Contributors' Notes

MASTHEAD

Guest Editor

Yusef Komunyakaa

Editor

Don Lee

Poetry Editor

David Daniel

Assistant Editor

Susan Conley

Assistant Fiction Editor

Maryanne O'Hara

Founding Editor

DeWitt Henry

Founding Publisher

Peter O'Malley

Editorial Assistants: Jessica Olin, Dina Finz, and Tom Herd.
Poetry Readers: Richard Morris, Caroline Kim, Renee Rooks, Michael Henry, R. J. Lavalee, Jessica Purdy, Brijit Brown, Tom Laughlin, Bethany Daniel, Charlotte Pence, Lori Novick, and Ellen Scharfenberg.
Fiction Readers: Heidi Pitlor, Billie Lydia Porter, Leah Stewart, Monique Hamzé, Thomas McNeely, Craig Salters, Tammy Zambo, Emily Buol, Karen Wise, Michael Rainho, Ellen Tarlin, Jodee Stanley, John Rubins, Holly LeCraw Howe, David Rowell, and Kevin Supples.

CONTRIBUTORS

tony ardizzone's most recent book is
Taking It Home: Stories from the Neighborhood (Illinois, 1996). "The Fisherman's Son" is from his just-completed novel,
In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu. He teaches ethnic literature and creative writing at Indiana University, where he also directs the creative writing program.

william baer, a recent grant recipient from the NEA, has had his work published in
Poetry, The Hudson Review, The New Criterion, and
The Southern Review. He is also the editor of
The Formalist, a journal of poetry, and
Conversations with Derek Walcott, a collection of the Nobelist's interviews.

james bertolino's eighth volume of poems,
Snail River, was published in 1995 in the
Quarterly Review of Literature poetry series. Other books include
First Credo, New & Selected Poems, and
Precinct Kali & The Gertrude Spicer Story. He received his M.F.A. from Cornell, teaches at Western Washington University, and lives on Guemes Island, Washington.

bruce bond's poems have recently appeared in
The Yale Review, The Georgia Review, The Threepenny Review, Poetry, and other journals, and his third full-length poetry collection,
Radiography, is forthcoming from BOA Editions. Currently he is Director of Creative Writing at the University of North Texas and Poetry Editor for the
American Literary Review.

laure-anne bosselaar's poetry collection,
The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, will be published by BOA Editions in May 1997. With her husband, Kurt Brown, she co-edited
Night Out: Poems about Hotels, Motels, Restaurants & Bars (Milkweed, 1997). She teaches a poetry workshop at Emerson College and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

kevin bowen is Director of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His recent works include
Playing Basketball with the Viet Cong (Curbstone, 1994) and, with Bruce Weigl,
Writing Between the Lines: An Anthology on War and Its Social Consequences (Massachusetts, 1997).

laton carter is from Eugene, Oregon. He studied music at the University of North Texas, received a B.A. in English from the University of Oregon, and is currently an M.F.A. candidate in poetry at the University of California, Irvine.

richard cecil has published two collections of poems,
Einstein's Brain and
Alcatraz. He teaches in the English department and the honors division of Indiana University.

bruce cohen is Director of the Counseling Program for Intercollegiate Athletes at the University of Connecticut. His poems have appeared in various literary magazines, most recently
Cimarron Review, Indiana Review, The Ohio Review, and
Mid-American Review. This is his second appearance in
Ploughshares.

martha collins's most recent book of poems is
A History of Small Life on a Windy Planet, which won the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award. She teaches at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where she founded and co-directs the creative writing program.

greg delanty's most recent book of poems is
American Wake (Dufour, 1995). He also edited
Jumping Off Shadows: Selected Contemporary Irish Poets (Cork University, 1995). In 1996 he received the Wolfer O'Neill Literature Award and the Austin Clarke Centenary Poetry Award. He teaches at Saint Michael's College in Vermont.

toi derricotte has two books forthcoming in 1997:
Tender, a book of poetry from the University of Pittsburgh Press, and
The Black Notebooks, a literary memoir to be published by W.W. Norton.

mark doty's new collection of poems,
Sweet Machine, will be published by HarperCollins in the spring of 1998. He teaches at the University of Utah and divides his time between Salt Lake City and Provincetown, Massachusetts.

gil josé durán is a student at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. A Knight-Ridder journalism scholar, he has reported for
The Miami Herald and
The
Herald-Leader in Lexington, Kentucky
.

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, a Massachusetts Cultural Council artist grant, and the Paterson Poetry Prize. He teaches in the English department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

george evans is the author of four books of poetry published in the United States and England, the most recent of which is
Sudden Dreams (Coffee House). His work has been represented in a number of recent anthologies, including
Against Forgetting,
Postmodern American Poetry, and
The Other Side of Heaven. Among other awards, he has received a Lannan Foundation fellowship and two NEA fellowships. He lives in San Francisco.

sascha feinstein is the author of
Jazz Poetry: From the 1920s to the Present and the co-editor, with Yusef Komunyakaa, of
The Jazz Poetry Anthology and
The Second Set. He teaches at Lycoming College and edits
Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature.

carolyn ferrell's first story collection,
Don't Erase Me, will be published by Houghton Mifflin this spring. Her stories have appeared in journals such as
Callaloo, Story, and
The Literary Review. Her story "Proper Library," which first appeared in
Ploughshares, was subsequently anthologized in
The Best American Short Stories 1994, edited by Tobias Wolff, and
Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers: 1967 to the Present, edited by Gloria Naylor. She currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

cecile goding is from Florence, South Carolina, where she directed adult literacy projects. She is the author of a chapbook of poems,
The Women Who Drink at the Sea (State Street), and is a graduate student in nonfiction and poetry at the University of Iowa.

jennifer grotz's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in
The Black Warrior Review, Negative Capability, Hayden's Ferry Review, and
Puerto del Sol. She received her M.F.A. from Indiana University in 1996 and now lives in Portland, Oregon.

alexander gurevich, born in 1959 in Leningrad, is a mathematician by education. He has published two books in his own translation, and his poems have appeared in
The Human Foundation and
The Star. Since 1993, he has worked as an interpreter for American oil explorers. "Komi" and other poems by Gurevich will appear in an upcoming anthology of Petersburg poets.

marilyn hacker is the author of eight books, most recently
Winter Numbers, from W.W. Norton, which received the 1995 Lenore Marshall Award and a Lambda Literary Award, and
Selected Poems, also from Norton, which won the 1996 Poets' Prize.
Edge, her translations of work by the French poet Claire Malroux, was published in 1996 by Wake Forest University Press.

bob hicok is an automotive die designer. His second book,
The Legend of Light, won the 1995 Felix Pollak Prize from the University of Wisconsin. New poems are due out in
The Best American Poetry 1997, Boulevard, DoubleTake, and
The Iowa Review. His third book,
Kinship, will come out with BOA Editions in 1998.

colette inez, author of seven books of poetry, has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the NEA. Widely published, she teaches poetry workshops at Columbia University. She recently completed a new collection of poems and a prose memoir. This summer she will be teaching at Antioch College's writers' conference.

hatif janabi was born in Iraq in 1953. Since 1976 he has lived as an exile in Poland, where he has published five bilingual volumes of poetry. The winner of numerous poetry prizes in Poland, he earned a Ph.D. in drama from Warsaw University, where he now teaches Arabic literature and world drama. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in many Arabic literary magazines.

william h. johnson was born in 1901 in Florence, South Carolina, studied at the National Academy of Design in New York City, and lived in Paris, Harlem, Denmark, and South Carolina. Although he received considerable recognition as an artist early in his career, he died in relative obscurity in a New York state mental institution in 1970. The painting on the cover, "Three Great Freedom Fighters," depicting John Brown, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass, measures 35
¹/2
" x 27
³/8
" and was composed with oil on fiberboard. It is reproduced courtesy of Hampton University Museum in Hampton, Virginia.

alice jones won the Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books for
The Knot in 1992. A 1994 NEA fellow, she has published her poems in
Pequod, Zyzzyva, Poetry, and
The Best American Poetry 1994. A chapbook,
Anatomy, is forthcoming.

allison joseph is the author of three collections of poetry:
What Keeps Us Here (Ampersand, 1992), which won the John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Emerson College and
Ploughshares, Soul Train (Carnegie-Mellon, 1997), and
In Every Seam (Pittsburgh, 1997). She currently lives in Carbondale, Illinois, and teaches at Southern Illinois University.

jesse lee kercheval is the author of two books of fiction,
The Dogeater and
The Museum of Happiness. A memoir,
Space, about growing up near Cape Kennedy during the moon race, is forthcoming from Algonquin Books.

priscilla lee works as a technical writer for a network computing company. Her poems have appeared in
The Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, Zyzzyva, Bakunin, Phoebe, and
The Cream City Review. Her work is forthcoming in
Storming Heaven's Gate: An Anthology of Women's Spiritual Writing (Penguin/New American),
Café Review, Gargoyle, and
Making Waves II: An Anthology of Asian American Women Writers (Beacon).

larry levis published five collections of poems during his life, the most recent of which was
The Widening Spell of the Leaves (Pittsburgh, 1991). A new book,
Elegy, will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press this fall. At the time of his death in May 1996, he was Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. His awards included the U.S. Award of the International Poetry Forum, a Lamont Prize, and a selection by the National Poetry Series.

demetria martinez of Tucson, Arizona, is the author of
Mother Tongue (Ballantine), which won the 1994 Western States Book Award for Fiction. She is also the author of
Breathing Between the Lines (Arizona), a collection of poetry. A columnist for the independent
National Catholic Reporter, she is involved with immigrants' rights issues along the U.S.-Mexico border.

khaled mattawa is the author of
Ismailia Eclipse (Sheep Meadow, 1995) and the translator of two books of contemporary Arabic poetry, Hatif Janabi's
Questions and Their Retinue (Arkansas) and Fadhil Al-Azzawi's
In Every Well a Joseph Is Weeping (
Quarterly Review of Literature).His poems have appeared in
Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Pushcart Prize, and elsewhere. A poem of his in
Ploughshares last year will be included in
The Best American Poetry 1997.

john mccluskey, jr., teaches fiction writing and contemporary African American literature at Indiana University. He is the author of two novels:
Look What They Done to My Song (1974) and
Mr. America's Last Season Blues (1983). With Charles Johnson, he co-edited
Black Men Speaking, a reader on African American men that will appear this spring.

campbell mcgrath's latest book of poems is
Spring Comes to Chicago (Ecco), which received the 1996 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He teaches at Florida International University and lives in Miami Beach with his family.

phil metres's translations and poems have appeared in
Artful Dodge, Glas, Modern Poetry in Translation, New Laurel Review, Poetry New York, Spoon River Poetry Review, and
Willow Springs. A graduate student in English at Indiana University, he is finishing
Celebration: Selected Poems by Sergey Gandlevsky.

carl phillips's most recent book of poems,
Cortège, was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award. A new book,
From the Devotions, is forthcoming this fall. He is Associate Professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University, St. Louis, where he also directs the creative writing program.

marilene phipps was born and raised in Haiti. She was a 1995 Guggenheim fellow, the 1993 Grolier Poetry Prize winner, and a 1992-93 fellow at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe and Harvard. She studied anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and is an M.F.A. graduate of Pennsylvania University.

rohan b. preston was the recipient of a 1996 Illinois Arts Council artist fellowship and won the 1997 Henry Blakely, Jr., Poetry Prize, which was awarded by Gwendolyn Brooks in honor of her late husband's memory. He is the author of
Dreams in Soy Sauce (Tia Chucha, 1992) and the co-editor of
Soulfires: Young Black Men on Love and Violence (Penguin, 1996). A member of the Chicago-based Blue Ellipsis Collective, he has published his work in
The Atlanta Review, Crab Orchard Review, Eyeball, and
Hammers.

leroy v. quintana is a native New Mexican. A Vietnam veteran (Airborne), he holds master's degrees in English and counseling, and is a licensed marriage, family, and child counselor. A former NEA fellow, he is the winner of two American Book Awards and the editor, with Victor Hernandez Cruz and Virgil Suarez, of
Paper Dance: 55 Latino Poets (Persea).

jan richman's first book,
Because the Brain Can Be Talked into Anything, won the 1994 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, judged by Robert Pinsky, and was published last spring by Louisiana State University Press. A former NEA fellow, she has published her poetry in many magazines, including
The Nation, Ploughshares, The Bloomsbury Review, and
Grand Street.

jennifer richter, a former Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University, is currently teaching poetry in Stanford's creative writing program. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in
The Louisville Review, The Formalist, Callaloo, Yellow Silk, Alaska Quarterly Review, Third Coast, and other journals.

david rivard's new book,
Wise Poison (Graywolf),won the 1996 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. He has twice received fellowships from the NEA, and his poems and essays have appeared in
Poetry, Ploughshares, The North American Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. Currently the poetry editor of
Harvard Review, he teaches at Tufts University and in Vermont College's M.F.A. program. See page 216 for a "Contributor Spotlight" profile on Rivard.

lloyd schwartz is Frederick S. Troy Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and a regular commentator on NPR's
Fresh Air. For his articles on classical music in
The Boston Phoenix, he received the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. His most recent book of poems is
Goodnight, Gracie.

j. d. scrimgeour is an assistant professor of English at Salem State College. His poems have appeared in several publications, including
Poetry, Colorado Review, and
Tar River Poetry. "On, Wisconsin" is from a recently completed manuscript,
Background Checks.

angela shannon's poems have appeared in
TriQuarterly, Willow Review, Crab Orchard Review, and
Black Text and Black Textuality: Deconstructing Blackness, among other publications. A member of the Chicago-based Blue Ellipsis Collective, she is completing her first collection of poems,
Rootwoman.

reginald shepherd's second book,
Angel, Interrupted, was published last fall by the University of Pittsburgh Press, which also published his first collection,
Some Are Drowning, as winner of the 1993 AWP Award. A recipient of a 1995 NEA fellowship and other awards, he lives in Chicago. "Motive" is from a recently completed third manuscript entitled
Wrong.

maura stanton's stories have recently appeared or are forthcoming in
TriQuarterly, Crab Orchard Review, and
The Cream City Review. Her book of poetry,
Life Among the Trolls, is forthcoming from Carnegie-Mellon University Press.

gerald stern's new book of selected poems will be published later this year by W.W. Norton. His most recent book is
Odd Mercy, also from Norton. He recently retired from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and now lives in Pennsylvania.

nyugen quang thieu has published four books of poems in Vietnam, as well as novels and short stories. In 1993, he won the Vietnam Writers' Association National Award for poetry. He lives in Hanoi, where he is the editor-in-chief of
Van Nghe Tre. The Women Carry River Water, a bilingual edition of his poems co-translated with Martha Collins, will be published by the University of Massaschusetts Press in May 1997.

melanie rae thon's most recent book is the collection of stories
First, Body (reviewed on page 208).She is also the author of two novels,
Meteors in August and
Iona Moon, and the collection
Girls in the Grass. Originally from Montana, she now teaches at The Ohio State University.

richard tillinghast's sixth book of poetry,
Today in the Café Trieste, a new and selected, has just been published in Ireland by Salmon. He has had two books recently published in this country:
The Stonecutter's Hand (Godine) and
Robert Lowell's Life and Work: Damaged Grandeur (Michigan).

barbara tran is currently at work editing
Watermark, an anthology of Vietnamese American poetry and fiction, to be published by the Asian American Writers' Workshop at the end of this year. Her own poems may be found in the anthologies
On a Bed of Rice and
Premonitions.

jon tribble has published poems in
Crazyhorse, Ploughshares, Poetry, and
Sycamore Review. He has work forthcoming in
Quarterly West.

reetika vazirani is the author of
White Elephants (Beacon, 1996), which won the Barnard New Women Poets' Prize. Poems from a new manuscript have appeared recently in
Columbia, Shenandoah, and
The Partisan Review. She teaches poetry writing at the University of Virginia.

charles h. webb worked as a rock singer and a psychotherapist before landing at California State University, Long Beach. He edited
Stand Up Poetry: The Anthology and
The Poetry of Los Angeles. A selection of his poems, introduced by Philip Levine, appears in
The Writing Path (Iowa). His book
Reading the Water recently won the 1997 Morse Poetry Prize and will be published by Northeastern University Press.

david wojahn's fifth collection of poetry,
The Falling Hour, will appear from the University of Pittsburgh Press in June. He teaches at Indiana University and in Vermont College's M.F.A. program.

lisa yanover is currently living in Houston, Texas, working on a Ph.D. in creative writing and literature and teaching college English. She received her M.A. from the University of California, Davis, and her B.A. from Oberlin College. She also lived for two years in Israel, where she studied Hebrew and Yiddish at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has had poems in
Prairie Schooner and
Amelia.

daisy zamora, the author of three widely acclaimed books of poetry in Spanish, lives in Managua, Nicaragua. Two collections of her work have been published in translation in the United States:
Clean Slate (Curbstone) and
Riverbed of Memory (City Lights). She was featured in the recent Bill Moyers PBS series
The Language of Life and is editor of
Pensamiento Proprio, a journal dedicated to the investigation and study of economic and sociological conditions in Central America and the Caribbean.