Contributors' Notes

MASTHEAD

Guest Editor

Cornelius Eady

Editor

Don Lee

Poetry Editor

David Daniel

Assistant Editor

Gregg Rosenblum

Associate Fiction Editor

Maryanne O'Hara

Associate Poetry Editor

Susan Conley

Founding Editor

DeWitt Henry

Founding Publisher

Peter O'Malley

Assistant Fiction Editors: Jay Baron Nicorvo and Nicole Kelley.
Editorial Assistants: Megan Weireter and Aja DeKleva Cohen.
Poetry Readers: Simeon Berry, Erin Lavelle, Sean Singer, Joanne Diaz, and Jennifer Thurber.
Fiction Readers: Simeon Berry, Erin Lavelle, Hannah Bottomy, Jeffrey Viccola, Wendy Wunder, Eson Kim, Coppelia Liebenthal, Michael Rainho, Cortney Hamilton, Lisa Dush, Laura Tarvin, Christopher Helmuth, and Susan Nusser.

CONTRIBUTORS

elizabeth alexander is the author, most recently, of
Antebellum Dream Book. She teaches at Yale University.

steve almond's debut collection,
My Life in Heavy Metal, was published in April 2002 by Grove Press. His stories have appeared in
Playboy, Zoetrope, Book, The Missouri Review, and other magazines. He teaches creative writing at Boston College.

jane avrich's short stories have appeared in
Harper's, The Paris Review, Story, and
Tin House, and her collection is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin. She teaches English at Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn and lives in New York City.

linda bamber teaches in the English department of Tufts University. She is the author of
Comic Women, Tragic Men: Gender and Genre in Shakespeare. Her stories, poems, and essays have appeared in
Raritan, The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, Tikkun, The Nation, The Michigan Quarterly, and elsewhere.

geoffrey becker is the author of
Dangerous Men, a collection of stories, and
Bluestown, a novel. He is a past winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, the Nelson Algren Award, and an NEA fellowship. His story "Black Elvis" appeared in
The Best American Short Stories 2000. He teaches at Towson University.

milahail borich has an M.F.A. in writing from the University of California, Irvine. His work has appeared in
The New Yorker, The North American Review, The Paris Review, and
New Letters, and his book,
The Black Hawk Songs, was published in the University of Illinois poetry series.

andrea carter brown's first collection,
Brook & Rainbow, won the Sow's Ear Press Chapbook Competition and was published in 2001
. Her poems are forthcoming this spring in
The Mississippi Review, Many Mountains Moving, and
The North American Review, and previously appeared in
The Gettysburg Review and
The Marlboro Review.

julie bruck is the author of two books of poetry, both from Brick Books:
The End of Travel (1999) and
The Woman Downstairs (1993). Her poems have appeared in such magazines as
Ms. and
The New Yorker. A former Montrealer, she now lives in San Francisco.

jan clausen's latest book is a memoir,
Apples and Oranges (Houghton Mifflin, 1999). She teaches in the Eugene Lang College and Goddard M.F.A. writing programs. "From a Glass House" is the title poem of a new manuscript that includes work published in
Hanging Loose, The Kenyon Review, Luna, Rhino, and elsewhere.

toi derricotte's two most recent books are
Tender, a volume of poems from the University of Pittsburgh Press that won the 1998 Paterson Poetry Prize, and
The Black Notebooks, a literary memoir from W.W. Norton that was a
New York Times Notable Book.

r. erica doyle is a writer of Trinidadian descent. Her work has appeared in
The Best American Poetry
2001, Role Call, Bum Rush the Page, Callaloo, Ms., Black Issues Book Review, and
Blithe House Quarterly. A Cave Canem fellow, she has received awards from the Astraea and Hurston/Wright Foundations.

eugene dubnov was born in 1949 in Tallinn and educated at the University of Moscow, Bar-Ilan University, Israel, and London University. He has published three volumes of poems in Russian, and his verse and prose have appeared in English in periodicals in Britain, the U.S., and Canada, as well as in French, Hebrew, and German translations.

denise duhamel's most recent poetry collection is
Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh, 2001). The recipient of a 2001 NEA fellowship in poetry, she is an assistant professor at Florida International University in Miami.

jane ehrlich is a prize-winning artist who has shown extensively in the Boston area for over twenty years. Her work is in many private and corporate collections. She lives and paints in Cambridge.

martín espada's sixth book of poems is called
A Mayan Astronomer in Hell's Kitchen (Norton). His previous collection,
Imagine the Angels of Bread (Norton), won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches in the English department at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

julie fay's most recent poetry collection is
The Woman Behind You (Pittsburgh, 1999). She lives in Blounts Creek, North Carolina, and Montpeyroux, France. In the fall of 2002, she will be Resident Director of the study abroad program in Montpellier, France, for East Carolina University and the Kentucky Institute of International Studies.

marilyn hacker is the author of nine books of poems, most recently
Squares and Courtyards, published by W.W. Norton in 2000.
Desesperanto will appear in the spring of 2003. She is also the translator of several contemporary French poets, including Claire Malroux, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, and Hédi Kaddour. She lives in New York and Paris.

kimiko hahn is the author of seven collections of poetry:
The Artist's Daughter (forthcoming from W.W. Norton),
Mosquito and Ant,
Volatile,
The Unbearable Heart (which was awarded an American Book Award),
Earshot,
Air Pocket, and
We Stand Our Ground (with Gale Jackson and Susan Sherman).

forrest hamer is the author of
Call & Response (Alice James, 1995), which won the Beatrice Hawley Award, and
Middle Ear (Roundhouse, 2000), which won the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Award.

yona harvey is a graduate of Howard University and The Ohio State University. The recipient of a Barbara Deming Award in poetry, she lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and daughter.

lola haskins's most recent collection of poetry is
The Rim Benders (Anhinga, 2001). Her work has appeared in
The Atlantic Monthly, The Christian Science Monitor, The London Review of Books, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.

terrance hayes's second book of poems,
Hip Logic (Viking Penguin, 2002), was a National Poetry Series selection in 2001. His debut collection,
Muscular Music (Tia Chucha, 1999), won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Whiting Writer's Award. He lives in Pittsburgh and teaches creative writing at Carnegie Mellon University. 

honorée fanonne jeffers's first book,
The Gospel of Barbecue (Kent State, 2000), was chosen by Lucille Clifton for the 1999 Stan and Tom Wick Prize for Poetry; her second book of poetry,
Outlandish Blues, will be published by Wesleyan University Press in 2003. Her poems are forthcoming in
The Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, and
Prairie Schooner.

tyehimba jess has been published in
Soul Fires: Young Black Men on Love and Violence and
Bum Rush the Page. A former Cave Canem member, he won an Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship in Poetry for 2000-01 and the 2001
Chicago Sun Times Poetry Award.

hettie jones's first book of poems,
Drive, won the Poetry Society of America's 1999 Norma Farber Award. Her second,
All Told, is forthcoming from Hanging Loose this year. Her memoir,
How I Became Hettie Jones, is available from Grove. She is currently working with Bob Marley's widow, Rita, on a memoir.

patricia spears jones is the author of the collection
The Weather That Kills, which was published by Coffee House Press in 1995, and the play
Mother, which was produced by Mabou Mines in 1994. Her poems have been anthologized most recently in
The Best American Poetry 2000, Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard, and
Real Things: An Anthology of Popular Culture in America.

a. van jordan was born and raised in Akron, Ohio. His book,
Rise, was published by Tia Chucha Press in 2001. He currently lives in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.

hédi kaddour was born in Tunisia, but has lived in France since childhood. He has published three books of poems with Gallimard:
La Fin des vendanges (1989),
Jamais une ombre simple (1994), and
Passage au Luxembourg (2000). Other poems of his, in Marilyn Hacker's translation, have appeared in
APR, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, and
Verse.

erika krouse is the author of a short story collection,
Come Up and See Me Sometime (Scribner, 2001). Her work has appeared previously in
Ploughshares, as well as in
The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Story, and
Shenandoah. She lives in Boulder, Colorado, and is working on a novel.

julia b. levine's first collection of poems,
Practicing for Heaven, was the 1998 winner of the Anhinga Prize for Poetry. She has poems published or forthcoming in
Prairie Schooner, The Nation, The Southern Poetry Review, Lullwater Review, Zone 3, and
Americas Review. She lives and works as a clinical psychologist in Davis, California.

william henry lewis is the author of a collection of stories,
In the Arms of Our Elders (Carolina Wren, 1995), and his work has appeared in numerous publications, including
The Best American Short Stories 1996. Raised in the U.S., Lewis now lives in New Providence Island, Bahamas, where he teaches creative writing and literature at the College of the Bahamas. He is completing his second collection of stories.

paul lisicky is the author of the novel
Lawnboy (Turtle Point, 1999) and the collection
Famous Builder, forthcoming from Graywolf Press in the fall of 2002. A recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the Michener/Copernicus Society, he teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and in the low-residency M.F.A. program at Antioch University, Los Angeles.

timothy liu is the author of four books of poems, most recently
Hard Evidence (Talisman, 2001). He is currently on leave from William Paterson University in order to serve as a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan.

shara mccallum is the author of
The Water Between Us. Her poems and essays have appeared in
The Antioch Review, Callaloo, Creative Nonfiction, Witness, and
The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology. One of her poems was also chosen for Billy Collins's "Poetry 180" project.

kathleen mcgookey's book of poems,
Whatever Shines (2001), is available from White Pine Press. Poems are forthcoming in
Epoch and
Willow Springs.

maile meloy's stories have appeared in
The New Yorker and
The Paris Review. Her first story collection,
Half in Love, is forthcoming from Scribner in July 2002. She lives in California.

sandell morse has published stories and essays in
Dutiful Daughters, Surviving Crisis, The Green Mountains Review, Iris, Bridges, New England Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She lives in York, Maine.

gregory pardlo received an M.F.A. at New York University as a
New York Times Fellow in poetry. He has been awarded fellowships from Cave Canem and the MacDowell Colony. A senior editor of
Painted Bride Quarterly, he teaches at Parsons School of Design and John Jay College and lives in Manhattan.

ed pavlic teaches at Union College and lives in Schenectady, New York. His book of poems,
Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue, won the
APR/Honickman First Book Prize and was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2001. His book of critical essays,
Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African-American Literary Culture, will be published in May 2002 by the University of Minnesota Press.

dannye romine powell's second collection of poems,
The Ecstasy of Regret, will be out from the University of Arkansas Press this fall. She has won fellowships from the NEA and the North Carolina Arts Council, and her poems have recently appeared in
Poetry, The Green Mountains Review, and
Folio. She is a news columnist for
The Charlotte Observer.

minnie bruce pratt's most recent book of poetry,
Walking Back Up Depot Street, was named the year's Best Lesbian/Gay Book by
ForeWord: Magazine of Independent Bookstores and Booksellers. Her second book,
Crime Against Nature, was a Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. She can be reached at www.mbpratt.org.

kevin prufer's second book of poems,
The Finger Bone, is just out from Carnegie Mellon. He is also editor of
The New Young American Poets (Southern Illinois, 2000) and
Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing. He is the recipient of a 2002 Pushcart Prize for poetry.

shreela ray (1942-1994) came to the U.S. from India in 1960 and attended graduate school at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and SUNY-Buffalo. Her poems appeared in many journals, including
The Nation and
The Dalhousie Review. The recipient of several awards, she wrote one book in the U.S.,
Night Conversations with None Other (Dustbooks, 1997).

michael symmons roberts was born in Lancashire, England, in 1963. His most recent collection of poems,
Burning Babylon (Cape/Random House), was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. His work has been widely published and broadcast in the U.K., and he is a regular collaborator with the composer James MacMillan.

natasha sajé's first book of poems was
Red Under the Skin (Pittsburgh, 1994). New poems, essays, and reviews appear in
The Gettysburg Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, Parnassus, Shenandoah, and
The Writer's Chronicle, among others. She teaches at Westminster College in Salt Lake City and in Vermont College's M.F.A. in Writing program.

reginald shepherd's fourth book,
Otherhood, is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press, which also published his other books:
Some Are Drowning (1993 AWP Award),
Angel, Interrupted, and
Wrong. He has received grants and awards from the NEA, the Illinois Arts Council,
The Nation, and other organizations.

hal sirowitz is the author of two books of poetry,
Mother Said and
My Therapist Said, both from Crown.
Mother Said has been translated into nine languages and was the recipient of a National Jewish Foundation Susan Rose Grant. He is Poet Laureate of Queens, New York.

sandy solomon's work has appeared in
The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Threepenny Review, The Partisan Review,
The Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere.Her book,
Pears, Lake, Sun, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Award, is available in a new edition from the University of Pittsburgh Press.

brian swann teaches at Cooper Union in New York City. He has published a number of books, the most recent of which is forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press:
Voices from Four Directions: Contemporary Translations of the Native Literatures of North America.

reetika vazirani is the author of
World Hotel (Copper Canyon, 2002) and
White Elephants (Beacon, 1996). She attended Wellesley College and the University of Virginia. She has received a
Poets & Writers Exchange Program Award and a Pushcart Prize. Her essay "The Art of Breathing" appears in the anthology
How We Live Our Yoga (Beacon, 2001). She lives in Trenton, New Jersey.

charles harper webb's latest book of poems,
Tulip Farms and Leper Colonies, was published in 2001 by BOA Editions. Among his many awards are the Morse Prize, the Tufts Discovery Award, the Pollak Prize, a Whiting Writer's Award, and a Guggenheim fellowship. He teaches creative writing at California State University, Long Beach.

yolanda wisher is a poet, singer, and cellist living in Philadelphia, where she teaches English at Germantown Friends School. Her poetry has appeared in
The Sonia Sanchez Literary Review, Drumvoices Revue 2000, Meridians, Nocturnes, Fence, Open Letter, Cave Canem VI: 2001 Anthology, and
POeP!, one of the first eBook literary journals dedicated to innovative poetry.

scott withiam's poems are forthcoming in
Inkwell, Marlboro Review, Alligator Juniper, Field, Puerto Del Sol, Tar River Poetry, and
The Laurel Review.

al young is a novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter, and editor. He is the author of almost twenty books, including the novels
Seduction by Light and
Who Is Angelina?; the poetry collections
Heaven and
The Sound of Dreams Remembered: Poems 1990-2000; and the musical memoirs
Mingus/Mingus (with Janet Coleman) and
Drowning in the Sea of Love.