Contributors

Merle Lyn Bachman recently completed a doctorate in English at the State University of New York at Albany. A poet, translator, and educator, she currently resides in Louisville, Kentucky, where she teaches courses at Spalding University and a local program serving refugees.

Helen Degen Cohen (Halina Degenfisz) is a widely-published poet and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Other honors include first prize in British Stand Magazine’s International Fiction Competition, two Illinois Arts Council Awards (Fiction and Poetry), an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, an Indiana Writers Conference award in Poetry, and fellowships to the four major art colonies in the United States. Cohen is the featured poet in the May, 2002 issue of the Spoon River Poetry Review. She is also a recently featured poet at TheScreamOnline.com (a journal of literature, art, and photography), where her two anthologized prose works dealing with the Holocaust—”Return to Warsaw” and “The Edge of the Field”—may also be found. Cohen is a graduate of the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago and, after years traveling to schools throughout the state as part of the Artist in Education program, she returned to teaching (at Roosevelt University) and then to co-editing Rhino magazine.

Miriam Dean-Otting is Professor of Religious Studies at Kenyon College. Her research interests lie in the intersections between Jews and the non-Jewish cultures in which Jews have made their home. Her publications have focused on Hellenistic Jewry, Jews in Germany and Central Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, and conflict resolution and dialogue between Jews and Arabs in Modern Israel. She is currently doing a study of the Jewish Community of Kolkata (Calcutta), India.

Norman Finkelstein has written three books of literary criticism, the most recent of which, Not One of Them In Place: Modern Poetry and Jewish American Identity (SUNY, 2001), was a finalist for this year’s Koret Jewish Book Award. He is also the author of Track and Columns: Track Volume II (Spuyten Duyvil, 1999Spuyten Duyvil, 2002), a serial poem, and is currently at work on Powers, the third and final volume. He is a Professor of English at Xavier University.

Benjamin Friedlander’s most recent book of poetry is A Knot Is Not a Tangle (Krupskaya Press, 2000). Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism is forthcoming from the University of Alabama Press. Friedlander is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maine, where he co-edits Sagetrieb.

Michael Heller has published six volumes of poetry, the most recent being Wordflow: New and Selected Poems (1997). A memoir, Living Root, was published by the State University Press of New York in 2000. A volume of poems is forthcoming from Salt Books in 2003. Heller’s libretto for the opera Benjamin was set to music by the composer Ellen Fishman Johnson and performed at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival.

Burt Kimmelman is an associate professor of English at New Jersey Institute of Technology. He is the author of two book-length literary studies: The “Winter Mind”: William Bronk and American Letters (1998) and The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages: The Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona (1996, paperback 1999). He is also the author of three collections of poetry, The Pond at Cape May Point (2002), First Life (1999), and Musaics (1992). He is currently developing a book on modern science and the mid-twentieth-century American avant-garde, and editing A Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry (forthcoming in 2004).

Elizabeth Klein, fiction writer and poet, is the author of Reconciliations (Houghton Mifflin, Berkley Books), a novel, which appeared as a condensed novel in Redbook Magazine and offered as part of a dual main selection of the Jewish Book Club. She is also the author of a chapbook of poetry, Approaches (Red Herring Press). Ms. Klein’s stories, poems, and essays have appeared in numerous publications including ACM (Another Chicago Magazine), Prairie Schooner, Shofar, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine in “Hers,” McCall’s, Korone, Kansas Quarterly, The Chowder Review, Blackwell’s Companion to Jewish Culture, and Illinois English Bulletin among...