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Biographies of Contributors

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WALTER KAISER is Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Harvard. Since 1988, he has been Director of Villa I Tatti, the Harvard U. Center for Italian Renaissance Studies located in Florence, Italy. He has published translations of the modern Greek poet George Seferis and the French novelist and essayist Marguerite Yourcenar.

CHET KALM Art editor of Metamorphoses, is a painter, teacher, illustrator and graphic designer. He established the Foundation Department of the Parsons School of Design in New York and chaired it for over twenty-five years. He makes his home in Stockbridge, MA.

VERA KALM Managing Editor of Metamorphoses. Following a long career with international organizations and completing her tenure as director of the World Health Organzation’s UN office in New York, she resumed her work as literary translator and removed to Stockbridge, MA.

KAMA KAMANDA is a Congolese writer currently living in exile in Luxembourg, and has published ten collections of poems, including La Somme du néant and Quand dans l’âme les mers s’agitent, four collections of tales, and one novel, Lointaines sont les rives du destin. His literary production has been published in Paris by L’Harmattan and Présence Africaine. Kamanda has won many prizes for his work, including the Grand Prix littéraire de l’Afrique noire, the Prix Paul Verlaine, and the Prix Théophile Gautier de l’Academie Française.

TOSHIYA KAMEI holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Arkansas. His translations of Latin American literature include books by Claudia Apablaza, Liliana Blum, Carlos Bortoni, Selfa Chew, and Leticia Luna.

MELINA KAMERIC is a writer and journalist from Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Her first collection of short fiction was published in 2009 by the local press Buybook under the original Bosnian title, Cipele za dodjelu Oskara (Shoes for the Oscars). The publication has been warmly received by readers and critics in the area of former Yugoslavia, earning the author several regional awards.

WLADIMIR KAMINER was born in Moscow in 1967. He studied sound engineering and theater production at the Moscow Theater Institute, before emigrating from Russia to Berlin in 1990, as an asylum seeker. Writing in German, rather than his native Russian, Kaminer has published several short stories and books about his experience adapting to daily life in Germany, including the collection of anecdotes in Russendisko (Russian Disco) which quickly brought him to national attention in 2000. Kaminer is a prolific writer whose work appears frequently in German newspapers and magazines, and he is also a renowned radio moderator of the programs Wladimirs Welt on SFB4 and Russendisko Club on RBB Radio MultiKulti. He lives in Berlin with his Russian wife and two children.

NAKA KANSUKE (1885-1963) is a writer and poet who grew up in Tokyo. His best-known work Gin no saji (Silver Spoon), the autobiographical fiction of his childhood, was serialized in Tokyo Asahi Shinbun in 1913 through the recommendation of Natsume Sôseki. Silver Spoon was chosen as the “most memorable book” in a special issue of Tosho, a Japanese literary journal published by Iwanami Shoten, in 1987. The work is praised for its beautiful writing style and the writer’s description of his childhood. His other representative works include Deibadatta (Devadatta, 1921) and Inu (The Dog, 1922), both of which analyze the dark nature of human beings. It is striking to see that the writer who wrote so lovingly about childhood also writes so vehemently about violence, sex, and mayhem in these works. Naka Kansuke is often referred to as kokô no shijin (a poet of proud loneliness), as he has put himself outside of the mainstream literary circles in Japan throughout his life.

ELLEN W. KAPLAN Currently an Assistant Professor of Theater at Smith College; Equity actress, director and writer. She has written, translated, and directed many plays, including En la Ardiente Oscuridad by Antonio Buero Vallejo, and is the author of books on the teaching of writing to special education students.

HILARY B. KAPLAN is a translator, poet, and PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Brown University, where her research focuses on contemporary poetics and environmental culture. She holds a B.A. from Yale University and an M.F.A. from San Francisco State University. Her translation of Rilke Shake, a book of poems by Brazilian writer Angélica Freitas, received a 2011 PEN Translation Fund award. She has published translations in Litro, Machado de Assis, Molussus, PEN America, Rattaplallax, Two Lines, and World Literature Today, and her writing on Brazilian poetry and poetics appears in Jacket2 and the collection Deslocamentos Críticos (Babel, 2011).

MARINA KAPLAN is an Associate Professor Emerita of Spanish and Latin American Studies, Smith College. She has worked as a professor of Latin American literature and culture, with a growing interest in postcolonialism, transdisciplinarity and theory. She has published articles on Argentine authors such as Sarmiento and Borges, on the genre of romance, the theme of the 19th century frontier, écriture and exile.

ROBERT KAPLAN was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He now lives in Northampton, MA, working as a computer consultant. Both as a translator and a reviewer, Robert has been involved with translations for many years and in multiple areas, from marketing to poetry.

JAAN KAPLINSKI (1941- ) is the only living Estonian poet who has achieved an international reputation. His poems have been translated into a dozen languages. Best known abroad for The Same Sea in Us All (Portland 1985, London 1990), at home he is recognized for his stories, philosophical essays and political writings, as well as his poems. Upon Estonia’s regaining independence he served in its parliament from 1992 to 1995. A gifted linguist, he wrote a book of poems—I am the Spring in Tartu (Vancouver 1991)—directly in English, and has translated literary works from French, Spanish, English, Swedish, and Chinese to Estonian. He has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

NIKOLAI NIKOLAEVICH KARAZIN (1842-1908) was a talented and prolific painter, writer, journalist, ethnographer, book illustrator, soldier, war correspondent and traveler, for whom Central Asia and its Russian conquest served as an inexhaustible source of inspiration. Several generations of educated Russians discovered Central Asia and its peoples through his drawings, paintings, novels, stories and articles. During his lifetime, Karazin published extensively in various Russian and foreign periodicals. He created roughly 4,000 drawings and watercolors, 100 paintings, as well as illustrating dozens of books. Karazin’s visual works are kept in more than twenty galleries of the former Soviet Union. A complete collection of his literary works consists of 25 volumes. “Camp on the Amu Darya” was published in a collection of stories in St. Petersburg in 1874.

ANDREAS KARKAVITSAS (1866-1922) is a Greek writer of short fiction and several novels depicting village life and the traditions, customs, and legends that he discovered in his travels throughout the country as an army doctor.

CARINA KARLSSON (1966- ) was born and lives in Aland, an island in the Baltic Sea and works in a grocery store. She has written since childhood, has been published in the local press as well as in magazines including BLM (Bonnier’s Literary Magazine) and has received various grants. Lisbeta, Per Skarp’s Wife was published in 1996.

IOANNA KARYSTIANI (1952- ) was born in Crete, Greece. She emerged relatively late on the literary scene with her short story collection Mrs. Kataki (Kastaniotis, 1995). Many stories from this collection have been adapted for the theatre and staged. Her novel Little England (1997) won the Greek State National Book Award for best novel in 1998 and was also chosen as Greece’s nomination for both the 1998 European Aristeion Literary Prize and the Balkan Prize. A second novel, Suit on the Ground (2000) shared the Diavazo Magazine Book Critics Award for best novel in 2001. She has recently completed a film script entitled Brides, to be produced by Martin Scorsese and directed by Pandelis Voulgaris, and is working on another film script, an adaptation of a holocaust story by a Greek Jewish writer set in Thessaloniki, for French film director Costas Gavras.

ZAMIRA KASYMOVA was born in 1967 in Andijan, Uzbekistan. After graduating from the Andijan State Pedagogical Institute of Languages with a major in Russian Language and Literature, she taught Russian Literature in the Russian and Foreign Literature Department of her alma mater. She earned her PhD from the Institute of Literature in the Academy of Science in Uzbekistan with a dissertation on The Process of Adopting Some Forms of Easter Poetry in Russian Literature, with a focus on the translation of Uzbek poetry. Her post-doctoral research at the Andijan State University is on how the world and the individual person are conceived through national and world literature traditions.

J. KATES is a poet and literary translator who lives in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire.

TIM KEANE is a poet and fiction writer. Poems from his first collection, Alphabets of Elsewhere, appeared in Modern Painters, Denver Quarterly, Poetry New Zealand, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, and other magazines. Excerpts from his novel, That Strange Flower the Sun, have been widely published. His translation from the French appeared in Cipher, Interim, Pusteblume and Parthenon West Review. His latest poetry appears in Now Culture, Fogged Clarity and Evergreen Review.

JOHN KEATS (1705-1821) Recognized as one of the mainstays of British poetry, friend of Shelley, he concentrated his brief life on writing. He sailed for Rome in 1820, hoping to conquer tuberculosis, but died there soon after.

THOMAS R. KEITH holds a PhD in classical studies from the Unviersity of Chicago, specializing in Greek literature under the Roman Empire. He has pursued the writing of poetry as an avocation since his early teenage years, and was inspired to try his hand at translation epigrams by Kenneth Rexroth’s Poems from the Greek Anthology.

HILARY S. KELLER is currently a translator with the EU Institutions. Previously, she worked for several years as a legal translator in Madrid where she completed a Master’s in Translation Studies at the Complutense University in Madrid. At the University of Oulu, Finland, she worked as a Coordinator for Languages and Intercultural Training. Interested mainly in short stories and poetry, she has also translated a collection of short stories from Spanish into English by Ignacio Aldecoa.

TSIPI KELLER, novelist and translator and the author of 13 books, is the recipient of several literary awards, including National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowships, New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction grants, and an Armand G. Erpf Translation Award from Columbia University. Her translations have appeared in literary journals and anthologies in the U.S. and Europe, as well as in the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization  (Yale University Press,  2012). Her most recent translation collection, Years I Walked at Your Side, a volume of selected poems by Hebrew poet Mordechai Geldman, was published by SUNY Press in 2018. Her novel Nadja on Nadja will be published in 2019 by Underground Voices.

PENN KEMP, poet, playwright, novelist and sound poet, she was made the first poet laureate of London, Ontario, Canada.

CLARENCE KENNEDY (1892-1972) was for all his working life professor of Art History at Smith College. He was photographer to Duveen, Mackay, et al., and known especially for his photographs of sculptures from the Italian Renaissance. He was particularly interested in making reproductions of art of high quality available to the general public and was consultant to Polaroid, Eastman Kodak, and Meriden Gravure.

MELINDA KENNEDY (1924-2002) was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, and spent much of her youth in Italy. Editor, translator, writer, she retired from teaching in 1989 and thereafter became co-editor of Metamorphoses. From the moment it was founded until her death, her tireless dedication, her broad culture, finely-tuned ear and keen editorial eye shaped the journal. Her poems have appeared in such journals as The Southern Review and The Massachusetts Review.

BIRHAN KESKIN was born in Kirklareli, Turkey, in 1963. She graduated from Istanbul University in 1986 with a degree in sociology. Her first poems began to appear in 1984. From 1995 to 1998 she was joint editor of the small magazine Gocebe. She has since worked as an editor for a number of prominent publishing houses in Istanbul. Her books include: Delilirikler (1991), Bakarsin Üzgün Dönerim (1994), Cinayet Kisi + Iki Mektup (1996), Yirmi Lak Tablet + Yolcunun Siyah Bavulu (1999), and Yeryüzü Halleri (2002). These five books were collected by Metis Publishing into Kim Bagislayacak Beni (2005). Metis published two further collections, Ba (2005) and Y’ol (2006). Birhan Keskin was the 2005 winner of Turkey’s prestigious Golden Orange Award for Ba.

IBN KHAFAJA (1058-1138) was born near Valencia, where he spent most of his life. One of the very greatest poets of Islamic Andalusia, he developed a style of nature poetry (dubbed Khafajiyya, or “Khafajism”) that was often imitated after him, but seldom rivaled.

OLEG KHAFIZOV is a contemporary Russian writer working out of the Russian city Tula. His work has garnered widespread attention among present-day Russian writers, diaspora communities, and Russian journalists. As of today, however, there exist no translations of his work in English. His writings—stylistically modest and conversational in tone—have been compared favorably to the work of Sergei Dovlatov.

NAHLA KHALIL holds a PhD in American Literature (2008) from Ain Shams University and is currently Assistant professor of English Language and Literature at Mansoura University, Egypt. She taught Arabic Language and Literature at Amherst College in 2008 and mentored Arabic courses in the Five College Center for the study of World Languages in 2006 and 2007.

RAFED A. KHASHAN is a former professor of Translation and English at the University of Basra, Iraq. He also was born and raised in Basra but was forced to move to the United States to live in Amarillo, Texas following the murder of his brother, Jalal. He is now working with Catholic Family Services helping refugees settle in the Texas Panhandle. He has translated a number of short stories for Mohammed Khudeir. His translation of H.C. Armstrong’s Lord of Arabia for Dar AlWarraq (London) was published in 2008.

MIKHAIL MATVEYEVICH KHERASKOV (1733-1807) was the author of Russia’s first major epic poem, Rossiada, which commemorated Ivan the Terrible’s 1552 victory over the Mongols. Kheraskov, the son of a wealthy Romanian who settled in Ukraine, was educated in Petersburg and published a wide variety of poetry, prose and drama. He served in a number of positions at Moscow University, including heading the university press, and was a major contributor to the early growth of Moscow’s literary publications and society. For Rossiada, Kheraskov was called by many of his contemporaries “the Russian Homer.” Later, in the 19th century, his work was harshly, and some would say unjustifiably, criticized by Russian poets. These attacks go some way to explaining the absence, to this day, of a complete translation of Rossiada.

MOHAMMED KHUDEIR was born in Basra, where he still lives. Like many Basri scholars, he feels rooted to the various landscapes of the city. He is one of the most prominent Iraqi and Arab writers who helped shape the form of the modern Arab fiction. His many short stories include To the Night Lodging, Clocks Like Horses, God of the Swamps, Autumnal Vision among many others. Among his influential novellas that have been translated into English are 45 Degrees Celsius and The Black Kingdom. His Basrayatha: A Portrait of A City is an artistic portrait of the city of Basra as it takes shape in the author’s mind and has nothing, but memory, to do with today’s city. Most, if not all, of Khudeir’s stories capture the marginal and forgotten aspects of life. His works teem with the stories of the poor, the fishermen and the street boys. Thanks to his captivating style and fragmented narrative, he is often compared to Borges and Italo Calvino.

JOHN KHOURY, was born in Illinois and raised in California, studied philosophy in Maine, Spanish in Madrid, and language education at the School for International Training in Vermont. He directs Excelsior Academy, an English school in Kyoto, Japan. His interests include Japanese literature, bamboo basketry, and learning to see.

BRENDAN KIERNAN, a student of Russian language and literature since 1977, majored in Russian and graduated from Williams College in 1983. He earned an area studies certificate from Indiana University’s Russian and East European Institute in 1986 and a PhD in 1990 from IU’s Political Science Department. In 2013, he published the first English translation of Vladimir Gilyarovsky’s Moscow and Muscovites, which, in addition to its justly famous street scenes and slang dialogue, includes a diverse range of original and quoted poetry.

TAKAR KIKAKU (1661-1707, also known as Enomoto Kikaku) was one of Basho’s leading disciples. He edited two of the major anthologies through which the Basho School earned its reputation, including Minashiguri (Shriveled Chestnuts, 1683), and wrote the preface for a third, Saruminosho (Monkey’s Straw Raincoat, 1691). Kikaku’s poetry is known for its wit and for its difficulty. His poetry is characterized by wordplay, allusions, and juxtapositions of images that defy easy explanation. At the time of his death, he was perhaps the leading poet in Edo (modern Tokyo).

CHARLES KILLINGER is Patricia Havill Whalen Professor of History at Valencia Community College and adjunct professor of Italian history at the University of Central Florida. He has an MA from the College of William and Mary and a PhD from Florida State University. A specialist in the history of modern Italy, he has published extensively on the subject in the United States and in Italy. He is the author of Rebel in Two Worlds: Gaetano Savemini in Italy and America and A History of Italy.

YUHN BOK KIM (Kim Yuhn Bok in Korean) is a Korean native who writes his poems in English and then recreates them in Korean, using the same material but “cooking each poem again in the soup of Korean taste.” He has taught English in the past but is now a vice-principal in a high school in Kyung-Buk, Republic of Korea.

KATHERINE CALLEN KING is Professor of Comparative Literature and Classics at UCLA. She specializes in Greek poetry and gender studies, and has published a bilingual edition of Gina Valdes’ poetry collection, Puentes y fronteras.

G. KITULA KING’EI, Kenyan born, has a PhD in Literary Studies and is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Kiswahili and Other African Languages at Kenyatta University, Nairobi.

SANDRA KINGERY is Professor of Spanish at Lycoming College (Williamsport, PA). Kingery has published translations of two books by Ana Mar­a Moix (Julia and Of My Real Life I Know Nothing) as well as a translation of Rene Vazquez Daza’s Welcome to Miami, Doctor Leal, and Daniel Innerarity’s The Future and Its Enemies. She has published translations of short stories by Julio Cortazar, Liliana Colanzi, Federico Guzman Rubio, and Claudia Hernandez, among others. Kingery was awarded a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship to complete her translation of Esther Tusquet’s memoir, We Won the War.

OLGA KIRSCH (1924-1997) was born and raised in an English-speaking home in Koppies, a tiny town in the Afrikaner heartland of the Orange Free State, where her father (a native Yiddish speaker) had emigrated from Lithuania in 1919. Kirsch considered Afrikaans her mother tongue. She published her first collection of poetry in 1944, at the age of twenty, and was the second woman poet to publish in Afrikaans. Her second collection was published in 1948, the year she emigrated to Israel at the age of twenty-four, and her third collection in Afrikaans, from which the sonnets in this issue are taken, appeared in 1972. In later years, she wrote in English.

KATHERINE KITETU holds a PhD in Linguistics and is currently Lecturer and Chair of the Department of Languages and Linguistics at Egerton University, Kenya.

STEPHEN KLASS is a professor of English at Adelphi University, Garden City, NY, and the translator of Fredrik Paludan-Müller’s Danish satirical epic, Adam Homo (NY: Twickenham, 1981) and, in collaboration with Leif Sjöberg, Harry Martinsson’s Aniara (Story Line Press, 1999).

LUCAS KLEIN is a father, writer, and translator whose work has appeared in Comparative Literature Studies, LARB, Jacket, CLEAR, and PMLA, and from Fordham, Black Widow, Oklahoma University Press, and New Directions. He is an Assistant Professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong, and an executive editor of the Journal of Oriental Studies. His translation Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems of Xi Chuan won the 2013 Lucien Stryk Prize, and his October Dedications, translations of the poetry of Mang Ke, is now available from Zephyr and Chinese University Press. New York Review of Books will be publishing his translations of Tang dynasty poet Li Shangyin, and his monograph, The Organization of Distance: Poetry, Translation, Chineseness, is forthcoming from Brill.

ASTRID KLOCKE was born and lived in Germany until age twenty-two. She came to the U.S. to study at Mount Holyoke College for one year but stayed on and completed a Masters degree and then a PhD in German Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington, in 2000. Her dissertation focused on Edgar Hilsenrath’s novel Der Nazi und der Friseur (The Nazi and the Barber). She has published two articles on Hilsenrath’s Holocaust fiction, one in a monograph and one in the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies (2008). She has taught German literature, language, culture, and film courses at Middlebury College, UCLA, and now, since 2002, at Northern Arizona University.

SABINA KNIGHT is Associate Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at Smith College. She is the author of The Heart of Time: Moral Agency in Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction (Harvard 2006), and Chinese Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, forthcoming), as well as book chapters, translations, and refereed articles in Chinese Studies journals, Textual Practice, Journal of the Medical Humanities, and Literature and Medicine (the last forthcoming). In addition to Chinese, she works in Russian, French, and English, and she is currently conducting cross-cultural research in the medical humanities to explore topics such as cancer, disability, aging, and the pursuit of well-being in fiction from six countries.

WALTER H. KOKERNOT is Associate Professor and chair of English at Ohio Dominican University in Columbus, Ohio. His research interests include: Mark Twain, Matthew Arnold, Walker Percy, George MacDonald, C. S. Lewis, and the Victorian Period. His most recent article, on Matthew Arnold’s poetry, will be appearing in Victorian Poetry in the summer 2005 issue.

JIRÍ KOLÁR (born in 1914) A poet and graphic artist, he was a founder of Skupina 42 (Group 42), the most important artistic movement during the Protectorate after Nezval disbanded the Surrealists on the eve of the war. In response to Nazi occupation, it proposes to confront everday life and record its grotesque interpenetration of the banal and the monotonous. “Night,” (from Ódy a variace, Odess and Variations, 1941-1944), with the catastrophic train ride, shows the power of the surrealistic vision, even in the newsreel. The diary format of the next two poems (Dny vroce, Days in a Year, 1946-1947), hones more closely to the esthetics of Group 42. Kolár’s quest for a synthesis between lucid observation of appearances and his sense of their concealed oneiric possibilities found its ultimate expression in his collages. The most famous of these is the cycle Tydeník 1968 (Newsreel 1968), which remains the defining graphic image of the Prague Spring and its calamitous slide into the Fall. From 1980 Kolár has lived in Paris.

JOCELYNE KOLB is Professor of German Studies at Smith College, where she also teaches comparative literature and is a member of the advisory board for the Jewish Studies Program. Her research focuses mostly on European Romanticism and on the works of Heinrich Heine. At present she is completing a monograph on Heine and literary judeophilia; she is also the current president of the North American Heine Society. Her book The Ambiguity of Taste: Freedom and Food in European Romanticism was awarded the Jean-Paul Barricelli Prize by the International Conference on Romanticism.

MIGUEL ALBERTO KOLEFF is the Dean of the College of Philosophy and Humanities at the Universidad Catolica de Cordoba, Argentina. He also directs the project Etica y politica en la novela y el ensayo de Jose Saramago.

ALFRED KOLLERITSCH was born in 1931 in Austria and earned a doctorate at the University of Graz with a thesis on Martin Heidegger. In 1960 he founded a pioneering, experimental literary magazine, Manuskripte. In 1958 he co-founded the Forum Stadpark artists’ association in Graz, and held the office of President from 1968 to 1995. Poet, essayist, novelist, and short-story writer, Kolleritsch is a crusader against totalitarianism and fascism, and constraints that diminish human life. He has been awarded the Styrian Literature Prize (1976), the Petrara Prize (1978), the Georg Trakl Prize for Lyric Poetry (1987), the Austrian State Prize for Cultural Journalism (1994), and the Horst Bienek Prize for Lyric Poetry (2005).

GERTRUD KOLMAR was born in Berlin in 1894 into an assimilated German-Jewish family. Her father was a respected criminal lawyer. She was trained in Early Childhood Education, as a teacher of German and French, and military interpreter. Staying on in Berlin to care for her aging father during the early 1940s—so very dangerous for Jews in Germany—she was deported to Auschwitz in March of 1943, where she perished soon afterward.

MIGUEL ALBERTO KOLEFF is the Dean of the College of Philosophy and Humanities at the Universidad Catolica de Cordoba, Argentina. He also directs the project Etica y politica en la novela y el ensayo de Jose Saramago.

STEVE KOMARNYCKYJ is a British Ukrainian writer and linguist who combines a career working in the NHS with his literary and translation work. He was born in 1963 and has lived and worked for most of his life in his native Yorkshire while maintaining strong links with Ukraine. His literary translations and poems have appeared in Poetry Salzburg Review, Vsesvitmagazine (Ukraine’s most influential literary journal), The North, the Echo Room, Fjords (USA), the Los Angeles Review and Modern Poetry in Translation. His book of selected translations from Tychyna was published by Poetry Salzburg in 2012 and a collection of poems translated from the Ukrainian of Ihor Pavlyuk and Steve’s own first collection was published in 2013.

KOSSI KOMLA-EBRI was born in Togo in 1954 and moved to Italy at the age of twenty. He has degrees in medicine and surgery from the University of Bologna and the Università degli Studi in Milano. In 1997 his story “Quando attraverserò il fiume” won first prize in the Eks&Tra competition for prose, and the next year, his story “Mal di…” was recognized in the same competition. Other stories have appeared in various anthologies and publications. He is active in his community as a cultural mediator, working on the integration and understanding of African culture in Italy. Imbarazzismi, a collection of short stories dealing with the day-to-day encounters between different races and cultures, was published in 2002 by Edizioni dell’Arco. Although he immigrated over thirty years ago, his stories document the continuing sense of separation felt by African immigrants to Italy, with both humor and insight.

XURONG KONG is Professor of Chinese Literature and Civilization in the History Department, as well as director of Chinese Studies and Asian Studies at Kean University. Her research focuses on early medieval Chinese poetry. She also works on issues of modern culture, lending her training in classical literature and art to these inquiries. She has written on third century poetic development, individual poets such as Fu Xuan and Tao Yuanming, military uniform as fashion during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), and has translated the History of the Later Han and the Selections from Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government into English for China Book Company. Her current research project aims to close the gap between the study of the Silk Road and the study of third century literary writing in China.

KIMBERLY KONO teaches modern Japanese language and literature at Smith College. She is currently working on a manuscript, tentatively titled Writing Imperial Relations, which explores Japanese writers’ negotiation of their relation to Japan, the colonies, and empire through the tropes of family, romance, and marriage during the late colonial period. She is also translating several works of Japanese colonial fiction.

NINA KOROTKOVA is pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

SRECKO KOSOVEL (1904-1926), considered one of Slovenia’s first modernists, was born near Trieste and was raised in the Karst, a desolate region of rockwork in Slovenia, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Following the outbreak of World War I, his parents sent him to school in Ljubljana, where he began to write experimenting with a wide variety of styles—impressionist, symbolist, expressionist, futurist, Dadaist, and surrealist. He studied at the University of Ljubljana, became active in the literary world and founded a literary review (Beautiful Vida). In 1925 he prepared a manuscript for publication called The Golden Boat, alluding to the Bengali poet Rabindranth Tagore, but it was subsequently lost and never published. In 1926 he died of meningitis at the age of 22, leaving over 1000 poems. The first collection of 60 poems (Pesmi) was published in 1927. His Complete Works was published in 1977. Kosovel’s poetry has been translated into several languages including French, Italian, German, Russian, Czech, Croatian, Serbian and Catalan. Two English translations of his Integrals were published in the 1980’s. A chapbook of his poetry in English translation by Barbara Siegel Carlson and Ana Jelnikar will appear in Mid-American Reviewin 2008. Other translations have appeared in Outer Bridge, The Literary Review, Poetry International and Poetry Miscellany. A collection of his selected poems translated by Carlson and Jelnikar is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse in 2009.

NINA KOSSMAN the author of three books of poetry and prose in Russian and English. Her fiction won the 1995 UNESCO/PEN Short Story Award in London and was broadcast on the BBC World Service. The recipient of an NEA fellowship, she has translated two books of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry, In the Inmost Hour of the Soul and Poem of the End. Her translations have appeared in several anthologies, including Norton’s World Poetry, and her own work has been translated into Dutch, Greek, and Japanese. Her poetry anthology is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2000. Two of her one-act plays have been produced in New York.

RUDY KOUSBROEK was a Dutch writer, perhaps most widely known in the Netherlands for The East Indian Camp, a collection of essays on the Dutch East Indies. Some of his lighter work includes the book The Petability Quotient, also an essay collection, albeit one on the ability of cats and other animals to inspire affection in humans. “The Petability Quotient” and “The Contract” are two of the collection’s headline essays.

STEPHANIE KRAFT is a journalist who has traveled to Poland regularly since 1988 and observed the changes there since the end of the communist era. She has translated a nineteenth-century novel, Emancipated Women (Emancypantki), by the acclaimed Polish author Boleslaw Prus, and has recently completed a translation of Stone Tablets (Kamienne Tablice) by Wojciech Zukrowski, a well-known Polish novelist of the twentieth century.

TAJA KRAMBERGER has published four books of poetry: Marzipan (1997), The Sea Says (1999), Velvet Indigo (2004), and Mobilizations (2004). She translates poetry, prose and scientific texts from French, Italian, English, and Spanish. She lives in Koper, Slovenia.

MICHAEL KREPS Born in Leningrad in 1940; taught English literature in Leningrad before emigrating in 1974 to the U.S. Is currently teaching at Middlebury College. His work has been well received both here and in Russia.

ANATOLIY KRIM (also KRYM) is a popular Ukrainian writer of short stories, stage plays and screenplays, and Secretary of the Ukrainian Writers’ Union.

VICTOR KRIVULIN (1944- ) Born in Krasnodon, Ukraine. Studied at Leningrad University from 1961 to 1967, starting with Italian and English before specializing in Literature of Russian Modernism. Co-editor of journal 37 from December 1975-1981. Has published articles, stories, and poems in various Russian emigrant journals. Has published cultural and literary articles in the leading journals and magazines of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Author of fourteen books of poems and essays, printed in Paris, St. Petersburg, London, Helsinki, Belgrade, and Frankfurt. His poems and articles have been translated into English, French, Danish, German, Swedish, Finnish, Italian, Spanish, Serbo-Croatian, Japanese, and other languages. Winner, Andrei Bély Prize (1978), Vers libre Festival in Kaluga’s Prize (1989), Pushkin Prize (Hamburg, Topfer Foundation, 1990).

PHILIP EUGENE KRUMMRICH has published translations from Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, and German; he is currently working with a team of translators on the first English version of the medieval Portuguese chronicles of Fernão Lopes. He is Chair of International and Interdisciplinary Studies and Director of the Honors Program at Morehead State University in Kentucky.

GERHILD KRUTAK. Born in Austria, she is a literary translator from the Finnish and English.

RYSZARD KRYNICKI (1943- ) is a poet, publisher, and translator. Like Baranczak, he was a leading member of the “Generation of ’68,” and was blacklisted for his political activities in the 1970s. He has translated the poetry of Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs.

SHIRLEY KUMOVE Has been active in publications of Yiddish women writers and has received several grants recognizing her work as a translator from the Yiddish.

GÜNTER KUNERT, at seventy-five, is one of the three or four best German-language poets writing today. Born in Berlin, he was “encouraged” by the East German government to move from East Berlin in 1979; he has lived north of Hamburg ever since. The poems here, taken from three of his four dozen books of poetry, essays, and other prose, exemplify his finely-tuned irony. The translations try to reproduce his seemingly casual metrical artistry, which make a German poem by Kunert immediately identifiable.

STANLEY KUNITZ was, from 2000 to 2001, U.S. Poet Laureate for the second time. He has edited the Yale Series of Younger Poets, is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and is founding president of Poets House in New York. According to the New York Times Book Review, he is “Perhaps the most distinguished living American poet.” His Collected Poems was published by W. W. Norton & Company. He and his artist wife Elise Asher live in New York and in Provincetown, where he cultivates a renowned seaside garden.

ALEKSANDR KUSHNER Called “one of the best Russian lyric poets of the twentieth century” by Joseph Brodsky, who continues: “Kushner’s poetics is… a combination of the Harmonious School and Acmeism…[his] poems are remarkable for their tonal reserve, their absence of hysteria, their sharp horizons, and their nervous gestures; he is rather dry where somebody else would boil, ironic where another would despair. Kushner’s poetics, to put it differently, is the poetics of stoicism… a consequence of extremely intense spiritual tension.” His main books of poetry are: Nochnoj dozor (Nightwatch, 1966), Prjamaja rech (Direct Speech, 1975), Tavricheskij sad (Tavricheski Garden, 1984), Na sumrachnoj zvezde (On a Grim Star, 1994), Izbrannoe (Collected Poems, 1997).

NICOLAS KURTOVITCH. See article, within 11.1.

GABRIELLA KURUVILLA is a writer, journalist, and painter born in Milan in 1969 to an Indian father and Italian mother. She has published two novels: Media chiara e noccioline (as Viola Chandra, 2001) and Milano, fi n qui tutto bene (2012); the children’s book Questa non è una baby-sitter (2011); and the short story collection È la vita, dolcezza (2008). An excerpt from her first novel, “Light Beer and Peanuts,” appeared in the anthology Multicultural Literature in Contemporary Italy.

MICHELLE L.Y. KWOK is a Research Assistant in the Department of Comparative Literature, University of Hong Kong. She is also a writer and a translator, and has published short stories and other prose in Hong Kong.