Per Contra

Contributors Fall 2006

Born in Lagos, Nigeria, Sefi Atta trained as an accountant in London and began to write whilst she was working in New York. She is a graduate of the creative writing program at Antioch University, Los Angeles, and has won prizes from Zoetrope, Red Hen Press and the BBC. In 2005, she was awarded PEN International’s David TK Wong Prize and her debut novel entitled Everything Good Will Come was published. She lives in Mississippi with her husband Gboyega Ransome-Kuti, a medical doctor, and their daughter, Temi, and teaches at the state university.

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Russell Bittner writes both fiction and poetry.  His poetry has appeared in, among other places, The American Dissident, The Lyric, The International Journal of Erotica, Thieves Jargon, Southern Hum, Opium Magazine, and Different Voices.  His fiction has been published widely, including in The International Journal of Erotica, Underground Voices and Skive. The first chapter of his novel, Trompe-l’oeil, (completed in 2004) will appear in Snow Monkey in its fall 2006 issue. The first six chapters of another novel, Girl from Baku are in Dead Drunk Dublin.

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Sean Farragher is founder and publisher of Great River Press, which publishes poetry and fiction e-books. Great River Press also publishes the BLAST ANNUAL, a poetry and fiction e-zine. Sean's personal Website contains selections from his many years of writing and teaching poetry as part of the original poet-in-the schools program.

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Kathy Fish lives in Colorado. Her stories have appeared or will appear in Night Train, Quick Fiction, Smokelong Quarterly, Staccato, Elimae, Cranky, Wild Strawberries, FRiGG, Ghoti, Ink Pot, Noo Journal, Temenos, Hobart, Alice Blue, N.O.L.A. Spleen, The Duck and Herring Co. Pocket Field Guide, Juked and elsewhere. Her story, "Shoebox" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

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Petina Gappah was born on 15 June 1971, in Kitwe on the Zambian Copper-belt, and she grew up in Zimbabwe. She has law degrees from the universities of Zimbabwe and Cambridge, as well as a PhD in trade law from Graz University in Austria. Her story, Something Nice from London, is her first work accepted for publication.  In addition to English, she speaks Shona, a language indigenous to Zimbabwe, German and some French. Petina currently lives in Geneva with her two-and-a-half-year-old son, Kush. She works for the Advisory Centre on WTO law, an international organisation that helps poor countries to interpret and apply the law of the world trading system. Petina also writes on legal aid, trade law and Zimbabwe's foreign policy.

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George Garrett is the author of thirty-six books (including eight collections of poems) and editor/co-editor of twenty-one others.  He has retired from forty-five years of teaching, and lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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Daniel Hoffman has published eleven books of poetry, including his recent volume, Makes You Stop and Think: Sonnets (George Braziller, 2005).  He is also the author of Zone of the Interior: A Memoir, 1942-1947 (Louisiana State University Press, 2000) and seven volumes of criticism, including Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (1971, Reprint Edition Louisiana State University Press, l985), which was nominated for a National Book Award. 

Among his other awards, Hoffman received the Arthur Rense Poetry Prize "for an exceptional poet" from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, and the Memorial Medal of the Maygar P.E.N. for his translations of contemporary Hungarian poetry.

He served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1973 to 1974 (now called the Poet Laureate) and is a Chancellor Emeritus of The Academy of American Poets. From 1988 to 1999 Hoffman was Poet in Residence at St. John the Divine, where he administered the American Poets' Corner. Until 1996, Hoffman was Felix E. Schelling Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Liesl Jobson is a bassoonist in the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra. Her poetry and fiction appear in magazines and anthologies in South Africa and the USA, including Chimurenga, New Coin and The Southern Review . In 2005 she won the POWA Women's Writing Competition for Poetry and the Ernst Van Heerden Creative Writing Award from the University of the Witwatersrand for her flash fiction manuscript "100 Papers". She is a poetry editor at Mad Hatter's Review.

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Lynn Levin is the author of two collections of poems, Imaginarium (Loonfeather Press, 2005), which was a finalist in ForeWard Magazine’s 2005 Book of the Year Award,  and A Few Questions about Paradise (Loonfeather Press, 2000), as well as The Forest, a chapbook of translations of poems by the contemporary Albanian poet, Besnik Mustafaj (Poetry Miscellany Chapbooks, 2001). Bucks County Poet Laureate for 1999, Lynn Levin has received three Pushcart Nominations. She is a four-time prize winner in The Mad Poets Competitions and in 2002 was chosen by Cornelius Eady to receive the Robert Fraser Poetry Award. She is executive producer of DUTV's The Drexel InterView and teaches in the Department of English and Philosophy at Drexel University.

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Abioseh Michael Porter was born in Sierra Leone. A Ph. D. in comparative literature, he is a professor of English and head of the Department of English and Philosophy at Drexel University, Philadelphia (www.drexel.edu/engphil).  Editor of JALA--The Journal of the African Literature Association, he has traveled quite extensively in West Africa, North America, Britain, France, and Germany.

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Larry Silver, Farquhar Professor of Art History at the University of Pennsylvania, also has taught at Berkeley and Northwestern.  He served as President of the College Art Association and as Editor in Chief of their on-line reviews journal, caa.reviews.  Author of a survey textbook, "Art in History" (1993;Prentice-Hall, now out of print), he has also published books, articles and exhibition catalogues in his specialty of Northern European paintings and prints, featuring such artists as Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel, and Rembrandt.

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Ann Sitarz grew up in Philadelphia, PA. She is pursuing degrees from Drexel University in Chemical Engineering and English. She is twenty-one years old. She has enjoyed several internships as a process engineer at Johnson and Johnson and is pursuing a career in medicine. She has published several articles in Drexel’s Online Journal and won the first place award for Creative Non-Fiction in Drexel’s Week of Writing, 2006.