Volume 49, Issues 1 & 2

Contributors

Henry Abelove is Osborne Professor of English at Wesleyan University. He is the author of The Evangelist of Desire: John Wesley and the Methodists and of Deep Gossip, and he is the co-editor of The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. He is at work on a book on colonialism and philosophy in the eighteenth century.

Laylah Ali‘s recent drawings and paintings are collected in the catalogue Typology, published in 2007 by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. She teaches studio art at Williams College.

John Ashbery‘s most recent books are A Worldly Country and Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (both Ecco/HarperCollins, 2007). His translations of poems by Pierre Martory has just been published as The Landscapist in a bilingual edition by Sheep Meadow Press. Since 1990 he has been Charles P. Stevenson, Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard.

Robin Becker is the author of six collections including Domain of Perfect Affection (2006), The Horse Fair (2000), All-American Girl (1996 Lambda Award in Lesbian Poetry), and Giacometti’s Dog (1990), all published in the Pitt Poetry Series. In 2001, the Frick Art & Historical Center published Venetian Blue, a limited-edition chapbook of art poems. Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the Pennsylvania State University, she serves as Contributing and Poetry Editor for the Women’s Review of Books.

Frank Bidart was awarded the 2007 Bollingen Prize for poetry. His newest book, WATCHING THE SPRING FESTIVAL, is forthcoming in May 2008 from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Gregg Bordowitz is a writer, and film and video maker. His films, including Fast Trip Long Drop (1993), A Cloud In Trousers (1995), The Suicide (1996), and Habit (2001), have been widely shown in festivals, museums, and movie theaters, and broadcast internationally. In Spring 2002, Bordowitz had his first solo museum show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. His book, The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings 1986-2003, was published by MIT Press in 2004. For this recent collection, Bordowitz received the 2006 Frank Jewitt Mather Award from the College Art Association. Currently, Bordowitz is a guest professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria.

Joe Brainard (1942-1994) was both an artist and a writer. Beginning in 1965, he had many solo shows and took part in a great many group shows around the country and abroad. He also designed sets for LeRoi Jones’s The Toilet and Frank O’Hara’s The General Returns from One Place to Another, as well as décor and costumes for the Louis Falco Dance Troupe and Joffrey Ballet Co. Brainard did many collaborations with his poet friends John Ashbery, Ted Berrigan, Kenward Elmslie, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, Ron Padgett, James Schuyler, and others. His work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Berkeley Art Museum, among others. Brainard’s art work is represented by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York. His book I Remember (Granary Books), in print since its first publication in 1970, has become a perennial classic. Brainard’s most recent publication is The Nancy Book (Siglio Press), a collection of his witty variations on the comic strip character Nancy. For more information, go to www.joebrainard. org.

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984. She is the author of Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth Century France (Columbia University Press, 1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (Routledge, 1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford University Press, 1997), Excitable Speech (Routledge, 1997), Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (Columbia University Press, 2000), Hegemony, Contingency, Universality, with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek (Verso Press, 2000). In 2004, she published a collection of writings on war’s impact on language and thought entitled Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (Verso Press). That same year, The Judith Butler Reader appeared, edited by Sara Salih (Blackwell Publishers). Undoing Gender appeared with Routledge in 2004 as well. Her most recent book, Giving an Account of Oneself appeared with Fordham University Press (2005). She is currently working on essays pertaining to Jewish Philosophy, focusing on pre-Zionist criticisms of state violence. She continues to write on cultural and literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism, and sexual politics.

Rafael Campo teaches and practices internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. His most recent books include Diva (Duke University Press, 2000), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry; Landscape with Human Figure (Duke University Press, 2002), winner of the Gold Medal from Fore Word for the best book of poetry published by an independent press; and The Enemy (Duke University Press, 2007), winner of the Sheila Motton Book Prize, given biannually for the best collection of poetry by the New England Poetry Club. New poems, essays, and reviews have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Commonweal, Georgia Review, The Nation, The Progressive, Yale Review, and elsewhere. For more information, please visit www.rafaelcampo.com.

Tim Dean is a professor of English and Comparative Literature, as well as Director of the Humanities Institute, at University of Buffalo (SUNY). He is the author of Beyond Sexuality (University of Chicago Press, 2000) and Unlimited Intimacy (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming), as well as a co-editor of Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis (University of Chicago Press, 2001) and A Future for the Humanities (Fordham University Press, forthcoming).

Thomas L. Dumm is Professor of Political Science at Amherst College. His most recent book, Loneliness As a Way of Life, will be published this year by Harvard University Press.

Jonathan Goldberg is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Emory University. His most recent book is Tempest in the Caribbean (University of Minnesota Press 2004); for more on the project to which his essay on Tintoretto belongs, see “After Thoughts” in South Atlantic Quarterly 106.3 (2007): 501-10, a special issue on writing since queer theory.

Lee Gordon was developing his My Lincoln series for inclusion in this special issue of MR when he died at the end of last summer, at the age of forty-nine. He was an alumnus of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (1979). Upon completion of his MFA at Rutgers (1982), he was in the first museum show to explore the idea of a homosexual sensibility in contemporary art at The New Museum, NYC, where his work was called “diabolically intelligent.” Lee was in hundreds of exhibitions, including solo shows in New York City, Paris, Chicago, New Orleans and The University of California in Santa Barbara.

Marilyn Hacker is the author of eleven books of poems, most recently Essays on Departure: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet Press, UK, 2006) and Desesperanto (Norton 2003). Recent translations include Guy Goffette’s Charlestown Blues (University of Chicago Press, 2007) and Venus Khoury-Ghata’s Nettles (Graywolf, 2008). She lives in New York and Paris.

Lisa Henderson teaches and writes as Associate Professor of Communications at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her book in progress is titled Love and Money: Queers, Class, Cultural Production.

Allan Isaac teaches English at Wesleyan University. His book American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America (2006) is published in the Critical American Studies Series by the University of Minnesota Press.

Shelley Jackson is the author of Half Life, The Melancholy of Anatomy, hypertexts including Patchwork Girl; several children’s books; and Skin a story published in tattoos on 2095 volunteers, one word at a time. Co-founder of the Interstitial Library and headmistress of the Shelley Jackson Vocational School for Ghost Speakers and Hearing-Mouth Children, she lives in Brooklyn and at www.ineradicablestain.com.

Liza Johnson is a filmmaker, artist, and writer. Her work has been exhibited widely in film festivals, galleries, and museums, including the New York, Berlin and Rotterdam Film Festivals, the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Walker Art Center, Mass MOCA, the Pompidou Center, ICA Philadelphia, and many others. Her writings have been published in a number of journals and magazines including Signs and The Believer. She has also curated museum exhibitions and festival programs. Johnson is Associate Professor of Art at Williams College.

Kevin Kopelson teaches English at the University of Iowa. His most recent books are Sedaris (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and Neatness Counts: Essays on the Writer’s Desk (University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

Michael Moon is the author of Disseminating Whitman (1991). He published an article on Whitman and the Utopian theorist Charles Fourier in the journal ELH in 2006. Currently Professor of American Studies in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts at Emory University, Moon has published essays on topics ranging from mourning and HIV/AIDS to Native Americans and mass media. He is currently completing a book about the art and writing of Henry Darger.

Eileen Myles lives in LA this second. She directed the writing program at UCSD for five years (2002-07) and now is unaffiliated poet and thinker again. Sorry, Tree (Wave Books) is her latest title.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick is a Distinguished Professor in the PhD Program in English, CUNY Graduate Center. Her books in queer studies include Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Epistemology of the Closet, and Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Her current work discusses Proust using ideas drawn from Kleinian psychoanalysis and Neoplatonism.

Elaine Sexton is the author of two collections of poems: Sleuth and Causeway (forthcoming in 2008), both from New Issues (Western Michigan University). Her recent poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, ARTnews, Bellevue Literary Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Women’s Review of Books, and Poetry Daily.

Michael D. Snediker is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. His book, Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood & Other Felicitous Persuasions, is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press. His poems and poetry reviews have appeared in journals including Black Warrior Review, MARGIE, jubilat, and Pleiades. He was the Fall 2006 James Merrill Writer-in-Residence.

In 1965, when the poet Jack Spicer died at the age of forty, he left behind a trunkful of papers and manuscripts and a few copies of the seven small books he had seen to press. A West Coast poet, his influence spanned the national literary scene of the 1950s and 1960s. During his short but prolific life, Spicer troubled the concepts of translation, voice, and the act of poetic composition itself. These poems gathered here are from notebooks in the Spicer archive housed at the Bancroft Library. This fall Wesleyan University Press is publishing My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer.