Biographies of Contributors
Y
TASSADIT YACINE is a renowned expert on Berber culture and society, focusing particularly on the Berber communities of Algeria and Morocco, and has been the Director of the review Awal since 1985. Her major publications include Poesie berbere et identite (1987), L’izli ou l’amour chante en kabyle (1988), Les voleurs de feu. Elements d’une anthropologie sociale et culturelle de l’Algerie (1993), Piege ou le combat d’une femme algerienne (1995), and Chacal ou la ruse des domines (2001).
HUDA YEHIA comes from Baghdad, Iraq. She defended her Master’s thesis in Translation Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in July 2007.
SERGEY YESENIN (1895-1925) Russian lyric poet of the early Soviet period, whose suicide in 1925 had a large impact on other Russian poets and intellectuals at home and abroad.
CHEN YINGSONG 陈应松 (1956-) was born in Gong’an County, Hubei Province. He has a degree in Chinese Literature from Wuhan University. Chen has published five novels and numerous short stories and novellas. The environment is a recurring theme in Chen’s work, particularly human-animal relationships, industrial alienation, and disadvantaged rural people. Chen’s writings have received some of China’s most prestigious literary prizes, including the Lu Xun Literary Prize, the People’s Literature Prize, and the inaugural Environmental Literary Prize.
LAUREN YODER is the Chair of the French department at Davidson College, where he teaches African and Caribbean literature. He lived in Africa for five years. His translations of a book of tales by Kama Kamada (Tales Vol. 1) and a collection of Kamada’s poems (Wind-Whispering Soul) appeared in 2001. He is currently translating a second volume of tales (La Nuit des griots) in which the story in this issue of Metamorphoses will appear.
SONG YONG was born in Youngkwang, Korea in 1940. He studied German language and literature at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and started his writing career with a short story, “Cock-Fighting,” published in The Quarterly Changbi in 1967. Since then, he has published several books of fiction and non-fiction including a critically acclaimed short story collection, Teacher and The Crown Prince (1974). In 1987, he won the 32nd Hyundai Literary Award for his short story, “A Friend.” Another short story was also included in The 1979 Yi Sang Literary Award Anthology, the Korean version of The Best American Short Stories. His most recent collection of short stories, For Baloza, was published in April, 2003 by Changbi Publishers. His short stories have appeared in U.S. literary journals such as Metamorphoses, PEN America Journal, The Literary Review, and Chelsea.
YORDAN YOVKOV (1880-1937) is a Bulgarian short-story writer, novelist, and dramatist whose stories of Balkan peasant life and military experiences show a fine mastery of prose. Though his plots are deceptively simple, the characters are nuanced and profound while the language is startlingly poetic. His works are widely read in Bulgaria.
LI YU 李漁 (1610-1680), also known as Li Liweng, was a Chinese playwright, producer, director, novelist, essayist, publisher, and inventor from present-day Jiangsu province. His life spanned the end of the Ming dynasty and the beginning of the Qing. He was well known in his own time and his works, ranging from erotica to opera to short humorous essays and drama criticism, remain popular today.
CHANGMING YUAN, 8-time Pushcart nominee and author of 5 chapbooks, grew up in rural China, became an ESL student at 19, and published several monographs on translation before moving to Canada. With a PhD in English, Yuan currently co-edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Qing Yuan in Vancouver and, since mid-2005, has had poetry appearing in 1029 literary publications across 34 countries, including Best Canadian Poetry, BestNewPoemsOnline, Cincinnati Review, and Threepenny Review.
ILYA YUDIN received his PhD in Biophysics from Moscow University. He is an active researcher of creative works of Russian authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, participates in preparing and publishing the book series Neizvestnye Strugatskye. He currently lives in New York and works for The New York Times.
SAÚL YURKIEVICH was born on November 27, 1931 in La Plata, Argentina, where he was educated and began his literary and academic career. His first books of poetry and literary criticism were published there. In the mid-1960s he moved to Paris where he was appointed professor of Latin American literature at the Université de Paris VIII, a post he still occupies. He has taught and lectured extensively at universities in Europe, Latin America, and in the United States at such institutions as the universities of Maryland, Pittsburgh, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Chicago, and most recently at UCLA. He was a close friend of Julio Cortázar, who named him in his will as executor of his papers. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the academic year of 1987-88 to work on the papers, a task that continues today. Throughout his career he has successfully combined writing both critical work as well as poetry and creative prose. He has published fifteen volumes of poetry, the first in 1961 and the most recent, El sentimiento del sentido, (Ediciones ERA, México) in 2000. He has also published fourteen volumes of criticism; two of the best known are Fundadores de la nueva poesía latinoamericana, 1971, enlarged and reissued in 1984 (Barcelona), and Summa crítica, 1998 (México). In addition to translations into English by Cola Franzen, three bilingual Spanish-French selections of poetry have appeared, and poems have been translated and published in German and Italian anthologies.