Interviews

Alberto Rios's ten collections of poetry include The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body, a finalist for the National Book Award. His most recent book is The Dangerous Shirt, preceded by The Theater of Night, which received the 2007 PEN/Beyond Margins Award. Published in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and other journals, he has also written three short story collections and a memoir, Capirotada, about growing up on the Mexican border. Regents Professor and the Katharine C. Turner Chair in English, Rios has taught at Arizona State University for over 29 years.

Elizabeth Kadetsky's short stories have been chosen for a Puschart Prize, Best New American Voices and Best American Short Stories notable stories of 2009, and her personal essays have appeared in the New York Times, Santa Monica Review, Antioch Review, and elsewhere. She has been a fellow at MacDowell Colony, Ucross Foundation, Djerassi Resident Artists Program and the St. James Centre for Creativity in Malta. A 25-year practitioner of Iyengar and Ashtanga yoga, she lived in India as a Fulbright scholar and wrote a memoir about her studies with the yogi BKS Iyengar, First There Is a Mountain, published in 2004 by Little, Brown. She is visiting assistant professor in the MFA program at Penn State.

Erick Setiawan was born in 1975 in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents and moved to the United States when he was sixteen. He is a graduate of Stanford University and currently lives in San Francisco. Of Bees and Mist, his first novel, has been nominated for QPBs 2010 New Voices Award and longlisted for the 2011 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

James Nolan's Perpetual Care was awarded the 2009 Next-Generation Indie Book Award for Best Short Story Collection, and his novel Higher Ground won the 2008 William Faulkner-Wisdom Gold Medal. His collections of poetry are Why I Live in the Forest and What Moves Is Not the Wind (Wesleyan), and he has translated Neruda's Stones of the Sky (Copper Canyon) and Longing: Selected Poems of Jaime Gil de Biedma (City Lights). He has received NEA and Fulbright Fellowships, and has taught at universities in New Orleans, San Francisco, Florida, Barcelona, Madrid, and Beijing. A fifth-generation native of the Crescent City, he lives in the French Quarter.

Mary Jo Bang is the author of six collections of poems, most recently Elegy, which received the 2007 National Book Critics Circle, and The Bride of E (2009). Shes been the recipient of a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University and a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Jubilat, Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. Her translation of Dantes Inferno, with illustrations by Henrik Drescher, will be published by Graywolf Press in 2012. Photograph by Mark Schfer