Contributors’ Notes: Summer 2015
- Contributors’ NotesSummer 2015
Osama Alomar was born in Damascus, Syria, in 1968. A well-known writer of short stories, poetry, and essays in Arabic, Alomar published Fullblood Arabian (New Directions, 2014), his first volume in English translation. A Norwegian edition of Fullblood Arabian was published this year. His writing has been published in Coffin Factory, The Literary Review, Gigantic, Dissent, TriQuarterly, and on the New Yorker website. He lives in Chicago.
Ramona Ausubel is the author of the novel No One Is Here Except All of Us (Riverhead Books, 2013) and the story collection A Guide to Being Born (Riverhead Books, 2014). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, One Story, Electric Literature and elsewhere. She is currently a faculty member of the Low-Residency MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Jesse Ball (1978-) has written many books. His work is thought to be absurd.
C. J. Collins is a librarian and Arabic translator based in Queens, New York. He translated Fullblood Arabian (New Directions, 2014) in collaboration with its author, Osama Alomar, whom he first met in 2007, when Collins was living in Syria on a Fulbright grant.
Lydia Davis is the author of The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009), a translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (Viking Penguin, 2010), a chapbook entitled The Cows (Sarabande Press, 2011), and a poem entitled “Our Village” in Two American Scenes (New Directions, 2013). In 2013, she was awarded the Man Booker International Prize for Fiction, and her most recent collection of stories, Can’t and Won’t, was published last year by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Alex Epstein was born in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) in 1971 and moved to Israel when he was eight. He is the author of ten works of fiction in Hebrew, and in 2003 was awarded the Israeli Prime Minister’s Prize for Literature. His work has appeared in Guernica, Iowa Review, Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, PEN America, and elsewhere. He lives in Tel Aviv. Two of his collections of micro-fiction, Blue Has No South (2010) and Lunar Savings Time (2011), are available in English from Clockroot Books.
Kevin A. González is the author of a collection of poems, Cultural Studies (Carnegie Mellon, 2009), and the coeditor of The New Census: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. His stories have been awarded the Narrative Prize, the Playboy College Fiction Prize, and the Michener-Copernicus Award, and they have appeared in Narrative, Playboy, Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares Solos, Mississippi Review, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and in two editions of Best [End Page 202] New American Voices. He teaches at Carnegie Mellon University and serves as editor of jubilat.
Yardenne Greenspan has an MFA in Fiction and Translation from Columbia University. In 2011 she received the American Literary Translators’ Association Fellowship. Her translation of Some Day by Shemi Zarhin (New Vessel Press, 2013) was chosen for World Literature Today’s 2013 list of notable translations. Her full-length translations also include Tel Aviv Noir, edited by Etgar Keret and Assaf Gavron (Akashic Books, 2014), and Alexandrian Summer by Yitzhak Gormezano Goren (New Vessel Press, 2015). Greenspan’s writing and translations can be found in The New Yorker, Haaretz, Guernica, Words Without Borders, and Asymptote, among other publications.
Eliana Hechter (1987–2014) began taking graduate creative writing classes at the University of Washington at the age of 15. She graduated with a major in mathematics at 17. A Rhodes Scholar, she received her DPhil in Statistics at the University of Oxford. She did genome research at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, and was in the Health Sciences and Technology Program at Harvard Medical School. “Extremities” is her only published work of fiction.
Vladislava Kolosova was born in 1987 in St. Petersburg. She grew up in unruly Perestroika-Russia, during the so-called wild nineties. In 2014, she received an MFA in creative writing from New York University, where she studied with Jonathan Safran Foer and Zadie Smith, among others. She works as a journalist in Germany and has previously published only nonfiction books.
Fiona Maazel is the author of the novels Last Last Chance (Picador, 2009) and Woke...
