Contributors to Issue 79

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the author of two novels: Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun. Her short fiction has appeared in Granta and The New Yorker, among other literary journals. She divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.

James Arthur’s poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Antioch Review, and The Nation. He lives in Toronto.

Martha Baillie’s most recent novel, The Shape I Gave You, was published in March 2006 by Knopf Canada. She is the author of two previous novels, My Sister Esther and Madame Balashovskaya’s Apartment. She lives in Toronto.

Yves Berger was born in the Haute-Savoie, France, and lives and works in the small Savoyard village where he grew up. He has recently exhibited at the Kunst im alten Schützenhaus (Zofingen, Switzerland) and at the Galerie Hugo Godderic (Veurne, Belgium). His drawings have appeared in various magazines, including Art on Paper, Conjonctures, and Revue de’études palestiniennes.

Ronna Bloom is the author of three collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Public Works (Pedlar Press, 2004). Her poems have been translated into Spanish and Bangla, and her book Personal Effects (Pedlar Press, 2000) was recorded by the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. She lives in Toronto.

Charles Bukowski was born in Germany in 1920, but lived in Los Angeles for almost his entire life. He was a prolific poet as well as a novelist, eventually publishing more than one hundred books, pamphlets, and broadsides, including the novels Post Office and Factotum, and the poetry collections Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit, You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense, and The Last Night of the Earth Poems. He died in Los Angeles in 1994.

Sarah Chase lives on a northern Gulf Island in British Columbia. She began her career as a dancer, but over the years became fascinated by how memory and story were stimulated by movement and found herself creating dances that included oral storytelling. Since 1997, these dance stories—which weave together dance, music, and text—have been presented in major performance festivals throughout Europe and Canada.

Kiran Desai was born in India and moved to the United States when she was fifteen. She is the author of two novels, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard and The Inheritance of Loss. She divides her time between India, England, and the United States.

Robert Duncan was an American poet whose works include The Opening of the Field and Bending the Bow. Associated with the Black Mountain poets, he lived in San Francisco for most of his adult life. He died in 1988.

Peter Glassgold is a writer, translator, and literary editor long associated with New Directions Publishing. Some of his recent books are the novel The Angel Max (Harcourt, 1998), Anarchy!: An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth (Counterpoint, 2001), and Living Space: Poems of the Dutch Fiftiers (Green Integer, 2006).

Lucy Gray is a photographer who, for a week in April 2006, projected collages she’d made with the actress Tilda Swinton, a half a block wide by five storeys high, on the exterior of San Francisco City Hall. Her interview in this issue was conducted in 1989 as research for a piece she wrote on the author John Fante for Elle magazine.

Jim Harrison is a woebegone geezer writer who divides his year between the Mexican border and Montana. His most recent novel is Returning to Earth, published by Grove Press in the United States and House of Anansi Press in Canada.

Robert Hass is a poet and essayist. His poetry books include Praise, Field Guide, and Sun Under Wood. He has a new book of poems forthcoming in the fall from Ecco/HarperCollins, titled Time and Materials.

Selina Hastings has written biographies of Rosamond Lehmann, Evelyn Waugh, and Nancy Mitford and is currently working on a biography of W. Somerset Maugham.

Sheila Heti lives in Toronto, where she regularly collaborates with other artists, in particular, lately, the painter Margaux Williamson. Her books include The Middle Stories and the novel Ticknor, both published in Canada by House of Anansi Press. In 2001, she founded the Trampoline Hall Lecture Series, at which people speak on subjects outside their areas of expertise.

David Hlynsky is an artist living in Toronto. He teaches studio art and new media at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. His primary medium has been photography.

Abbey Huggan lives and draws in Toronto and on organic farms in West Flamborough and Waterford, Ontario.

Pico Iyer’s latest madcap enterprise is a book about the fourteenth Dalai Lama and globalism, The Open Road, due to come out in spring 2008. His last book, exhibiting Morrisian tendencies, was Sun After Dark.

Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator for twenty years and has translated such authors as José Saramago, Bernardo Atxaga, Fernando Pessoa, and Lídia Jorge. Her translation of Eça de Queirós’s masterpiece The Maias will be published in July by New Directions.

Javier Marías is the author of A Heart So White, All Souls, A Man of Feeling, and numerous other novels, as well as several books of non-fiction and translation. He lives in Madrid.

Michael Ondaatje’s new novel is Divisadero. He lives in Toronto and has several doubles.

Don Paterson works as an editor and musician, and teaches at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. His most recent publications include Landing Light (Faber and Faber); The Book of Shadows (Picador); and Orpheus (Faber and Faber), a version of Rilke’s Die Sonette an Orpheus. A second book of aphorisms, The Blind Eye (Faber and Faber), will be released in September 2007.

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.

Vasco Ray was born in New Jersey in 1954 and moved to Africa in 1985 to record Aka music. He has been there ever since.

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.

Clayton Ruby has made his life in the law. He has defended clients as diverse as the Dionne quintuplets, Donald Marshall Jr., assorted terrorists, pit bulls, and the occasional flying squirrel. He has written a textbook for lawyers, Sentencing, now in its sixth edition, and he has been a member of the board of directors of PEN Canada.

Arnold Schoenberg, innovator of the twelve-tone technique, was also a painter and music theorist. Among his best-known works are Pierrot lunaire, Piano Concerto op. 42, and Gurrelieder. Schoenberg died in California in 1951.

Peter Dale Scott is a former Canadian diplomat and professor of English. His poetry trilogy, Seculum, consists of Coming to Jakarta (1988), Listening to the Candle (1992), and Minding the Darkness (2000).

Eleanor Wachtel is the host of CBC Radio’s Writers & Company and Wachtel on the Arts. Three selections of her interviews have been published: Original Minds (HarperCollins Canada), Writers & Company (Knopf Canada), and More Writers & Company (Knopf Canada). Random Illuminations: Conversations with Carol Shields is forthcoming from Goose Lane Editions.