Editor's Note

To begin this Summer 2003 issue of Biography, I'd like to note a change in the masthead, and extend invitations for two different kinds of contributions to this journal.

First, I'd like to announce that Miriam Fuchs, Professor of English at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, has agreed to become co-editor of Biography.She has of course been an integral part of the editorial staff since 1994, when as Literature Editor she became responsible for assigning readers for article submissions. In 2000, she became Associate Editor, and served as the Guest Editor for the Winter 2002 Biography special issue on Biography and Geography. She has published many articles on life writing and literary modernism, and her book The Text is Myself: Women's Life Writing and Catastrophe will be appearing this December from the University of Wisconsin Press. Biography has benefited greatly from her editorial contributions over the past ten years; the co-editorship simply acknowledges what was really already the case.

I'd also like to direct your attention to the report by Bianca Schwindt on the 2002 Bern International Conference on Women's Life Writing. Biography would be interested in publishing brief accounts of such meetings—and especially when these conferences take place outside the Anglo-American corridor many of us institutionally live within. If you are organizing such a conference, or you know of one forthcoming, and you would like to provide such a report, please contact us.

Finally, I hope Biography readers will enjoy the collection of brief "Sketches from Life" we've assembled in this issue. Credit for the idea goes to Julia Watson, who some time ago asked me if Biography would be interested in publishing a brief personal essay about a memorable experience with an autobiographical text. After reading her piece on Ben Franklin, crime, and Mexico, I was definitely interested, and when talking about the piece with Julia, we somehow arrived at the idea of collecting a few such pieces together. Gillian Whitlock, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, and Philippe Lejeune very willingly accepted the commission, and the results are the four pieces appearing together in this issue. I'm hoping that in the future Biography can publish clusters of similar pieces. If you have such a piece, please send it along.