Luis Alberto Ambroggio is an Argentinian poet who lives in the US. He is the author of nine collections of poetry, most recently Laberintos de Humo (published in Argentina) and Los Tres Esposos de la Noche (published in Costa Rica), both in 2005. He was recently appointed to the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española (North American Academy of the Spanish Language), and his poetry has been selected for the Archives of Hispanic-American Literature of the Library of Congress. In 2004, he won the Spanish Television competition for poems on solitude. <back to translation>

Zdravka Evtimova was born in 1959 in Bulgaria. She has published several books of fiction, including the novels Your Shadow Was My Home (Best Bulgarian novel of 2000) and Thursday (Best prose publication of 2003 of the Union of Bulgarian Writers). Her collection of short stories Bitter Sky was published in 2003 by Skrev Press, UK. Two of her short stories were broadcast on Radio BBC in 2004 during a week of Eastern European fiction; her short story "Vassil" was one of the 15 prize-winning short stories in the BBC 2005 worldwide short story competition. Her short story "It's Your Turn" was one of the 10 prize winning stories included in the anthology Utopia 2005: Dix auteur du monde enteir, Nantes, France. Her short story collection Somebody Else was published in 2004 by MAG Press, San Diego, California, and won MAG Press’ Best Short Story Collection by an Established Author Award in 2004. Her short stories have been published in the US in Masachusetts Review and Antioch Review, among others, in the UK, Canada, Australia, Japan, Russia, Germany, France, India, Argentina, Poland, Turkey, the Netherlands, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Macedonia, Nepal and Serbia. She works as an English-Bulgarian literary translator and lives in Pernik, Bulgaria, with her husband, her two sons and her daughter. <back to translation> <back to commentary>

Mark Francis has placed verse renderings of classical Chinese poetry in such print and e- journals as Two Lines, Renditions, The New Formalist, Candelabrum, eXchanges, Contemporary Rhyme, and The Raintown Review, and in the book anthology A Silver Treasury of Chinese Lyrics (Chinese University of Hong Kong Press). He holds a Ph.D. in Chinese from Stanford and teaches Chinese language and culture at Drew University. <back to translation of Han Shan> <back to translation of Li Qingzhao>

Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948 ) is one of the great poets of Chile and Latin America, and his work has influenced many major figures and movements of twentieth century Spanish language literature. Written in French, "L’horizon carré" (from which the poems here have been taken) was decisive in the development of the surrealist movement. <back to translation>

Chris Michalski's poems and translations have been published or are forthcoming in such journals as Spoon River Poetry Review, Asheville Poetry Review, FIRE, Burnside Review and Poetry International. His second film, Asche, is currently in post-production . <back to translation>

Yvette Neisser Moreno is both a poet and a translator. She is currently translating Ambroggio’s poetry for what will be the first book-length collection of his poems in English. Publication of this bilingual "selected poems" is tentatively scheduled for 2007. (Her translations and co-translations of individual poems have appeared in various publications.) Her translations of his poetry have appeared in the International Poetry Review and in the anthology Poetic Voices without Borders, and are forthcoming in the South Florida Poetry Anthology and the online journal Beltway. Her own poetry manuscript, Fields of Vision, was a finalist for the 2004 Gival Press Award, and her poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies, including the Virginia Quarterly Review, Tar River Poetry, and the Potomac Review. <back to translation>

Kathy S. Leonard is professor of Spanish and Hispanic Linguistics at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. She has published numerous translations of short stories by Latin American women writers and several books dealing with their work. These include: Cruel Fictions, Cruel Realities: Short Stories by Latin American Women (1997); Fire from the Andes: Short Fiction by Women from Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru (1998); Aurora (1999) the English translation of the Bolivian novel La flor de “La Candelaria"; and Una revelación desde la escritura: entrevistas a narradoras/poetas bolivianas (2001) two volumes of interviews with Bolivian women writers. Professor Leonard has received a number of awards and grants for her work with Latin American authors, among them a Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Grant and a grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities in translation . <back to translation>

Li Qingzhao (11th-12 C.), the most famous and well-regarded of classical Chinese women poets, is noted for melancholy verse of intricate musical effect. The titles in her preferred genre of the ci (“lyric”) come from those of standard musical compositions; Chinese poets took turns substituting rhyming lines of irregular meter to the tunes. <back to translation>

Giovanna Rivero Santa Cruz has published the following short story anthologies: Nombrando el eco (1994), Las bestias (1997), Sentir lo oscuro (2002), La dueña de nuestros sueños (2001), and Contraluna (2005). In 2001 she published the controversial novel Las camaleones. In 2004, Rivero participated in the prestigious International Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa. Rivero has won a number of awards in her native Bolivia and recently was the recipient of the Franz Tamayo National Short Story Prize (2005). <back to translation>

Thom Satterlee's first book of poetry, Burning Wyclif, was just published by Texas Tech University Press. Two of the poems from the manuscript were nominated for Pushcart Prizes. In 1998, he received the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Translation Prize for his translation of poems by Danish poet Henrik Nordbrandt, published as The Hangman’s Lament by Green Integer in 2003. <back to interview>

Han Shan ("Cold Mountain") is the ostensible author of a storied collection of some 300 poems attributed to a Chinese Zen Buddhist recluse—or possibly group of recluses—of most likely the 8th or 9th Centuries. Written in a strikingly colloquial version of classical Chinese, these verses expressing both otherworldly and worldly sentiments were literally written “on bamboo, wood, stones and cliffs… and on the walls of people’s houses” at “Cold Mountain.” <back to translation>

Shireen Sinno holds an AAS in Graphic Design from the Lebanese American University in Beirut. She has worked as a graphic designer for various advertising agencies and as a freelancer in Lebanon, Jeddah, and Bahrain. Shireen has 7 years of experience in design, digital art, photography, typography, and web design. She has a passion for beauty, nature, and general wellbeing. For more information, please visit her webiste: www.shireensinno.com . <back to cover art>

Programs in Creative Writing and Translation     ■     Department of English     ■     University of Arkansas      ■     Fayetteville