorsman, David has climbed mountains in the Yukon and Argentina, and has drunk several tank cars of wine on Georgian Bay.