Open City 16 CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES

Jean Claude Abreu is a French-Cuban connoisseur and collector who has lived in Paris since the revolution. As a mountain climber, jazz aficionado, host, and patron, he was secretly responsible for launching both the celebrated magazine L’Oeil and the equally famous alpine resort of Zermatt.

Joe Andoe is a painter. He came to New York City in 1982 from Tulsa, Oklahoma and now lives and works in the Chelsea Hotel.

Craig Arnold’s first book, Shells, was the 1998 volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. His poems have appeared most recently in Colorado Review, Cream City Review, and Borderlands.

Nathaniel Bellows has published poems in The New Republic, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Ploughshares, and many other magazines. His first novel, On This Day, will be published by HarperCollins in February 2003.

Robert Bingham (1966–99) is the author of the short-story collection Pure Slaughter Value and the novel Lightning on the Sun, of which “The Crossing Guard” was originally the opening chapter but was never published. His fiction and nonfiction appeared in The New Yorker and Might. He was a reporter, contributing editor, and early talent scout for the Cambodia Daily, Phnom Penh's first English-language daily, beginning in 1993, shortly after the paper was founded. He was the publisher of Open City from 1993 to 1999.

Matthew Brannon lives and works in New York City and Berlin. His art (posters and tapestries) obliquely satellites dual themes of decadence, pessimism, decor, and power. The bookmark tucked into this issue lists all the recorded names of the de Sade family, from the first known to the Marquis himself. You are welcome to contact him at matthewbrannon71@earthlink.net.

David Bunn is an artist living in Los Angeles. He continues to work with remains of the discarded card catalog of the Los Angeles Central Library, creating compositions that respond to other obsolete card catalogs internationally, producing installations, books, and readings. His project’s next installment, “Subliminal Messages,” will be published by Walther König, Cologne. His work may be seen in New York at Brooke Alexander Gallery and Carolina Nitsh Contemporary Art, and in Los Angeles at Angles Gallery. This year he received the Ethel Fortner Award in creative writing.

Bryan D. Dietrich is a recipient of The Paris Review Prize in Poetry, a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, a Writers at Work Fellowship, and the Eve of St. Agnes Prize. His poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, The Nation, Prairie Schooner, The Yale Review, Chelsea, Alaska Quarterly Review, Quarterly West, and other journals. His first book, Krypton Nights, was published by Zoo Press in October 2002. Currently, he is chair of the English Department at Newman University in Wichita, Kansas.

Erich Eisenegger is a lawyer and writer living in New York City. This is his first published short story.

Rafael Fernández de Villa-Urrutia was an extremely cultivated Cuban bookman (in Spanish, English, French, and even German), who ended up as curator of drawings and prints at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

Bruce Jay Friedman is the author of the novels Stern, A Mother’s Kisses, and Violencia, as well as Collected Stories and the essay collection Even the Rhinos Were Nymphos. He also wrote the plays Scuba Duba and Steambath and the screenplays for Stir Crazy and Splash. He lives in New York City.

Dana Goodyear’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Yale Review, and The Paris Review. She is on staff at The New Yorker.

Peter Gray lives in Chicago. He’s in a band called Chalet Chalet. In the summer, he drinks Miller.

Lohren Green is a writer living in San Francisco. He has a Ph.D. in Rhetoric from U.C. Berkeley. These poems are from his just-completed manuscript Poetical Dictionary.

Evan Harris is the author of The Quit: A Consideration of the Art of Quitting (Simon & Schuster, 1996). Her short fiction has appeared in various publications, including The Iowa Review, Fence, Jane, and The Brooklyn Rail. She lives in her native East Hampton, Long Island.

Matthew Higgs is an artist, curator, and writer based in Oakland, California. He is currently curator of art and design at the CCAC Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco and Oakland, and also an associate director of exhibitions for the ICA, London. Later this year he will launch a new independent publishing project entitled The Oakland Wedge.

Jorge Jauregui served in the Argentine diplomatic corps during the Falklands war before moving to Cork as a lecturer on Latin American art. He has worked as a foreman at a Louisiana steel scrap yard and as a contributing editor at Lacanian Ink. As a translator, editor, and reader he divides his time between Manhattan and Buenos Aires.

Marilyn A. Johnson works in a converted train station in Sleepy Hollow, New York, for the Hudson Valley Writers Center. She has poems in the spring and fall issues of Field.

Nina Katchadourian is a Brooklyn-based artist who spends part of each year in Finland. She is currently a visiting lecturer at Brown University in the Visual Art Department, and her varied art practice includes sound, photography, sculpture, and public projects. She is represented by Debs & Co. gallery in New York and Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco. The “Sorted Books” photographs shown here document an ongoing project that has taken place at several different sites over the past nine years in private homes as well as in public book collections.

Ryan Kenealy’s story, “Yellow and Maroon,” appeared in Open City #7. He lives, sometimes large, sometimes small, in Chicago, and has an attic.

Margaret Levine grew up in Los Angeles and now lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Her poems have previously appeared in The Quarterly.

Ed Pavlic´’s book of poems, Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue (Copper Canyon, 2001) won the The American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. His book of essays, Crossroads Modernism, was published in 2002 by the University of Minnesota Press. His poems have appeared in magazines such as Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz and Literature, Connect: Art.Politics.Theory.Practice, The Cortland Review, Indiana Review, Ploughshares, and New Orleans Review. He teaches in the English Department and directs the Africana Studies Program at Union College in Schenectady, New York.

Lewis Robinson was born in Natick, Massachusetts and grew up in Maine. He attended Middlebury College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Teaching/Writing Fellow and winner of the Glenn Schaeffer Award in Creative Writing. He has written for Sports Illustrated and The Boston Globe. His collection of short stories, Officer Friendly, which includes the story “The Diver,” will be published by HarperCollins in February 2003. He lives in Portland, Maine.

Rick Rofihe was born in Nova Scotia. He is the author of the story collection, Father Must, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1991. His stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and mrbellersneighborhood.com.

Allen Ruppersberg is an artist, author, and teacher based in New York and Los Angeles. His work includes paintings, prints, photographs, sculptures, installations, and books, and has been exhibited internationally since the late 1960s. His 240-page “novel,” Greetings from L.A., was first published in 1972 and is excerpted here. He is represented by Gorney Bravin + Lee in New York and Margo Leavin Gallery in Los Angeles.

Deborah Shapiro is a writer in Brooklyn. This is her first published story.

Michael Sledge is the author of a memoir entitled Mother and Son (Simon & Schuster, 1995). “The Birdlady of Houston” is an excerpt from his novel in progress, The Tongue is the Enemy of the Neck. He lives and works in San Francisco.

Cannon Thomas was born in Youngstown, Ohio and now lives in Manhattan. He’s written for The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Dallas Morning News, and many other newspapers. “Dubrovnik” is an excerpt from a novel in progress. He’s also working on a series of travel essays (Old Ways/New Ways) about his experiences with the Hewa people, an intact primitive tribe that lives in the western highlands of Papua New Guinea. This is his first published work of fiction.

Mungo Thomson, who curated the art projects for this issue, is an artist, regular designer, occasional curator, and infrequent writer who lives and works in Los Angeles. He is represented by Margo Leavin Gallery.

Nick Tosches is the author, most recently, of the novel In the Hand of Dante. He lives in New York and is presently at work on nothing.

Tim Wilson is the New York correspondent for the New Zealand newspaper the Sunday Star-Times. He recently completed a biography of New Zealand’s most notorious art forger. It will be published next year. He does not own a video recorder.

Kevin Young’s first book, Most Way Home, was selected for the National Poetry Series and won the Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares. His second book of poems To Repel Ghosts, a “double album” based on the work of the late artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, was a finalist for the James McLaughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Poems in this issue are from Jelly Roll: A Blues, forthcoming from Knopf in spring 2003. A former Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, he is currently the Ruth Lilly Professor of Poetry at Indiana University.