English Studies Forum

AIZAWA Keizō is the author of twelve anthologies of poetry, including the recent collections Mangō gensō [Mango Hallucination] and Kujakusō no dekigoto [Happenings at the Peacock Villa].   During the 1950s and 1960s, Aizawa made a name for himself as one of a new generation of postwar Japanese authors that used particularly bold language to describe homoerotic desire.  Translations of Aizawa's poetry have appeared in International Poetry Review, pacific REVIEW, Event, and the online journal QP: queerpoetry.  He has also written eight books on opera and music appreciation.  He currently lives with his partner, the jazz singer KANAMARU Masaki, in Tokyo.

Jeffrey Angles has spent a number of years living and studying in Japan.  He currently teaches as an assistant professor of Japanese literature and language at Western Michigan University. 

Dennis Bohr is an actor and playwright, co-founder of Black Sheep Theatre based in Boone, NC.  Black Sheep has produced most of his thirteen plays, including "Pope Joan: The Hiss of the Snake," "Burn in Hell," and his one-man show, "The English Whore."  He has performed his
work in Ireland, Northern Ireland, London, North Carolina and Kentucky.  He taught high school English for 14 years in Kentucky and Tennessee and now teaches composition at Appalachian State University in Boone.

Benjamin D. Carson is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic American Literature at Bridgewater State College, in Bridgewater, MA. His work has appeared in Women's Studies, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, and Nebula, as well as other publications.

Merrill Cole received an M.F.A. degree in English from Cornell University and a Joint-Ph.D. in English and in Criticism and Theory from the University of Washington. He is the author of The Other Orpheus: A Poetics of Modern Homosexuality (Routledge, 2003).

Zachary Dobbins studies and teaches American literature at The University of Texas at Austin.  He is writing about Russell Banks, who makes and believes in American literature, and who makes things happen (like self-reflection and confrontations with histories national and private) and hopes to make things happen (like personal and social change) among his readers (and himself) through such “make-believing.”  Both, one assumes, know what it means to pretend without feigning.

Trevor Dodge was born amidst the sad cartoon of Nixon's America and Evel Knievel's ill-fated jump across the Snake River Canyon. Since then, he has taught courses in literature, writing, and cultural studies at the College of Southern Idaho, Boise State University, Portland Community College, Marylhurst University, and, currently, the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, OR. His novella, Yellow #10, was published this fall by Eraserhead Press, and he is the co-editor of the recently-published anthology Northwest Edge: Fictions of Mass Destruction.  He can be found online at www.trevordodge.net.

Heather Dubrow, Tighe-Evans Professor and John Bascom Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the author of two chapbooks of poetry, one entitled Transformation and Repetition (Sandhills Press/Main-Travelled Roads) and the other Border Crossings (Parallel Press/Silver Buckle Press), and of The Devil's Paintbrush, a play produced by a community theater.  Her recent poetry has appeared  in Cedar Press Review, Southwest Review,  and Prairie Schooner, and other work is forthcoming in two anthologies to be published by Abbeywood Press.  She has also published five scholarly books.

Joshua Edelman is currently a Ph.D. student in Theatre Studies at Trinity College Dublin. He wrote this essay in 2002, while living at Central Expressway and Royal Lane in Dallas.

Jana Browning Herbert is currently pursuing her MFA in creative writing at Boise State University. She lives with her husband, a hermit crab named Jessica, and two daughters who claim they have "social issues."

Janis Butler Holm teaches at Ohio University, where she has served as Associate Editor for Wide Angle, the film journal

Maggie Jaffe's publications include How the West Was One, Continuous Performance, 7th Circle, winner of the 1998 San Diego Book Award for Poetry, and The Prisons, winner of the 2001 San Diego Book Award for Poetry.  She is the Poetry Editor of Cedar Hill Review and Editorial Assistant of Rattle.  She won a California Arts Council Grant in 1998.

Tom Lavazzi has published several pieces on contemporary poet Armand Schwerner's work, exploring the continuum from textual performance to multi-media re-enactment (in Sagetrieb, Talisman, The American Poetry Review, and Text), and his work on poet Gary Snyder (American Poetry Review and Sagetrieb) has been substantially excerpted for a recent volume of Contemporary Literary Criticism.   His third book of poetry, LightsOut, is forthcoming from Bright Hill Press in 2005.

Stacey Levine lives in Seattle and is the author of My Horse and Other Stories and Dra--, a novel. Her second novel, Frances Johnson, will be published by Clear Cut Press in early 2005.

David Matlin is a novelist, poet, and essayist. He lives in San Diego and teaches both literature and creative writing at San Diego State University.

Joseph McElroy is the author of eight novels, including A Smuggler's Bible, Hind's Kidnap, Ancient History, Lookout Cartridge, Plus, Women and Men, The Letter Left to Me, and Actress in the House.  A recent electronic book review festschrift celebrates his work. 

Tim Morris is a professor of English at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Neil Murphy is the author of Irish Fiction and Postmodern Doubt (Edwin Mellen, 2004). He has also published articles, reviews, fiction and interviews in The Irish Review, The Irish University Review, Graph, Asylum Arts Review, The Irish Literary Supplement, Force 10, The Literary Review and The Review of Contemporary Fiction.  He is currently working on a comprehensive study of contemporary fiction and is an assistant professor in modern literature at Nanyang University, Singapore. He studied at NUI, Galway and NUI, Dublin.

Paula Murphy is currently completing her doctoral thesis, entitled The Post-Millenial Self, in Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland.  Her areas of specialization are contemporary Irish literature and film, Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, and film theory.  She has given many papers on these areas and has published chapters on “Spec(tac)ular Society: French Theory Interpreting Globalisation” in Globalisation and France (New York: Peter Verlang, 2004) and “From Post-Industrial to Post-Modern: the Changing Face of Irish Cinema” in Engaging Post-Modernity (London: Pluto, 2005).

Kathleen O’Gorman is Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University, which has supported the work of this essay with a research grant.  She has published on James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Charles Tomlinson, Julio Cortázar, and others.  Her first essay on Carole Maso’s Ava (online at the website of the Center for Book Culture) concerns strategies for teaching the text.  She wrote both essays because she loves this novel. 

Lance Olsen is author of 15 books of or about innovative fiction, including, most recently, the novel Girl Imagined by Chance (FC2, 2002) and the short-story collection Hideous Beauties (Eraserhead, 2003).  He lives digitally at www.cafezeitgeist.com.

Joe Ashby Porter is the author of the novels Eelgrass (New Directions), Resident Aliens (Ivan R. Dee), and the forthcoming The Near Future (Turtle Point), and the collections The Kentucky Stories,  Lithuania: Short Stories (both Johns Hopkins), and Touch Wood: Short Stories  (Turtle Point), which occasioned his 2004 Academy Award in Literature presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the body of his fiction.. 

Neil Ramsey earned a master's degree in English literature from the University of Waikato in New Zealand and is currently undertaking a Ph.D. at the Australian National University, researching the ways in which British soldier-memoirs of the Napoleonic Wars might contribute to the concept of a Napoleonic “war literature.” This is the first time his poetry has been published.

Doug Rice is the author of Blood of Mugwump, A Good Cuntboy Is Hard to Find, Skin Prayer and numerous essays and stories published in a variety of journals.  He co-edited FEDERMAN: A to X-X-X-X and editsNOBODADDIES: A Journal of Pirated Texts.  He teaches fiction writing and theory at California State University, Sacramento.

Todd Rohman is a professor of English at Governors State University, where he teaches Modern and Contemporary Literature.  He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Miami.  His poetry has appeared in Mangrove, The Green Hills Literary Lantern, and will appear in the reader, Engaging the Text. Rohman also has a forthcoming chapter in the Modern Language Association's Approaches to Teaching Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49.

Writer and editor Lou Rowan has recently completed three books: Except my Life, a collection of short stories; Let Leaves: Poems 1967-1997; and, My Last Days, a satirical Superman autobiography in which the prominent American superhero takes on the economic, cultural, and political establishment in New York City, retires to Kansas, but returns to his mission as the President, bringing compassion and danger to the second Bush term. He’s at work on a long novel about the losing of the American West.  Rowan’s fiction currently appears in Prague Literary Review and English Studies Forum. His stories, essays, and poetry have appeared in a wide variety of journals, notably a study of David Antin in The Review of Contemporary Fiction.  He lives in Seattle, where he edits the Golden Handcuffs Review.

Kenji Siratori is a Japanese cyberpunk writer who is currently bombarding the internet with wave upon wave of highly experimental, uncompromising, progressive, intense prose. His is a writing style that not only breaks with tradition, it severs all cords, and can only really be compared to the kind of experimental writing techniques employed by the Surrealists, William Burroughs and Antonin Artaud. Embracing the image mayhem of the digital age, his relentless prose is nonsensical and extreme, avant-garde and confused, with precedence given to twisted imagery, pace and experimentation over linear narrative and character development. With unparalleled stylistic terrorism, he unleashes his literary attack. An unprovoked assault on the senses. Blood Electric (Creation Books) was acclaimed by David Bowie.
 

Davis Schneiderman is Chair of the American Studies Program and an Assistant Professor of English at Lake Forest College.  His creative work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and accepted by numerous journals including Fiction International, The Iowa Review Web, Clackamas Literary Review, Exquisite Corpse, Diagram, 3rd Bed, Quarter After Eight, The Little Magazine, Gargoyle, and Happy.  He is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization (Pluto Press, 2004).  Dr. Schneiderman is currently co-editing an anthology on contemporary uses of the Surrealist Exquisite Corpse, as well as co-editing the new literary journal Potion.

Mark Troy is an associate professor (Docent) of English at Karlstad University, Sweden; his published research interests show a sea-change in recent years, moving from modernist texts,  such as Joyce's Finnegans Wake, through Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, to his current project, which uses post-colonial theory to illuminate Joseph McElroy’s Women and Men .

Wendy Walker is the author of the espionage novel, The Secret Service (1992), the poetic dossier BLUE FIRE: Confessing Constance Kent, and several critical fictions.  She is the recipient of the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative American Poetry, and her work has appeared in such journals as Parnassus, Marginalia, and Fiction International. 

Norman Weinstein is a poet and critic, author of Gertrude Stein and the Literature of the Modern Consciousness, A Night in Tunisia: Imaginings of Africa in Jazz, and four books of poetry, the most recent being Weaving Fire From Water.. He teaches American literature at Boise State University.

At 44, a retired professor of modern Japanese literature at San Jose State University, James A. Wren holds his Ph.D. from The University of Washington in comparative literature, his D. Phil. from Niigata University (Japan) in modern Japanese literature, and his D.Sc. from The Chinese University of Mining and Technology (P.R.C.) in immunogenetics. He has also completed his
medical residencies in internal medicine and in family practice. In addition to his latest project, a reference to Jewish American Writers, Wren spends his time either with musical composition or as an advocate for literacy and the disabled (he has SLE and Young Parkinson's Disease).