Lane Jennings is a longtime DC-area resident, having lived in Columbia, MD since 1978. His poetry and other writings have appeared in local magazines, such as Gargoyle, Bogg and Visions, and occasional anthologies (including Free State 1989, Weavings 2000, and Through a Glass Darkly 2003). He has read at the Art Barn, the Writer's Center in Bethesda, and other venues, and had one book of poems, Fabrications, published by Black Buzzard Press, Fredricksburg, VA in 1998. He has worked as a writer and editor for the World Future Society since 1976, and a translator/ interpreter of literary works in German for the Goethe-Institut Washington, where for the past three years he has consulted on the Time Shadows project. He is currently poet in residence at Iona Senior Services in Tenleytown, DC.
Lane spent his boyhood in Chicago, Illinois, graduated from Williams College, where he majored in German, was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to the University of Munich, and received his MA and PhD from Harvard University.
Karl Zhang studied German language and literature in Germany on a Friedrich Naumann Scholarship for three years. After receiving his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1999 in the German Studies and Humanities Program, he came to George Mason University, where he has overseen the founding of its comprehensive Chinese program. He is currently Associate Professor of Chinese and Head of the Chinese Program in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, and Co-director of the Confucius Institute at George Mason University.
Karl's dissertation deals with the Chinese-German literary/cultural interactions. He has translated German poems into Chinese and also writes poems himself.
Peter Beicken, Ph.D. Stanford University, is Professor of German Language, Literature and Film, and Chair of the Department of German Studies, University of Maryland, College Park. He is known for his expertise and numerous publications on Walter Benjamin, Ingeborg Bachmann, Franz Kafka, Anna Seghers and Film Studies. Teaching modern Austrian and German literature and culture, he focuses on Fin de Siècle, Expressionism, the Weimar Republic, Exile and Post-war literature and culture including GDR Studies. His books include Kafka. Eine kritische Einführung in die Forschung (1974); Die Verwandlung. Erläuterungen und Dokumente (1983, 1995); Franz Kafka. Leben und Werk (1986, 1995); Franz Kafka. 'Der Proceß' (1995, rev.1999, 2005); Ingeborg Bachmann (1988; 1992) and Ingeborg Bachmann: Literaturwissen (2001).
Peter was awarded the Eduard von der Heydt Preis, Wuppertal 1984 for Kindheit in W. Gedichte und Prosa (1983, 2009) and the Elisabeth Frazer de Bussy Prose Prize (1998). He has served as editor of TRANS-LIT, the Journal of the Society for Contemporary American Literature in German (1998-2002), and as president of the SCALG (2003-2005), and is a regular contributor to TRANS-LIT2.
