Felice Beato was born in the 1820s near Venice, possibly on the island of Corfu, in Greece. He learned photography from the Scottish-born architectural and topographical photographer James Robertson, and was the first photographer to devote himself entirely to working in Asia and the Middle East. His career was long affiliated with images of war: the Indian Mutiny and its aftermath in the late 1850s; the Opium War in China in 1860; and the Sudanese colonial wars in 1885. The photographs he took of the Indian Mutiny in collaboration with his brother are thought to be the first to show human corpses on a battlefield. Beato died in 1908 in Burma, where he was working as a furniture merchant.

Bei Dao is the pseudonym of Zhao Zhenkai, who was born in Beijing in 1949 and lives in Davis, California. He is a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent publications in English translation are a volume of poetry, Unlock (New Directions, 2000), and a collection of essays, Blue House (Zephyr Press, 2000).

Arthur Bispo do Rosário was born in Japaratuba in northeast Brazil in 1911 and died in 1989. The first major exhibition of his work, “Registros de Minha Passagem pela Terra” (Records of my passage on earth), was organized in 1989 at the Visual Arts School of Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro, and traveled to São Paulo, Pôrto Alegre, and Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Subsequent solo exhibitions have been held at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (1992), the Brazilian pavilion of the 1995 Venice Biennale, and the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris (2003). Bispo do Rosário’s work has been included in the group exhibitions “Imagenes del Inconsciente” (Images of the unconscious) at the Proa Foundation, Buenos Aires (2001), and “Brazil: Body and Soul” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2002).

Roberto Bolaño was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1953, and is the author of five novels and five books of poetry. His short-story collection Llamadas telefónicas (Lost calls; Anagrama) won the prestigious Santiago de Chile Municipal Prize in 1997, and his novel Los detectives salvajes (The wild detectives; Anagrama, 1998) won the Premio Herralde de Novela and Premio Rómulo Gallegos. His writing has appeared in Grand Street 68 and 70, and his novella By Night in Chile is forthcoming from New Directions in December 2003. Bolaño passed away on July 14, 2003.

Inger Christensen was born in 1935 in Denmark and lives in Copenhagen. The winner of numerous European literary awards, she writes in several genres, but it is her poetry that has established her as one of the leading figures in modern Scandinavian literature. An English translation of Christensen’s alphabet was recently published by New Directions (2001), and a second volume of her poetry, titled ButterÅy Valley: A Requiem, is forthcoming from New Directions in 2004. Her work has been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Margaret Jull Costa was born in 1949 in Richmond, just outside London, and currently lives in Leicester, England. She has been a professional translator since 1987 and has translated works by many Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American writers. Her awards include the 1992 Portuguese Translation Prize for her rendering of Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet; the translator’s portion of the 1997 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for Javier Marías’s A Heart So White; and the 2000 Weidenfeld Translation Prize for José Saramago’s All the Names. She is currently translating Saramago’s latest novel, The Duplicated Man, to be published by Harcourt in fall 2004.

Cynthia Cruz was raised in Germany and California. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Paris Review, the Boston Review, Chelsea, and Pleiades, among others. She has received fellowships to Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony and teaches poetry in New York City schools as part of the Teachers & Writers Collaborative.

Joanne Diaz received her M.F.A. from New York University, where she was a New York Times Foundation fellow. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, Poetry International, and the Notre Dame Review. She lives in Chicago and is a graduate student in the English department at Northwestern University.

William Eggleston was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1939. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1976); the Corcoran Museum of Art, Washington, D.C. (1977, 1990); the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (1983, 1985); the Museum Folkwang, Essen (1992); the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (1999 – 2000); and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris (2001 – 02), among other venues. He was awarded the 1998 Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation International Photography Award, and his work was featured in Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany (2002). Eggleston’s published collections of photography include William Eggleston’s Guide (Museum of Modern Art, 1976), The Democratic Forest (Doubleday, 1989), and Faulkner’s Mississippi (Oxmoor House, 1990). “William Eggleston: Los Alamos,” opened at the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, in March 2003 and will travel to the Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; the Albertina, Vienna, Austria; and the Dallas Museum of Art.

Paul Farley was born in Liverpool in 1965. He has published two collections of poetry with Picador in Britain: The Boy from the Chemist Is Here to See You received the 1998 Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and The Ice Age was awarded the 2002 Whitbread Poetry Prize. He is also a recipient of the Somerset Maugham Award and was the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1999. He lives in Lancashire, England.

Robert Frank was born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1924, and emigrated to the United States in 1947. His first book of photographs, The Americans, was published by Grove Press in 1959 with an introduction by Jack Kerouac. In the late 1950s, Frank turned his attention to cinema: his films include Pull My Daisy (1959), which he made with the Beat poets, and Cocksucker Blues (1972), a documentary portrait of the Rolling Stones. Frank has had solo exhibitions at venues worldwide, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1969); Kunsthaus, Zurich (1995); the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1986); the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (1994); the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1995); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1995); the Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan (1995); and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2001). In 1990 the Robert Frank Collection was established at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Frank’s numerous awards include the Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation International Photography Award (1996), and the Cornell Capa Award of the International Center of Photography (2000). “Robert Frank: London / Wales” opened in 2003 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and will travel to the Tate Modern, London.

Gao Xingjian was born in 1940 in the Jiangxi province in eastern China. He studied French literature at the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute, graduating in 1962. The publication of his Preliminary Discussions on the Art of Modern Fiction (Huacheng, 1981; banned 1982) and the Beijing People’s Theater’s staging of his controversial plays Absolute Signal (1982), Bus Stop (1983; banned 1983), and Wild Man (1985) displeased the authorities, and he was subjected to various forms of harassment. In 1987, he relocated to Paris. Gao received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000, marking the first time the prize has been awarded for a body of Chinese-language writings. Among his works, the novel Soul Mountain (HarperCollins, 2000) was singled out for special acclaim by the Swedish Academy. Gao’s other works of fiction in English include the novel One Man’s Bible (HarperCollins, 2002) and a forthcoming collection of short stories, Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather (HarperCollins, 2004), the title story of which appears in this issue.

Arthur Goldhammer has translated more than eighty books from the French. His new translation of Emile Zola’s novel The Kill is to be published by the Modern Library this winter. He is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and was awarded the Médaille de Vermeil by the Académie Française.

Dieter M. Gräf was born in 1960 in Ludwigshafen, Germany, and lives in Cologne. He has published three volumes of poetry with Suhrkamp: Rauschstudie: Vater + Sohn, 1994; Treibender Kopf, 1997; and Westrand, 2002.

Taylor Graham’s poems have appeared in Ascent, International Poetry Review, the Iowa Review, the New York Quarterly, West Branch, and elsewhere. Her latest collections are Lies of the Visible (Snark Publishing, 2003) and Harmonics (Poet’s Corner Press, 2003). Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California.

Howard Halle is a senior editor at Time Out New York.

Herberto Helder was born in 1930 in Funchal, on Madeira Island, Portugal, and lives on the outskirts of Lisbon. He is one of Portugal’s leading post-surrealist poets, and his work is well known in France, Spain, and Italy. Helder’s poems have appeared in English translation in Boulevard, Barrow Street, Cream City Review, Confrontation, and Osiris, among other journals.

Emily Jacir was born in 1970 and currently lives and works in New York and Ramallah, in the West Bank. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including “Greater New York” at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2000); “Uncommon Threads” at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, New York (2001); “Queens International” at the Queens Museum, New York (2002); and the Istanbul Biennial, Turkey (2003). In 2003, she has had solo exhibitions at Debs & Co., New York; Frumkin Duval Gallery, Los Angeles; and the Khalil Skakini Cultural Centre, Ramallah, among other venues.

John Kinsella’s Peripheral Light: New and Selected Poems will be published by Norton in November 2003. He is a professor of English at Kenyon College and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University.

Mabel Lee was born in 1939 of Chinese parents in northern New South Wales, Australia. She majored in Chinese studies at the University of Sydney where she obtained her Ph.D. in 1966 and took up an academic appointment in the same year. In the 1990s she began translating the works of two contemporary Chinese writers, Yang Lian and Gao Xingjian. In 2001, Lee received the New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Translation and the pen Medallion, and in 2003 she received a Centenary Medal “for service to Australian society and
literature.”

Alexis Levitin’s translations have appeared in the Partisan Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and Chelsea, among other magazines. He has published twenty volumes of translations, the most recent being Forbidden Words: The Selected Poetry of Eugenio de Andrade (New Directions, 2003). He is currently working on the poetry of Herberto Helder and Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen under a 2003 NEA Translation Fellowship.

Julio Llamazares was born in Vegamián, Spain, in 1955. He has published two books of poetry, La lentitud de los bueyes (The slowness of the ox, 1979) and Memoria de la nieve (The memory of snow, 1982), both with Hiperión. His novels, published by Seix Barral, include Escenas del cine mudo (Scenes from silent movies, 1993), El río del olvido (The river of forgetting, 1995), and La lluvia amarilla (The Yellow Rain, 1988), which will be published by Harcourt in 2004 and from which the excerpt in this issue of Grand Street was taken. Llamazares lives and works as a journalist in Madrid.

Charles Merewether is an art historian and curator at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. He has taught at the University of Sydney, the Universidad Autonoma in Barcelona, the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, and the University of Southern California. He was a 2003 Fellow at the Humanities Research Center, Australian National University (Canberra), and the recipient of a Japan Foundation Research Fellowship. His writing has appeared in journals and catalogues in Europe, the Americas, Australia, and Asia. He is currently working on exhibition and book projects on art in postwar Japan and contemporary China.

Sarah Emily Miano was born in Niagara Falls, New York, in 1974 and recently received an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of East Anglia in England. Her first novel, Encyclopedia of Snow, was published by Picador in spring 2003. Miano currently lives in London.

Wangechi Mutu was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and received a B.F.A. from Cooper Union for the Advancement of Arts and Sciences, New York, and an M.F.A. from Yale University School of Art, New Haven. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including the 1997 Johannesburg Biennial; “Out of the Box” at the Queens Museum, New York (2001); and “Africaine” at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2002). Her first solo exhibition was held in September 2003 at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

Susanna Nied is a writer and literary translator whose most recent publications are Selected Poems by Søren Ulrik Thomsen (Poetry New York, 1999) and alphabet by Inger Christensen (New Directions, 2001). She was the winner of the 1981 pen / ASF translation award. Her translation of Christensen’s ButterÅy Valley: A Requiem, in which “Watersteps” appears, is forthcoming from New Directions in 2004.

Isamu Noguchi was born in Los Angeles in 1904 and spent his childhood in Japan. In 1924, he abandoned his medical studies at Columbia University to devote himself to sculpture. After being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1927, he worked as a studio assistant to Brancusi in Paris. During the 1930s Noguchi supported himself through portrait sculpture, while beginning collaborations with Buckminster Fuller and Martha Graham. His first important body of abstract sculpture was made during the 1940s and was exhibited with the New York School. A Bollingen Foundation Fellowship launched a period of international activity for him, with public commissions in Europe and Asia, as well as in the United States. He established a studio in Japan in 1969 and dedicated himself to stone carving. Retrospectives of his work were shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1968, and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, in 1992. The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum in Long Island City, New York, opened in 1985. In 2004, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, will present a centenary exhibition of his work, which will travel to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. Noguchi died in 1988.

Adriano Pedrosa is a curator, writer, and editor. He is a regular contributor to Artforum and Frieze, and his work has appeared in Art Nexus, Art + Text, Bomb, and Flash Art, among others. Pedrosa has contributed and edited several exhibition catalogues on contemporary art, most recently monographs on Beatriz Milhazes and Ernesto Neto. His curatorial projects include “F[r]icciones” (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2000 – 01, with Ivo Mesquita); São Paulo Bienal (1998, adjunct curator); and the “exhibition in a book” titled Cream 3: 10 Curators — 100 Artists — 10 Source Artists (Phaidon, 2003). Pedrosa is cocurator of insite 2005 (San Diego / Tijuana), curator of Coleção de Paisagens Paulo A. W. Vieira (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), curator of Colecção Teixeira de Freitas (Lisbon, Portugal), and curator of Museu de Arte da Pampulha (Belo Horizonte, Brazil), where he is responsible for the exhibition program and the collection.

Artist and architect Marjetica Potrc lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her work has been featured in exhibitions throughout Europe and the United States, including the São Paulo Bienal (1996); Skulptur Projekte in Münster, Germany (1997); “La casa, il Corpo, il Cuore: Konstruktion der Identitaeten,” Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, Austria (1999); “Urban Visions,” Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts (1999); and Manifesta 3, Ljubljana, Slovenia (2000). She has had solo exhibitions at the Center for Curatorial Studies Museum, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (1996); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2001); the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2001); and the IVAM Center Julio Gonzales, Valencia (2003), among other venues. Potrc has received numerous awards, including grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1993, 1999) and the Soros Center for Contemporary Arts, Ljubljana (1994), as well as the Guggenheim Museum’s Hugo Boss Prize (2000).

Neil Printz is the coeditor of the first two volumes of the Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné: Paintings and Sculptures, 1961–1969, published by Phaidon in 2002. He is currently preparing a catalogue raisonné of Isamu Noguchi’s work.

Minna Proctor’s translations from Italian include Love in Vain: Selected Stories, by Federigo Tozzi (New Directions, 2001), which won the pen Poggioli Prize; and Belief, Non-Belief: An Exchange, by Umberto Eco and Carlo Maria Martini (Arcade, 1999). Her essays and criticism have appeared in the American Scholar, The Nation, Aperture, the New York Observer, and Bomb. Proctor is currently organizing a special Italian issue of the Literary Review, and her nonfiction study of religious calling is forthcoming in 2004 from Viking.

Edward W. Said is University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. His recent books include Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society, with Daniel Barenboim (Knopf, 2002), an excerpt from which appeared in Grand Street 71; ReÅections on Exile and Other Essays (Harvard, 2000); and Out of Place: A Memoir (Knopf, 1999).

Mark Schafer is a literary translator and visual artist living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has translated many Latin American authors, among them novelists Alberto Ruy Sánchez and Virgilio Piñera, poets Gloria Gervitz and Alberto Blanco, and essayists José Lezama Lima and Julio Ortega. His translation of Jesús Gardea’s collection of stories, Stripping Away the Sorrows from the World, was published in 1998 by Editorial Aldus/Mercury House. He is currently working on translations of Gloria Gervitz’s epic poem Migraciones, a collection of selected poems by David Huerta, a collection of essays by Antonio José Ponte, and a novel by Belén Gopegui.

Andrew Shields was born in Detroit in 1964 and has lived in Basel, Switzerland, since 1995. His poems, prose, and translations have appeared in journals on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2004, Harcourt will publish two books that he translated from the German: the correspondence of Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, and The Cello Player, a novel by Michael Krüger.

Franklin Sirmans is a freelance writer, editor, and curator based in New York. A former U.S. editor of Flash Art magazine, Sirmans was recently named editor in chief of Art AsiaPacific. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Essence, Art in America, Artnews, and Time Out New York. He has also edited and contributed to numerous catalogues on contemporary art, including Transforming the Crown: African, Asian and Caribbean Artists in Britain (University of Chicago Press, 1998) and Basquiat (Tony Shafrazi Gallery, 1999). Sirmans has curated a number of exhibitions in Europe, Asia, and North America, including “One Planet Under a Groove” (cocurator, Bronx Museum), which has traveled to Minneapolis, Atlanta, and Munich.

Charlie Smith lives in New York City and is the author of a dozen books of poetry and fiction, including Heroin and Other Poems (Norton, 2000) and Shine Hawk (Simon & Schuster, 1988). His new volume of poetry, Women of America, is forthcoming from Norton in 2004. He has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment of the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Antonio Tabucchi was born in Pisa in 1943. He lived in India and Portugal before settling in his native Tuscany, where he holds the Chair of Literature at the University of Siena. Tabucchi, who writes in Italian and Portuguese, has won numerous awards for his work, including the Prix Médicis Etranger. A new collection of his stories will be published by New Directions in 2004.

Kenzo Tange was born in Imabari, Japan, in 1913, and studied architecture at Tokyo University. Tange’s first important commission was the Peace Park in Hiroshima in 1949. The Olympic Stadium in Tokyo, 1961 – 64, is one of his most admired works, and his urban planning designs have been implemented in Tokyo Bay (1960); Skopje, Yugoslavia (1966); and Bologna, Italy (1967). His works of architectural theory include Katsura: Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture (Yale University Press, 1960) and Ise: A Prototype of Japanese Architecture (MIT Press, 1965). In 1987 he was awarded the Pritzker Prize for Architecture.

Dorothea Tanning was born in Galesburg, Illinois, in 1910 and lives and works in New York City. She has also lived in Chicago, Arizona, and for twenty-eight years in France. In addition to her work as a painter, print-maker, and sculptor, Tanning has designed sets and costumes for ballet and theater productions in New York, London, and Paris. Retrospective exhibitions of her paintings, drawings, and sculpture have been held at the Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Paris (1974); the Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, Sweden (1993); and Camden Arts Centre, London (1993). Her work is represented in numerous permanent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Menil Collection, Houston, Texas; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Tate Modern, London.

Ann Temkin is the Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

William T. Vollmann is the author of eight novels, three collections of stories, and two nonfiction works. Vollmann’s writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, and Granta, and he is a frequent contributor to Grand Street. His new nonfiction book, Rising Up and Rising Down, parts of which were featured in Grand Street 65, will be published in five volumes by McSweeney’s in fall 2003.

Novelist, essayist, and poet Abdourahman A. Waberi was born in Djibouti in northeast Africa in 1965. In 1985, he moved to Caen, France, to study English language and literature. Waberi’s first volume of stories, Le Pays sans ombre (Land without shadows; Le Serpent à Plumes), was published in 1994 and received the Grand prix de la Nouvelle francophone from the Académie Royale de Langue et de Littérature Française de Belgique and the Prix Albert Bernard of the Académie des Sciences d’Outre-mer de Paris. In 1996, another volume of stories, Cahier nomade (Nomad notebook; Le Serpent à Plumes), received the Grand Prix Littéraire de l’Afrique noire. Waberi’s first novel, Balbala, was published in 1997 (Le Serpent à Plumes). In 2000, his first volume of poems, Les Nomades, mes frères, vont boire à la Grande Ourse (Nomads, my brothers, are going to drink from the Great Bear), was published by Pierron and in 2003 his second novel, Transit, was published by Gallimard. Waberi’s writing has appeared in many international newspapers, including Africultures, Le Monde, Libération, Le Figaro, Le Nouvel Observateur, DU, and Lettre International. He lives with his family in Caen, where he works as an English teacher.

Eliot Weinberger is an essayist and translator. His latest books are 9/12 (Prickly Paradigm, 2003), a collection of political articles, and The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry (2003), which he edited.