ZAIA ALEXANDER is a writer and literary translator. Her publications include Wende Kids: A New Generation of German Authors; “Primo Levi and Translation” in the Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi; “The Translator’s Diary” in Suitcase: A Journal for Transcultural Traffic; and “The Danube Exodus: the Rippling Currents of the River” (coauthored with Marsha Kinder) in Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film (MIT). She holds a PhD in Germanic Languages and Literature from UCLA and served as chair of the PEN Center USA Translation Jury in 2007.
CHANA BLOCH (1940–2017) was a poet, translator, scholar, and teacher. Bloch’s last book of poems, The Moon Is Almost Full, appeared in 2017. Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems, 1980–2015 includes work from The Secrets of the Tribe, The Past Keeps Changing, Mrs. Dumpty, and Blood Honey, as well as new poems. Bloch co-translated The Song of Songs (a Modern Library Classic), The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai and his Open Closed Open, and Dahlia Rakovitch’s Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry. Her work has also appeared in Best American Poetry 2015 and Pushcart Prize XL, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, and The New Yorker. For poems, translations, reviews, interviews, audio, and videos, see www.chanabloch.com.
COURTNEY ANGELA BRKIC is the author of The First Rule of Swimming (Little, Brown and Company, 2013), Stillness: and Other Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) and The Stone Fields (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004). Her work has also appeared in Zoetrope, The New York Times, The Washington Post Magazine, Harpers & Queen, the Utne Reader, TriQuarterly Review, The Alaska Review, and National Geographic, among others. Her translations of Expressionist poet A. B. Simic have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation. She teaches in the MFA program at George Mason University.
SUSAN DAITCH is the author of four novels and a collection of short stories, most recently The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir, published by City Lights Books. Her work has been the recipient of an NEA Heritage award, two Vogelstein awards, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in fiction. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Guernica, Tablet, Conjunctions, Slice, Tin House, and elsewhere. www.susandaitch.net.
LYDIA DAVIS is the author of, among others, The Collected Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009) and a chapbook entitled The Cows (Sarabande Press, 2011). She is also the translator of numerous works from the French, including Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way (2003) and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (2010), both of which were awarded Annual Translation Prizes by the French-American Foundation. In 2013, she received the Man Booker International Prize for her short fiction, and in 2014 another collection appeared from FSG—Can’t and Won’t. She is currently assembling a collection of translations of very short stories from the Dutch by A. L. Snijders.
LUCY FERRISS is the author of ten books, mostly fiction. Her novel A Sister to Honor, set partly in northern Pakistan, was a WNBA 2015 Great Group Read; her novel The Lost Daughter was a Book of the Month pick. Her work has won several national awards and been translated into five languages. Recent short fiction and essays appear in The New York Times, Missouri Review, The American Scholar, Michigan Quarterly Review, Arts & Letters, and weekly at the Chronicle of Higher Education’s “Lingua Franca.” She lives in the Berkshires and Connecticut, where she is Writer-in-Residence at Trinity College.
TODD HASAK-LOWY is a writer, teacher, and translator living in Evanston, Illinois. He is the author of four works of fiction, one scholarly monograph, and a co-written narrative memoir for young adults. His writing has been translated into ten languages. He began translating Hebrew literature into English about a decade after writing the story included here, and he won the 2013 Risa Domb/Porjes Prize for his translation of Asaf Schurr’s novel Motti.
ROBIN HEMLEY has published twelve books of fiction and nonfiction and won numerous awards for his writing, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Independent Press Book Award, an Editor’s Choice Award from the American Library Association, and three Pushcart prizes in both fiction and nonfiction. A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, he directed the nonfiction writing program at the University of Iowa for nine years. He is currently director of the writing program, writer-in-residence, and professor of humanities at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, professor emeritus at the University of Iowa, and adjunct professor at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.
DAVID HUDDLE is from Ivanhoe, Virginia, and he taught at the University of Vermont for thirty-eight years. His fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The American Scholar, Esquire, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Green Mountains Review. In 2012 his novel Nothing Can Make Me Do This won the Library of Virginia Award for Fiction, and his collection Black Snake at the Family Reunion won the 2013 PEN New England Award for Poetry. His most recent book is a collection of poems, Dream Sender, published in September 2015 by LSU Press.
NORMAN LAVERS grew up in Berkeley, California. He got an MA in English at San Francisco State, and was awarded a writing fellowship to the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he received a PhD. He taught literature and creative writing for thirty years before his retirement in 2000. He has lived in various parts of Europe and Asia. Nature and settings in remote parts of the world figure often in his writing. His short stories have won numerous awards, including the O. Henry and Pushcart prizes. His books are available on Amazon and Kindle.
PRIMO LEVI was born in Turin, Italy, in 1919 and earned a degree in chemistry from the University of Turin in 1941, but had trouble finding work because of Italy’s racial laws. In 1943, as part of a fledgling partisan group, Levi was arrested by the Fascists and spent a year in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. His skills as a chemist enabled him to work indoors and survive the harsh conditions. After the war he wrote over a dozen books of memoir, fiction, essays, and poetry. The work that brought him to international attention was Survival in Auschwitz, 1947 (not available in English until 1959), an account of his time in the camp. The Truce, 1963, recounts his ten-month journey through Eastern Europe to reach home after the liberation. His other widely known works are The Periodic Table, The Monkey’s Wrench, The Drowned and the Saved, and Other People’s Trades. Levi is revered worldwide for the moral rigor, wisdom, and eloquence of his testimony. He died in Turin in 1987 from a fall down a stairwell, which some judged to be suicide.
SHARON MAY’s stories have appeared in Best New American Voices, The Chicago Tribune, Tin House, Mānoa, StoryQuarterly, Crab Orchard Review, Other Voices, and elsewhere. She co-edited In the Shadow of Angkor: Contemporary Writing from Cambodia (Mānoa: An International Journal/University of Hawai‘i Press) and a special issue of Cambodian literature in translation for Words Without Borders. She conducted research for Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Human Rights and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University.
JOYCE CAROL OATES is the internationally known author of dozens of novels and story collections, as well as poetry and criticism. Her novel them, dealing with racial conflict in Detroit, won the National Book Award in 1969 and several other of her novels have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Among her best-known works are Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, We Were the Mulvaneys, and Black Water. Her many awards include the National Medal for the Humanities and the PEN/Malamud Award for the Short Story. Her most recent book is the autobiographical collection The Lost Landscape. Oates is currently the Roger S. Berlind Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University.
BOGDAN RAKIC is a translator from the Serbo-Croatian. His translations include How to Quiet a Vampire by Borislav Pekic (Northwestern University Press, 2005), Death and the Dervish by Mesa Selimovic (Northwestern University Press, 1996), and, with John Jeffries, Tesla: A Portrait with Masks by Vladimir Pistalo (Graywolf Press, 2008).
MICHAEL SCAMMELL is the author of two prize-winning biographies, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic, and Solzhenitsyn, a Biography, and has translated many works by Russian authors, including Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Nabokov. He has also translated from Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian, including (with Veno Taufer) Nothing Is Lost, the Selected Poems of Edvard Kocbek. He is currently working on a memoir.
SVETLANA VELMAR-JANKOVIC, 1933–2014, was a Serbian novelist, essayist, and chronicler of Belgrade, her birthplace and lifelong home. She became a journalist while still at the university there, and in the 1950s became an editor at the local Prosveta Publishing House. She wrote five novels and several collections of essays, short stories, and plays, and won every major national literary prize. Her work has been translated into English and major European languages, as well as Korean. Her father, Vladimir Velmar-Jankovic, was also a well-known writer, but was discredited because he served in the collaborationist Ministry of Culture during the war, and later went into exile in Spain.
LAURA ESTHER WOLFSON’s distinctive blend of essay, first-person narrative, and musings on language and books has appeared in Bellingham Review, Gettysburg Review, rumpus.net, The Sun, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere, been repeatedly listed as “notable” in Best American Essays, and appeared in Swedish and Russian translation. She has worked as a diplomatic, conference, and court interpreter and literary translator. Her translations include works on Russian obscenities and gulag slang and on Stalin’s persecution of Yiddish authors. She works at a large international organization headquartered in New York City, where she translates from Russian, French, and Spanish into English.
LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ is the author of twenty-four books, including novels, short stories, non-fiction, poetry, and translations from Italian. Her latest publications are a collection of poems, No Way Out But Through, the essay collection This Is Where We Came In, and the novels Two-Part Inventions and The Writing on the Wall. Her novel Leaving Brooklyn was nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award, and Rough Strife was nominated for a National Book Award and the PEN/Hemingway First Novel Award. She edited The Emergence of Memory, a collection of interviews with and essays on W. G. Sebald. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Essays, The Best American Poetry, and many other anthologies. She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Foundation for the Arts. She teaches at the Bennington College Writing Seminars.