Kathryn Bernard is a writer and educator living in England. She has two sons and an English husband who is a retired professor of languages, and writes fiction and nonfiction. In her spare time, she travels as much as possible.

Benjamin Hale Cheever  has published three novels, THE PLAGIARIST, THE PARTISAN, and FAMOUS AFTER DEATH. He edited THE LETTERS OF JOHN CHEEVER and has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nation, and The Ladies Home Journal. His nonfiction book SELLING BEN CHEEVER, the preface of which appears in this issue, will be published by Bloomsbury in October. He is a Contributing Editor of Archipelago. His “Confessions of a Lover, Spurned” appeared in Vol. 1, No. 1, and “Come Here, I Want You,” in Vol. 2, No. 4.

Georgiana Farnoaga teaches Romanian at UCLA. She is the translator (with Sharon King) of two recent books: THE PHANTOM CHURCH AND OTHER STORIES FROM ROMANIA (University of Pittsburgh, 1996) and FOOL’S TRIUMPH, Ioana Ieronim’s poetry (Pitesti, Romania: Editura Paralela 45, 2000), which is also due out in the United States from Green Integer.

Lucy Gray has been a photographer since 1991, when she began a family portraiture business. Her first book of photographs was ANIMAL FACES (The Nature Company, 1993; reissued recently by the Discovery Channel and Dutton). Her work has appeared in The New York Times and Sierra Magazine. She has had solo and group shows at various galleries and in City Hall in San Francisco and New Haven; received grants from organizations including the Rockefeller Philanthropic Collaborative and the Windfall Foundation; lectured at California State University, Long Beach, and City College, San Francisco; and been the subject of several documentaries, including one about her project “Naming the Homeless,” a selection of which appeared in Archipelago, Vol. 4, No. 1. In 2000 she won the Millard Sheets Gallery New Photography Competition (Los Angeles) for “Katita Gossiping Backstage,” from the series “Balancing Acts: On Being Prima Ballerinas Who are Mothers.” Lucy Gray is represented by Jernigan Wicker Fine Arts, 161 Natoma Street San Francisco, CA 94105, (415) 512-0335. She is married to the writer and film critic David Thomson; they have two sons.

Ann McKinnon Kucera writes stories and essays, has finished two science fiction novels, including HARP UNSTRUNG (University Editions, W.Va., 1999), and is working on a third. She has also written “two slim volumes and a local history.” She is recently widowed and lives in a small old farm house in Maine.

Walt McDonald began writing poems and stories after a brief service in Vietnam. Among the eighteen collections of poems he has published are: ALL OCCASIONS (University of Notre Dame Press, 2000); WHATEVER THE WIND DELIVERS: Celebrating West Texas and the Near Southwest. With photographs selected by Janet Neugebauer (Texas Tech University Press, 1999); BLESSINGS THE BODY GAVE (Ohio State University Press, 1998); COUNTING SURVIVORS (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995); WHERE SKIES ARE NOT CLOUDY (University of North Texas Press, 1993); ALL THAT MATTERS: The Texas Plains in Photographs and Poems; photographs selected by Janet Neugebauer (Texas Tech University Press, 1992); THE DIGS IN ESCONDIDO CANYON (Texas Tech University Press, 1991); NIGHT LANDINGS (Harper & Row, 1989); AFTER THE NOISE OF SAIGON (University of Massachusetts Press, 1988); RAFTING THE BRAZOS (University of North Texas Press, 1988); THE FLYING DUTCHMAN (Ohio State University Press, 1987); A BAND OF BROTHERS: Stories from Vietnam (Texas Tech University Press, 1989). More of his poems can be read in Ploughshares and Tattoo Highway. Walt McDonald is Poet Laureate of Texas.

Doru Motz is a broadcaster, producer, and simultaneous interpreter for the Voice of America in Washington, D.C. As writer and translator, he has published over forty books and thousands of technical and informational articles. He is also a typographer and designer of fonts. Currently, he is working on translating into English fiction by the important Romanian novelist, Augustin Buzura, REQUIEM FOR MADMEN AND BEASTS.

Ileana Orlich is Director of the Romania Program at Arizona State University at Tempe. She has published essays on Romanian women poets, Marin Sorescu, Andrei Codrescu, twentieth-century and contemporary Romanian prose writers, as well as on Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Charles Simic and Stéphane Mallarmé. Her translations of Mihai Ursachi with Adam J. Sorkin appear in Compost, West Branch, and Tampa Review.

Adam J. Sorkin has published thirteen books of translations of contemporary Romanian poetry, most recently SEA-LEVEL ZERO, poems by Daniela Crasnaru (BOA Editions, 1999) and THE TRIUMPH OF THE WATER WITCH, prose poems by Ioana Ieronim (Bloodaxe, 2000). The latter was short-listed for the Weidenfeld Prize at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, the second time in the six years of this prize Sorkin’s translation work was selected a finalist; Liliana Ursu’s THE SKY BEHIND THE FOREST (Bloodaxe, 1997, translated with the poet Tess Gallagher) was previously recognized. Sorkin’s translation with Lidia Vianu of Marin Sorescu’s deathbed volume, THE BRIDGE, is forthcoming from Bloodaxe.

Mihai Ursachi, writes his translator Adam J. Sorkin, “is one of Romania’s most eminent writers, and, I believe, a great, neglected literary figure of world poetry today. Currently, he is Romania’s Nobel Prize nominee in literature. Ursachi’s work shows an often characteristic Romanian combination of mysticism and surreal symbolism; the religious intensity of his ‘poetry of being’ (his own term) makes his voice unusual and compelling. Ursachi defected from Romania in 1981 after having been imprisoned and put in solitary confinement for an earlier escape attempt when a university student in philosophy (swimming the Danube); he wound up in California (teaching swimming) and then Austin, Texas, where, while learning English (which he had not studied) and working as a garage mechanic (for which he’d had no training) and a German instructor at University of Texas, he put himself through graduate school, subsequently teaching part-time at the University of California, La Jolla, for four years. Soon after the 1989 revolution that overthrew Romania’s communist dictatorship, Ursachi declared that he was not an economic refugee and thus no longer had any reason to stay abroad. He returned to Romania in early 1990, serving until February 1992 as Director of the National Theater in the city of Iasi, a traditional cultural center of the northeast region of Moldavia, where he was born in 1941. He lost the National Theater post due to his open opposition to the Ion Iliescu government and to his allowing the Theater to be used for a commemoration of the 50^th anniversary of the Great Pogrom of Iasi, which some influential politicians in the city claimed never took place. In 1992 Ursachi won the first national Mihai Eminescu poetry prize to be awarded since World War II. He continues to live in Iasi, where he has supported himself by heading the city’s chapter of the Civic Alliance, a coalition of opposition intellectuals, and working as secretary of the Iasi Writers’ Association and Professor of Poetry at the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi. In 1998 he published a career retrospective, NEBUNIE SI LUMINA (Bucharest, Editura Nemira), or MADNESS AND LIGHT, which will also be the title of a book of translations by Adam Sorkin now in progress. Ursachi’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Sorkin’s co-translations in Nimrod, Alea (with an essay on Ursachi), Prism International, Artful Dodge, International Poetry Review, The MacGuffin, 100 Words, Compost, Apostrof, The Montserrat Review, Exquisite Corpse /Cyber Corpse, Third Coast, Runes, River City, Many Mountains Moving, Tampa Review, Archipelago, and West Branch as well as in the anthology of poetry of Iasi, CITY OF DREAMS AND WHISPERS (Iasi: The Center for Romanian Studies, 1998) and the 2001 Oxford University Press anthology, GODS AND MORTALS: MODERN POEMS ON CLASSICAL MYTHS.”

Jane Barnes is the recipient of the Writer’s Guild Award for her documentary screenplay for John Paul II: The Millennial Pope, shown on “Frontline,” PBS. As Jane Barnes Casey, she is the author of I, KRUPSKAYA, MY LIFE WITH LENIN (Houghton Mifflin) and as Jane Barnes, of  DOUBLE LIVES (Doubleday). She is a Director of Archipelago.

Comix Decode is the collaborative group of graphic novelists including Jessica Abel and Matt Madden, a sample of whose work appeared in Archipelago, Vol. 5, No. 2. It was described by Calvin Reid; his conversation about electronic publishing with the Editor appeared in Vol. 4, No. 4. They announce: “Comix Decode is a collective of cartoonists and comix lovers devoted to spreading the word about the best in contemporary comics. Our main modus operandi is to get a few outstanding cartoonists together in a room, project their work on a screen while they read it, and then have an active and open discussion about it, with the cartoonists themselves acting as the panel of experts. 
        “Comix Decode will hold an event in New York City, October 25 at North Sixth in Williamsburg, and feature CHARLES BURNS and TOM HART along with two other artists TBA. (We apologize to those who expected an event earlier, but this one should make up for it in sheer spectacularity!) All will be moderated by Calvin Reid, of course!”

Thomas Crampton, whose photographs appeared in Archipelago, Vol. 4, No. 3, and who is a reporter and photographer for the International Herald Tribune, won the Certificate of Special Merit at the 2001 Human Rights Press Awards in Hong Kong “In recognition of an outstanding contribution toward greater awareness and appreciation of human-rights related issues.” The winning article, with Crampton’s photograph, was “A Tamil Guerrilla’s Story, Starting at Age 7, A Child Fighter Describes Abduction and Training:” An excerpt:

“Jaffna, Sri Lanka – Shuffling her sandal-clad feet in the dust, 14-year old Arumuyam Malar confesses that she has been a naughty girl: she did not kill herself.

“Trained since the age of 7 to fight until victory or death and commit suicide upon capture, she did not have a cyanide capsule or grenade handy when Sri Lankan government troops overran the position she was defending several weeks ago. ‘If I had had a grenade or cyanide capsule, I would have done it,’ she said through a translator. ‘I thought the army would kill me when I was caught.’ The story of Arumuyam Malar, one of the youngest child soldiers captured alive by government forces in their 17-year war against the guerrilla fighters of the separatists Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, is a sad tale of abduction and lost childhood. Her story also reveals the methods employed by the rebels to recruit and train young children into their ranks. The Sri Lankan government claims that many Tamil Tiger guerrilla fighters are children, with nearly one third of the 5,000-strong force under the age of 18.”

The full text can be read at http://www.iht.com/articles/30092.html.

Katherine McNamara, editor of Archipelago, is the author of NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH, A Journey into the Interior of Alaska (San Francisco: Mercury House). Reviews and information may be seen on Mercury House. An excerpt, “The Repetition of Their Days,” appeared in Archipelago, Vol. 2, No. 3.

Samuel Menashe, a selection of whose poems appeared in Archipelago, Vol. 5, No. 2, will read at the Library of Congress on Thursday evening, November 1, 2001, under the auspices of the Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund. The Library of Congress is at 101 Independence Avenue, S.E., Washington, D.C. For information, telephone (202) 707-5000 

Maria Negroni: ISLANDIA, a book-length poem translated from the Spanish by Anne Twitty, has appeared in a bilingual edition published by Station Hill Press. Selections from other books by Maria Negroni, also translated by Anne Twitty, appeared in Archipelago, Vol. 1, No. 1, and, Vol. 2, No. 4. ISLANDIA can be ordered through Consortium or 1-800-283-3572, or directly from Station Hill.