About the Contributors

Carlos Almaraz was born in Mexico City in 1941 and grew up in Chicago and Los Angeles. He studied at the University of California at Los Angeles and the New School of Social Research in New York, then earned a master's degree in fine arts from Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, in 1974. He founded several arts organizations in Los Angeles and for three years worked for César Chávez and the United Farm Workers Union in central California creating murals, banners, and other works. He was a founding member of the Chicano art collective Los Four, who were among the first Chicano artists to exhibit in mainstream museums and galleries, paving the way for others. Though he died of AIDS in 1989 , he remains a major influence on younger Latino artists, and his work continues to be widely exhibited in solo and group shows throughout the world.

Bay Anapol is a former Wallace Stegner fellow whose work has appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review, Story Magazine, and The Pushcart Prize 2001. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she is finishing her first novel, The Real Life Test.

Robert Barclay lives in Käne'ohe, O'ahu, with his wife, Stacy, and their baby daughter, Ava Kimie. His first novel, Melal: A Novel of the Pacific was short-listed for the 2002 Kiriyama Prize.

David Borofka has received such awards as the Missouri Review's editors' prize and Carolina Quarterly's Charles B. Wood award for distinguished writing; his collection, Hints of His Mortality, won the 1996 Iowa short-fiction award. His novel, The Island, was published in 1997 by MacMurray & Beck.

David Botello grew up in East Los Angeles and Lincoln Heights and now lives in El Sereno, just north of East Los Angeles. Alone and Together Under the Freeway, reproduced in this issue, is the seventh in his series of paintings inspired by Hollenbeck Park, one of the oldest in Los Angeles.

Eddie Chuculate is a Creek and Cherokee Indian from Muskogee, Oklahoma. He graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and received a Wallace Stegner fellowship in creative writing from Stanford University. He has published stories in Weber Studies, Many Mountains Moving, and the Iowa Review. He lives in Albuquerque and is working on a collection of stories.

Marcelino Freire was born in 1967 in the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco. He has published several books of short stories: eMe (1991), AcRústico (1995), eraOdito (1998), Angu de sangue (2000), and BaléRalé (2003). He recently compiled Cem menores contos brasileiros do século, a microanthology of the twentieth century's shortest (fifty letters or less) Brazilian stories. His fiction in this issue is from Angu de sangue and Geração 90 : manuscritos de computador (2001).

Bruce Fulton teaches Korean literature and literary translation at the University of British Columbia. He edited the Korean section of The Columbia Companion to Modern East Asian Literature (2003 ) and is co-translator of A Ready-Made Life: Early Masters of Korean Fiction (1998), Land of Exile: Contemporary Korean Fiction (1992), and Words of Farewell (1989). He was recently named general editor of the University of Hawai'i Press's new Modern Korean Fiction series.

Eric Gamalinda is a poet and fiction writer who teaches at New York University and Columbia University. His most recent novel, My Sad Republic (2000), was awarded the Philippine Centennial prize for fiction. He has two books of poetry, Zero Gravity (1999) and Lyrics from a Dead Language (1990).

Margaret García studied at California State University at Northridge, Los Angeles City College, and the University of Southern California, where she received her master's degree in fine arts in 1992. Her work has been exhibited in group shows throughout Southern California as well as in Texas and Mexico. She has also taught and lectured extensively.

Wayne Alaniz Healy was raised in East Los Angeles and first painted murals there in 1972. Today, Healy's East Los Streetscapers public-art studio produces murals, multimedia work...