Volume 51, Issue 1

Contributors

JOHN ALLMAN is the author of seven books of poetry and a collection of short stories, most of them published by New Directions. His latest books are the poetry collections Lowcountry (2007) and Loew’s Triboro (2004) from New Directions. He has new work appearing soon in New York Quarterly, Hotel Amerika, and 5 A.M.

ANUR was born in 1971 in Sarajevo and graduated from the Accademia di belle arti di Milano-Brera and Istituto Europeo di Design-Milano. He presented his poster exhibi tion Human Condition for the first time in 1996 at the IED Gallery in Milan, and a restructured version with new works from the Human Condition cycle was presented at the Central Exhibition of the 2001 Venice Biennale, selected by the Biennale director Harald Szeemann.

PAIGE BONCHER is a recent graduate of Wellesley College, where she majored in English and Spanish. The collection of short stories she wrote for her honors thesis in 2008 won the annual graduation prizes for prose fiction and creativity in writing. She now teaches English in Cadiz, Spain. This is her first publication.

JULES CHAMETZKY retired from the UMass English Department in 2004, after a stint as Guest Professor (for the second time) at Humboldt University in Germany in 2003, where his wife, Anne Halley, also taught a Bilingual Poetry Workshop. The selections in this issue are the first two of more than thirty essays on Jewish writers that he has encountered over fifty years.

MICHELLE DISLER has a Ph.D. in Creative Non fiction from Ohio University, and teaches nonfiction workshops on the essay and literature classes on women writers at Ohio Wesleyan University. Her work has appeared in the Laurel Review, Seneca Review, Lake Effect, Gulf Coast, Painted Bride Quarterly, North Dakota Quarterly, Witness, Southern Humanities Review, Fugue, and Columbia, where her essay received the Essay Prize. Disler has also received the Virginia Woolf Prize in the Essay, and an AWP Intro Award in Nonfiction, and Pushcart Prize nomination, the latter for her multigenre work on Fleming’s Bond.

PATRICK DONNELLY’s books are The Charge (Ausable Press) and Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin (Four Way Books, forthcoming). He is an Associate Editor of Poetry International. The title of his poem and forthcoming book alludes to the 236 Sufi idea of the “tavern of ruin,” a profane, disreputable place where one loses one’s reputation and the idea of the self, and where, by studying human love, one disappears into the divine.

SARAH FRENCH lives in Brooklyn. Her fiction has appeared in Bomb Magazine and the New Review of Literature. She is the contributing editor of “Immediate Experience,” a monograph of artist David Salle (Gabrius, 2003). Her writing has earned her a Vermont Studio Fellowship. She has just finished a collection of stories and is working on a novel.

DIANE GILLIAM is the the author of three collections of poems: Kettle Bottom, One of Everything, and Recipe for Blackberry Cake (chapbook). In 2003, she was recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship. She is the winner of the Ohioana Library Association Book of the Year Award in Poetry 2005 for Kettle Bottom, which also won a Pushcart Prize and was an American Booksellers Association Book Sense Pick for the Top Ten Poetry Books of 2005. She was the winner of the 2008 Chaffin Award for Appalachian Literature.

LAUREN FOSS GOODMAN is in love with the sound of the English language and has every intention of pursuing a career in words, despite the looming financial crisis. She has lived and traveled abroad, but is always thrilled to return home to the hills of Western Massachusetts. In the fall of 2009, she will enter the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

JOSHUA HARMON is the author of Scape, a collection of poems (2009), and Quinnehtukqut, a novel (2007). Other poems from Le Spleen de Poughkeepsie are published or forthcoming in Agni, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, Sentence, and Typo, as well as in a chapbook from the Greying Ghost Press.

JIM HICKS  is Director of the American Studies Diploma Program at Smith College, and a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. From 2004 to 2007, he served as U.S. Project Director of the Educational Partnership Program between Smith College and the University of Sarajevo. He has published work in the Centennial Review, the Minnesota Review, Postmodern Culture, Twentieth-Century Literature, as well as scholarly journals in Italy and Estonia. His current book project is entitled Lessons from Sarajevo: A War Stories Primer.

KIRUN KAPUR grew up in Hawaii and has since lived and worked in North America and South Asia. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Literary Imagination, Crab Orchard Review, Third Coast, BPJ, The Christian Science Monitor, and other journals and news outlets. She has been a poetry fellow at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Vermont Studio Center, and MacDowell Colony. She lives in Newburyport, MA, where she is the creative director of the Tannery Reading Series.

PHILIP KOBYLARZ has recent work that appeared or will appear in Connecticut Review, The Iconoclast, Notre Dame Review, New American Writing, VOLT, and Poetry Salzburg Review.

ROBERT KOSTUCK is an M.Ed, graduate from Northern Arizona University. Recently published or forthcoming work appears in Tiny Lights, So to Speak, Alimentum: The Literature of Food, Flyway, and the Massachusetts Review. His body is in Florida, but his spirit is in the American Southwest.

CYNTHIA LEWIS is Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Davidson College, where she has taught Shakespeare, Renaissance drama, and creative nonfiction for thirty years. She publishes both literary criticism and nonfiction. Her nonfiction essays include reportage on American culture and personal narratives.

FRANNIE LINDSAY’s newest volume of poetry, Mayweed, is the 2009 winner of the Washington Prize. It has been published by The Word Works. Her previous books are Lamb (Perugia Press, 2006) and Where She Always Was (Utah State University Press, 2004). She is the 2008 winner of the Missouri Review Prize. Her work is widely published, and she has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She is also a classical pianist.

KELLY LUCE is the winner of the 2008 Danahy Prize from Tampa Review, and has recently published fiction in the Gettysburg Review, North American Review, and Nimrod. Her story collec tion won the 2008 Jackson Award from the San Francisco Foundation, and she has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Jentel Arts. Find her online at Crazy Pete’s Blotter: www.thecrazypetesblotter.blogspot.com.

ANNE MARIE MACARI’s most recent book, She Heads into the Wilderness, was published by Autumn House Press in 2008. Her book Ivory Cradle won the APR/Honickman first book prize in 2000, followed by Gloryland (Alice James, 2005). Macari is the director of the Drew University MFA pro gram in poetry and poetry in translation.

JOY MANESIOTIS is the author of They Sing to Her Bones, which won the New Issues Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in several journals, including The American Poetry Review, The Antioch Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, and Poetry International, and she has received a Poetry Fellowship from The New York Foundation for the Arts, a Graves Award, and the Reader’s Choice Award from Prairie Schooner, among others. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Redlands, in California.

JANE E. MARTIN grew up in Maine and lived in Boston for several years. She earned an MFA in creative writing in 2008 from the University of Michigan, where she received two Hopwood Awards for her work as well as the Farrar Memorial Award for Playwriting. In addition, she has an MA in dramatic literature from Tufts University. She is currently a Fulbright student at McGill University in Montreal, studying French Canadian history and culture, and working on her writing.

SANDRA MEEK is teh author of three books of poems, Biogeography, winner of the Dorset Prize (Tupelo Press, November 2008), Burn (2005), and Nomadic Foundations (2002), and editor of Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad (Ninebark, 2007), winner of a 2008 Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal. Twice awarded Georgia Author of the Year, in 2006 for Burn, and in 2003 for Nomadic Foundations, which also was awarded the Peace Corps Writers Award in Poetry, she is Poetry Editor of the Phi Kappa Phi Forum, Co-founding Editor of Ninebark Press, Director of the Georgia Poetry Circuit, and Professor of English at Berry College.

MIKE MICHAELS is a poet from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 

PETER MOORE studied in the Classes Préparatoires aux Grandes Écoles Vétérinaires in Paris. His Manuscript “The Somnambulist’s Convention at the Nights End Hotel” was a finalist for the 2007 Del Sol Press Poetry Prize. His work previously appeared or is forthcoming in Raritan, Barrow Street, Hotel Amerika, Double Room, and the Cimarron Review. 

MEI LI OOI has been making things up since her youthful years in her hometown of Penang, Malaysia. These days, she may be spotted scribbling in notebooks in the buses and cafes of San Francisco. The fruits of these labors have ripened in Flashquake and Gulf Coast.

IRA SADOFF is the author of History Matters: American Poetry on the Margins of Culture. His last book of poems was Barter, and he has work coming out in APR and the Northwest Review. He teaches at Colby and the graduate MFA program at Drew.

Of JUAN JOSÉ SAER (1937-2005), the writer Ricardo Piglia once commented, “To say that he is the greatest contemporary Argentine writer is to undervalue his work. It would be more precise, though less exact, to say that Saer is one of the best writers today in any language.” Saer reinvented Argentina’s origin story in El entenado (The Witness, trans. Margaret Jull Costa); his account of his country’s Wild West, in his novel La ocasión (The Event, trans. Helen Lane), won Spain’s Premio Nadal in 1987. “Shadows on Jeweled Glass” appears here for the first time in English.

LEE UPTON’s most recent book of poetry is Undid in the Land of Undone. She is the author of eleven books, including the new novella, The Guide to the Flying Island.

BURLEE VANG’s work has appeared in Ploughshares, the North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and in the anthology Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers: Best New Voices of 2006 (Random House), among others. He holds an MFA from Fresno State and is the founder of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle.

Aside from five collections of poems, NANCE VAN WINCKEL has also published three books of short stories–most recently Curtain Creek Farm (Persea Books, 2001). For a new book of stories in progress, she recently received a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship. Her stories have appeared in AGNI, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, The Sun, Colorado Review, and The New Ohio Review. She teaches in Vermont College of Fine Art’s MFA in Writing Program.

ZACHARY WATTERSON is the recipient of a fellowship from the Jentel Artist Residency Program and two work/study scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. An associate of the University of Michigan-based Prison Creative Arts Project, Watterson has been a visiting scholar at the Whiteley Center. He holds a BA in English from the Colorado College and an MFA in Fiction from the University of Washington. His recent literary writing appears in Salt River Review and River Styx. The author says: “I am indebted to conversations with Kathryn Watterson, Lowell Brower, Sarah Yaw, Brandon Abood, David Shields, C. H. Thornton, Patricia Engel, Brian Christian, Mike Scalise, Harriet Clark, Charles Johnson, Denyse Delcourt, Carson Kennedy, Emily Beyer, and Sarah Elizabeth Green.”

AMY WEINGARTNER is a writer of fiction and nonfiction; her essays and interviews have appeared in newspapers and magazines including The New York Times. She has edited and written books, comics, and magazines for kids, and her published books include Westward Bound and The Rise and Fall of Knight Eric (Macmillan/McGraw Hill). Her story “Minnie Driver” is part of a collection, Backfill: Stories from MediaCity, started at Vermont College of the Fine Arts, where she earned an MFA in Writing in 2007. A magazine editor and lecturer on comics and graphic novels, Amy currently resides in Los Angeles, with her rock ‘n’ roll songwriting husband Michael Culhane.

FREDERIC WILL writes and teaches in Mt. Vernon, Iowa. A new study of his work appeared this year: Frederic Will’s Short Fiction: Literature as Social Critique, by Frank Shynnagh (Mellen, 2008).

SUSI WYSS’s short stories have appeared in various literary magazines, including Bellevue Literary Review, Bellingham Review, and Cream City Review. Her work is influenced by her twenty-year career in international health, during which she lived in or visited over a dozen countries in Africa. She has been awarded grants from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, among others. “Waiting for Solomon” is part of a recently completed collection of linked stories entided The Civilized World. Her website is at: www.susiwyss.com.