Joel Agee is the author of TWELVE YEARS: AN AMERICAN BOYHOOD IN EAST GERMANY (University of Chicago Press, p.b., 2000), a memoir of his life behind the Iron Curtain from ages eight to twenty. His essays and stories have appeared in publications such as Harper’s, The New Yorker, and The Best American Essays. He is also known as a translator of German literary works, among them Rilke’s LETTERS ON CÉZANNE (Fromm International Publishing Corporation, 1985) and Elias Canetti’s THE SECRET HEART OF THE CLOCK (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989). He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1999 he won the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for his translation of Heinrich von Kleist’s PENTHESILEA (HarperCollins, 2000; see “Passion” Archipelago, Vol. 3, No. 1.). Joel Agee’s stories “Killing a Turtle”, “German Lessons” , “The Storm”, and “Chao Khun” appeared in Archipelago and are from his memoir-novel IN THE HOUSE OF MY FEAR, recently published by Shoemaker & Hoard, Publishers), Washington, D.C.. His “Foreword to The End,” by Hans Erich Nossack in this issue, appears in THE END: Hamburg 1943. (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2004).
Leon Bell was born in Texas in 1918 and moved with his family to Moscow in 1931. He was trained as a nuclear physicist and later became a internationally-respected plant physiologist and biophysicist with expertise in photosynthesis. With his wife, Ira, Prof. Bell lived until 1992 in Russia; they now live in New York. The author’s brother, David (Davie), still in Russia, survived World War II, became an English teacher, and taught for many years in the city of Dubna, 70 miles north of Moscow and the home of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. Prof. Bell is the author of “Energetics of the Photosynthesizing Plant Cell” (Soviet Scientific Reviews Supplement Services, Physiochemical Biology, Vol. 5, 1985), and THERMODYNAMICS OF LIGHT ENERGY CONVERGENCE, with N.D. Gudkov (The Hague: SPB Academic Publishing, 1993).
Ellen Boneparth, after a career as university professor and administrator, diplomat, and policy advocate, writes on politics, women's issue, and travel at www.openroadopenmind.com. She is Director, Special Projects, at the National Council of Women's Organizations, Washington, D. C., and Director of the International Women’s Studies Institute.
Isabel Fargo Cole lives and works in Berlin as a writer and freelance translator from the German. Most recently she completed a translation of the short stories of Hermann Ungar, to be published by Twisted Spoon Press in 2005. Her translations of Christine Wolter, Annemarie Schwartzenbach, and Ilse Molzhan have also appeared in Archipelago.
Theo Dorgan is a poet, broadcaster, translator, editor and documentary scriptwriter. His poetry collections include THE ORDINARY HOUSE OF LOVE, ROSA MUNDI, and SAPPHO’S DAUGHTER. He is the editor of IRISH POETRY SINCE KAVANAGH, and co-edited REVISING THE RISING, THE GREAT BOOK OF IRELAND, WATCHING THE RIVER FLOW, and AN LEABHAR MÓR / THE GREAT BOOK OF GAELIC. His JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS, set to music by Howard Goodall, was premiered in the Royal Albert Hall in 2004. He is a member of Aosdána, the Irish Academy of the Arts, and of The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon. Born in Cork in 1953, he lives in Dublin.
Alex Forman is a Brazilian/American visual artist living in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Her work, Tall, Slim & Erect : Portraits of the Presidents, was recently on view at David Krut Projects in New York. It is also featured on the cover of JUBILAT 9. She is currently working on a project about transsexual prostitutes on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro.
Nathan Horowitz studies Applied Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. His translation of Abdón Ubídia’s “Telepathy and Other Imitations” was published in Michigan Quarterly Review. His work has also been featured in Global City Review, The Ann Arbor Observer, and Shaman’s Drum.
Samuel Menashe has won the Pegasus Prize “Neglected Masters” awarded by the Poetry Foundation. As part of the award, his Selected Poems are to be published, with an introduction by Christopher Ricks, by the Library of America in Autumn 2005. Samuel Menashe is also the author of THE NICHE NARROWS (Talisman House, Publishers, P.O. Box 3157, Jersey City, N.J. 07303-3157, 2000), six poems from which appeared in Archipelago, Vol. 5, No. 2. The text of the cantata No Jerusalem But This by Otto Luening is drawn from two collections of poems by Samuel Menashe, THE MANY NAMED BELOVED and NO JERUSALEM BUT THIS, which include the poems in this issue.
George C. Thomas is a painter and photographer who spends his winters in Nantucket and his summers in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. He has taught the arts and art history at Tufts University, Milton Academy, Phillips Academy, Worcester Museum School, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and the Boston Museum School. He was a documentary photographer for Operation Crossroads-Africa and Peace Corps in Africa, and took photographic assignments in Western Europe. Having been the subject of a Canadian Nation Film Board feature film, Margaree People (1976), he photographed and published privately MARGAREE, PHOTOGRAPHS OF CAPE BRETON (1980), from which come the photos in this issue. His ten-year Canadian documentary project was purchased by the Canadian National Archives in 1980.
Abdón Ubídia is the literary director of Editorial El Conejo in Quito, Ecuador, and the prizewinning author of ten books. His novel WOLVES’ DREAM was translated into English and published by the Latin American Literary Review Press in 1997. His latest novel is LA MADRIGUERA (Editorial El Conejo, Quito, 2004).