Contributors' Notes

beth alvarado's story "Just Family" is from her collection, Not a Matter of Love, which won the MVP award from New Rivers Press and will be published in fall 2006. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Calyx, Northwest Review, Spork, and Cue, a journal of prose poetry. She is a lecturer at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

geoffrey becker is the author of a collection of stories, Dangerous Men, and a novel, Bluestown . A past winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, the Nelson Algren Award, and an NEA fellowship, his work has recently appeared in The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Best American Short Stories. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and teaches at Towson University.

katherine bell is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the managing editor of Harvard Review. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, where she is writing her first novel. Her work has appeared previously in this magazine.

jon billman is the author of the story collection When We Were Wolves. He lives with his family in southern New Mexico.

frederick busch's new novel is North, published in May 2005 by W.W. Norton.

maysey craddock was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and graduated from Tulane University and Maine College of Art. Her work has appeared in group and solo exhibitions, mostly in the southern United States, since the mid-nineties. She is represented by the Francine Seders Gallery in Seattle, David Lusk Gallery in Memphis, and PanAmerican Gallery in Dallas. She is currently living in Munich, Germany.

lesley dormen's short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Atlantic Monthly, Five Points, Open City, Glimmer Train, and the anthology 20 /40 (Mississippi). She is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, and teaches at The Writers Studio in New York City. She is completing a collection of short stories that includes "Curvy."

peter gordon's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Review, Glimmer Train, The Carolina Quarterly, The Gettysburg Review, The North American Review, The Antioch Review, and elsewhere. He is at work on a collection of stories. A Pushcart Prize winner, he lives in Framingham, Massachusetts, with his wife and two children.

casey gray was born and raised in southern Indiana. His piece in this issue is an excerpt from his first novel, If There's a Hell I Hope You Burn There with the Others, which is being represented by Inkwell Management. This is his first published work.

ethan hauser's short stories have appeared in Esquire, Playboy, Witness, The Antioch Review, and New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 2005. He lives in Brooklyn.

laura kasischke's most recent novel is The Life Before Her Eyes (Harcourt, 2002). A new novel entitled Boy Heaven is forthcoming. She has also published six collections of poetry, and this year received an NEA fellowship. Her writing has appeared in Harper's, The New Republic, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She teaches in the M.F.A. program and the Residential College at the University of Michigan, and lives in Chelsea, Michigan.

lily king is the author of two novels, The Pleasing Hour (1999) and The English Teacher (2005), both with Grove/Atlantic. This is her second story to appear in Ploughshares. She is the recipient of the Barnes & Noble Discovery Prize and a Whiting Writer's Award. She lives in Maine with her husband and their two daughters.

kathleen lee is the author of Travel Among Men, a collection of stories. She is the recipient of a 1999 Rona Jaffe Writing Award. Sometimes she writes for Condé Nast Traveler magazine, and her travel essays appear in Best American Travel Writing 2001 and 2002.