Contributors' Notes

MASTHEAD

Guest Editor

Marilyn Hacker

Editor

Don Lee

Poetry Editor

David Daniel

Assistant Editor

Jodee Stanley

Founding Editor

DeWitt Henry

Founding Publisher

Peter O'Malley

Editorial Assistants: Heidi Pitlor, Maryanne O'Hara, and Nathaniel Bellows.
Intern: Monique Hamzé.
Fiction Readers: Billie Lydia Porter, Anne Kriel, Barbara Lewis, John Rubins, Karen Wise, Loretta Chen, Todd Cooper, Michael Rainho, Joseph Connolly, Holly LeCraw Howe, David Rowell, Emily Doherty, and Craig Salters.
Poetry Readers: Lisa Sewell, Bethany Daniel, Mike Henry, Brijit Brown, Renee Rooks, Tom Laughlin, Lori Novick, Ellen Scharfenberg, and Jessica Purdy.

CONTRIBUTORS

elizabeth alexander is the author of
The Venus Hottentot and has completed a second collection of poems,
Body of Life. Her verse play,
Diva Studies, will premiere at the Yale School of Drama in May 1996, and she is at work on a collection of essays,
On Black Masculinity. She is currently teaching at Yale University while on leave from the University of Chicago.

julia alvarez is the author of two novels,
How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and
In the Time of the Butterflies, and two books of poems,
Homecoming and
The Other Side. She teaches literature and creative writing at Middlebury College and is at work on a new novel.

rane arroyo is a gay Puerto Rican poet and playwright. His latest collection,
The Singing Shark, is forthcoming from Bilingual Press this summer.
The House with Black Windows, co-written with the poet Glenn Sheldon, was produced in 1995 by Polaris Theater in New York City. His papers are archived at El Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños/Hunter College.

alison brackenbury was born in England in 1953. Her work has won an Eric Gregory Award and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She has published five collections of poetry, most recently
1829 (Carcanet, 1995).

rafael campo teaches and practices medicine at Harvard Medical School's Beth Israel Hospital.
What the Body Told, his second collection of poems, will be published by Duke University Press in April 1996;
The Poetry of Healing, a collection of his prose, is due from W.W. Norton in September 1996. He recently received a fellowship for literary nonfiction from the Echoing Green Foundation.

melissa cannon's work has recently appeared in
Bogg, The Kenyon Review, and
The Lyric. Her chapbook of poems,
Sister Fly Goes to
Market, was published by Truedog Press in 1980. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she works in the fast food industry.

alfred corn is the author of seven books of poetry. He teaches in the writing division of the School of the Arts at Columbia. "Musical Sacrifice" was completed after a visit to Leipzig and Prague last spring.

brian komei dempster completed his M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of Michigan, where he received the Academy of American Poets Award, a Cowden Fellowship, and the Hopwood Award. He also received a scholarship to attend the 1995 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. His work recently appeared in
Quarterly West.

tory dent's first collection of poems,
What Silence Equals, was published by Persea Books in 1993. Her work has appeared in
The Paris Review, The Partisan Review, The Kenyon Review, Agni, and other magazines, as well as in the anthologies
Life Sentences, The Exact Change Yearbook, In the Company of My Solitude, and
Things Shaped in Passing. She also writes arts criticism for magazines, including
Arts, Flash Art, and
Parachute.

toi derricotte has published three collections of poetry:
Natural Birth (Crossing),
The Empress of the Death House (Lotus), and, most recently,
Captivity (Univ. of Pittsburgh), which is in its fourth printing.
The Black Notebooks will be published by W.W. Norton in 1997. She is a recipient of two fellowships from the NEA and the Distinguished Pioneering in the Arts Award from the United Black Artists, USA, Inc. She teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Pittsburgh.

cornelius eady is the author of five books of poetry, including
Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, which was the Academy of American Poets' 1985 Lamont Poetry Selection, and
The Gathering of My Name, which was nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. He has received fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He has taught poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, William and Mary, and is currently an associate professor of English and the director of the Poetry Center at SUNY Stony Brook.

thomas sayers ellis, a co-founding member of The Dark Room Collective, earned his M.F.A. from Brown University, and is currently a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Most recently his poems have appeared in
Between God and Gangsta Rap: Bearing Witness to Black Culture and
The Garden Thrives: Twentieth-Century African-American Poetry. In 1993, he co-edited
On the Verge: Emerging Poets and Artists, and in March, his manuscript of poems,
The Good Junk, was published in the first volume of the annual series
Take Three from Graywolf Press.

martín espada is the author of five poetry collections, most recently
City of Coughing and Dead Radiators and
Imagine the Angels of Bread, both from W.W. Norton. His awards include two NEA fellowships, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, and the Paterson Poetry Prize. Espada teaches in the English department at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

u. a. fanthorpe, who was born in Kent and educated at Oxford, has worked as a teacher and a hospital reception clerk. The recipient of many prizes, she has published six collections of poems. She was a candidate for the position as the Oxford Professor of Poetry in the last election.

julie fay's "Hannah" is a chapter from her recently completed novel
In the Houses of the Good People, which is currently seeking a publisher. Her poetry collection,
Portraits of Women, was published by Ahsahta Press in 1991. She lives in Blount's Creek, North Carolina, and Montpeyroux, France.

anne finger has published three books: a novel,
Bone Truth (Coffee House, 1994), an autobiographical essay,
Past Due: A Story of Disability, Pregnancy and Birth (Seal, 1990), and a short story collection,
Basic Skills (Univ. of Missouri, 1988). Currently at work on a novel, she teaches creative writing at Wayne State University in Detroit, where she lives with her ten-year-old son, Max.

catherine gammon is the author of the novel
Isabel Out of the Rain (Mercury House, 1991). She has published stories most recently in
The Kenyon Review, Manoa, and
Central Park. She teaches in the M.F.A. program at the University of Pittsburgh.

diana garcía, a native of California's San Joaquin Valley, recently moved from San Diego to Connecticut, where she is an assistant professor of English at Central Connecticut State University. Her work has appeared in
The Kenyon Review, Bloomsbury Review, and
The Mid-American Review.

mary gordon is the bestselling author of the novels
Final Payments, The Company of Women, Men and Angels, and
The Other Side, as well as a collection of stories,
Temporary Shelter, and of essays,
Good Boys and Dead Girls. She has received the Lila Acheson Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award and a Guggenheim Fellowhip. She teaches at Barnard College.
Shadow Man, a book about her father, will be published in May.

arthur gregor's most recent collection,
The River Serpent and Other Poems, was published by Sheep Meadow Press. Earlier volumes include
Selected Poems, The Past Now, and others from Doubleday. He is also the author of a memoir,
A Longing in the Land, published by Schocken Books.

judith hall's first book,
To Put the Mouth To, was selected for the National Poetry Series and published by William Morrow. She serves as the poetry editor of
The Antioch Review.

marie-geneviève havel is a Paris-based painter, engraver, and graphic artist. Since 1988, she has also created images with a computer-generated palette, one of which,
Tous les départs sont possibles, appears on the cover. In April 1996, an exhibition of her prints and computer graphics will be on view at the Alliance Française in Cork, Ireland; a one-woman show of her work in all media was exhibited at the Maison de l'Avocat in Nantes in December 1995. Her work has been shown all over France, as well as in Belgium, Morocco, Brazil, and Argentina.

john r. keene is the author of
Annotations (New Directions, 1995), which was named one of
Publishers Weekly's"Best Books of 1995" and earned a Critics' Choice 1995-1996 Award from the
San Francisco
Review of Books and
Today's First Edition. He is a
New York Times Fellow at New York University.

yusef komunyakaa's latest book,
Neon Vernacular, published by Wesleyan University Press, was awarded the 1994 Pulitzer Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Award. He also received the 1994 William Faulkner Prize (Université de Rennes). He teaches creative writing and literature at Indiana University.

maxine kumin's eleventh book of poems,
Connecting the Dots, will be published by W.W. Norton in July. Her book of essays and stories,
Women, Animals, and Vegetables, focusing for the most part on women, is now out in paperback from Ontario Review Press. She is a newly elected chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the 1995 winner of the Aiken Taylor Poetry Prize. Kumin and her husband live on a farm in New Hampshire, where they raise horses.

adrian c. louis teaches on the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota and is a recent recipient of the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award. His new collection of short stories,
Wild Indians & Other Creatures, is now available from the University of Nevada Press.

khaled mattawa is the author of
Isamailia
Eclipse (Sheep Meadow, 1995). His poems have appeared in
Poetry, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Callaloo, Crazyhorse, Poetry East,
Michigan Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, Black Warrior Review, and
The Pushcart
Prize XIX (1994-1995). He was awarded the Alfred Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University for 1995-96.

stephen mcleod's poems have appeared in
Agni, The American Poetry Review, Poetry East, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. New work is forthcoming in
The Journal, The Paris Review, The Southwest Review, and
Western Humanities Review. He lives in New York City, where he is studying law at Fordham University.

constance merritt is a doctoral candidate at the University of Nebraska- Lincoln, where, in 1994, she was awarded the Academy of American Poets College Prize for "Woman of Color."

alicia ostriker is a poet and critic whose most recent book,
The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions, combines prose and poetry. A new volume of poems,
The Crack in Everything, is forthcoming this spring from the University of Pittsburgh Press.

carl phillips is the author of two collections,
Cortège (Graywolf, 1995) and
In the Blood (Northeastern Univ., 1992). On leave this year from Washington University in St. Louis, where he teaches creative writing, English, and African-American literature, he is Visiting Assistant Professor in English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University.

minnie bruce pratt's second book of poetry,
Crime Against Nature, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, chosen as the 1989 Lamont Poetry Selection by the Academy of American Poets, and received the American Library Association's Gay and Lesbian Book Award for Literature. Her other books include
We Say We Love Each Other,
Rebellion: Essays 1980-1991, and
S/HE, stories about gender boundary crossing. She is presently working on a series of narrative poems,
Walking Back Up Depot Street. She lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.

hilda raz is the author of two poetry collections,
What is Good (Thorn Tree) and
The Bone Dish (State Street). Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in
Touchstones: American Poets on a Favorite Poem,
American Nature Writers,
The Whole Story: Editors on Fiction,
The Southern Review, Women's Review of Books, The Laurel Review, and elsewhere. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she edits
Prairie Schooner.

boyer rickel is Assistant Director of the creative writing program at the University of Arizona. His book of poems,
arreboles, was published by Wesleyan/University Press of New England.

aleida rodríguez's poetry has been published in
The Progressive, Prairie Schooner, and
The Kenyon Review, and her prose is forthcoming in
In Short (Norton, 1996).
Garden of Exile was a finalist for the National Poetry Series and runner-up for the Barnard New Women Poets Prize. In 1995, she was also a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize.

carol rumens is the author most recently of
Best China Sky and
Thinking of Skins: New & Selected Poems, both from Bloodaxe Books. She lives in Northern Ireland.

grace schulman's latest poetry collection is
For That Day Only (Sheep Meadow, 1995). Her previous books of poetry include
Hemispheres and
Burn Down the Icons. Her work appears in
The Best American Poetry 1995, and she is a 1995 Fellow in Poetry of the New York Foundation of the Arts. She is Poetry Editor of
The Nation and a professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY.

maureen seaton is the author of three books of poetry, most recently
Furious Cooking, which won the Iowa Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming this spring from the University of Iowa Press. In 1994, she was the recipient of grants from the Illinois Arts Council and the NEA. Her poems have appeared in
The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and
The Pushcart Prize XX.

reginald shepherd's first book of poems,
Some Are Drowning (Univ. of Pittsburgh), won the 1993 AWP Award; his second,
Angel, Interrupted, is due from Pittsburgh this fall. He is the recipient of a 1995 NEA Fellowship, among other awards, and has been selected for the 1995 and 1996 editions of
The Best American Poetry.

edmund white's "The Tea Ceremony" is from his novel
The Farewell Symphony, which is scheduled for publication in 1997. The novel will complete the trilogy begun with
A Boy's Own Story and
The Beautiful Room Is Empty. White's biography of Jean Genet won the National Book Critics Circle Award.