Contributors' Notes
MASTHEAD
Guest Editors
Marie Howe & Christopher Tilghman
Executive Director
DeWitt Henry
Managing Editor & Fiction Editor
Don Lee
Poetry Editors
David Daniel & Joyce Peseroff
Editorial Assistant
Barbara Tran
Circulation Manager
Maureen Armstrong
Founding Publisher
Peter O'Malley
Staff Assistant: Barbara Lewis.
Staff Intern: Maryn Wergland.
Assistant Proofreader: Holly LeCraw Howe.
Fiction Readers: Billie Lydia Porter, Karen Wise, Sara Nielsen Gambrill, Phillip Carson, Holly LeCraw Howe, Christine Flanagan, Win Pescosolido, Paul Brownfield, Michael Rainho, Erik Hansen, Molly Lazarotta, Thomas Olofson, Thom Shaw, Kim Reynolds, Maryanne O'Hara and Kathryn Herold.
Poetry Readers: Renee Rooks, Barbara Tran, Jason Rogers, Karen Voelker, Tom Laughlin, Jenny Cronin, Tanja Brull, Sandra Yannone, Rafael Campo, Mary-Margaret Mulligan, and Ed Charbonnier.
CONTRIBUTORS
KEITH ALTHAUS, 47, went to Provincetown in 1969 as one of the first writing fellows at the Fine Arts Work Center. An allergic reaction to academia led him to a long string of jobs, including loft renovation, tree planting, carpentry, and clerical work. In the 1980s, while doing a five-year stint in a warehouse, he self-published the first of three chapbooks. He now runs a shop in Provincetown, promoting his wife Susan Baker's artwork. They live in North Truro with their ten-year-old son. Provincetown Arts Press will soon be publishing his first fulllength book,
Reunion.
DOUG ANDERSON was sent to Vietnam as a corpsman with a Marine infantry battalion in 1967, an experience which later became poetry, despite years of trying to avoid the subject. For twenty years he worked in the theater, as an actor and then as a playwright, and did not start writing poetry seriously until his forties, when he joined a Monday night poetry group in Northampton, Mass., which included Jack Gilbert and Linda Gregg. Anderson teaches literature and creative writing at Mt. Wachusset Community College and at a Massachusetts state prison. He is completing a book called
Foxfire.
ELIZABETH BINGGELI began writing at the University of Southern California through the tutelage of T. C. Boyle. She received her M.A. from the University of California at Davis, where her principal teacher was Elizabeth Tallent. She now lives in Los Angeles, picking up small checks from tutoring, house-cleaning, working as an aide in a special education classroom, and typing everything from personality tests to peanut butter cookbooks. "The Backyard" is her first published story.
SOPHIE CABOT BLACK was born in New York City in 1958 and was raised on a small farm in Connecticut. Educated at Marlboro College and Columbia University, her first publication was in 1987, and since then, her poems have appeared in magazines such as
Field, The Partisan Review, Agni, Antaeus, and
The Atlantic. She completed a full-length manuscript in 1988 and entered it in first-book contests. After a few finalist letters and a few revisions, she sent the manuscript off to several publishers in 1990, all the while continuing to ply through the contest seasons. Just recently, the book was accepted by Graywolf Press.
JANE BUCHBINDER, 29, received her B.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. For the past six years, she has pursued a freelance film and video career, working as an editor on several PBS documentaries, including
Making Sense of the Sixties, Scientific American Frontiers, and
Out of the Past. She has recently taken a sabbatical from editing to devote more time to fiction writing and jewelry design. She has participated in writing workshops at Harvard and at the Bennington summer program, and now belongs to a writing group. "Angel in the Snow" is her first publication.
SIGMAN BYRD was born in Houston, Texas, in 1964, and educated at Sarah Lawrence College, Oxford University, and the University of Iowa, where he received his M.F.A. He has won a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Dobie-Paisano Fellowship from the University of Texas and the Texas Institute of Letters, and was a runner-up for the 1990 Grolier Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in
Pequod, The Sonora Review, Gulf Coast, and other journals. In order to have time to write, he has worked as a proofreader, a sales clerk, an assistant professor, and a grant proposal writer. Currently he is teaching ESL at Safarik University in Presov, Czechoslovakia.
ROBERT CLINTON was born in 1946 and raised in upstate New York. He has worked as a carpenter and cabinetmaker in New York, California, and Vermont. In 1979 he received an M.F.A. in creative writing from Goddard College, and since then, his poems have been published in
Antaeus, Prairie Schooner, The Atlantic, and other periodicals, and he has twice been a MacDowell Colony fellow. He lives in southeastern Massachusetts with his wife, the poet Caroline Finkelstein, and works as a designer for a custom cabinet shop in Boston. He has completed a manuscript of poems called
Taking Eden.
DON COLBURN grew up near Boston and lives in Washington, D.C., where he is a reporter for
The Washington Post. He received his B.A. from Amherst College and, twenty-three years later, his M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College. He has worked as a journalist for two decades, and was a runner-up for the 1983 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. He began writing poems nine years ago while at Stanford University on a Knight Fellowship for journalists, and regards poetry and journalism as two ways of reporting on the world. His poems have won
The Iowa Review's McGinnis Award, the District of Columbia Arts Commission's Larry Neal Award, and
The Madison Review's Felix Pollak Prize. He is working on a book-length manuscript.
KATHLEEN CUSHMAN, 42, obtained a peculiarly concrete sense of words and their weight twenty-odd years ago, when she worked in an Oak Grove, Kentucky, print shop and set type by hand for wedding invitations and for nametapes on soldiers' uniforms. Since then, she has written steadily in many genres, and is the co-author of two nonfiction books, one on the circus and the other on starting a newspaper. She has been involved in various small-scale publishing ventures, taught expository writing at Harvard, and raised three daughters.
THOMAS SAYERS ELLIS was born and raised in Washington, D.C. He lives in Boston and works at the Carpenter Center for Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard. He has worked with Seamus Heaney and Spike Lee, and his poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in
Callaloo, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. He is the co-editor of
Standing on the Verge, a special issue of
Agni (No. 37) that will focus on young poets, and is a founding member of the Dark Room Collective, whose reading series strives to develop community by presenting established and emerging writers of color. The poems in this issue are from
Black Shadows on a Silver Screen, a manuscript-in-progress.
SUSAN FAWCETT grew up in Macedonia, Ohio, and has degrees from Ohio University and Columbia University. She divides her time between New York City and Miami, writing poetry and college textbooks. A former professor of English at Bronx Community College, she has co-authored four composition texts for "at-risk" students, all published by Houghton Mifflin. In 1980, she resigned her tenure to write full time. The winner of the Billee Murray Denny and other poetry prizes, she has published a chapbook,
Abandoned House, and her work has appeared in
Poetry, The Nation, Michigan Quarterly Review, Ms., and elsewhere. She has completed a full-length manuscript called
Black Water Diving.
NEIL FISCHER was born in 1963 and began writing poetry with some resolve five years ago, while traveling alone across the country. In 1992 he received an M.A. from New York University, through which he volunteered at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island; in NYU's creative writing program there, he transcribed patients' works and assisted in workshops. He is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, and is at work on his first manuscript, which includes poems about an American family in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.
DONNA FLAX was born in Newburgh, N.Y., in 1955. She attended Cornell University, intending to study social work, but after a year and a half, she dropped out and moved to Boston, with hopes of becoming an illustrator of children's books. Due to a computer error at a continuing education program, she enrolled in a silkscreening-rather than illustration-class, which eventually led her to start a screen printing business that she still has today. She had her first one-person show in 1982. Her work is currently exhibited at the UFO gallery in Provincetown.
NICHOLAS FLYNN was born in Scituate, Mass., in 1960. He earned his undergraduate degree, finally, from the University of Massachusetts in 1990. In the interim, he worked in Boston for six years with homeless adults as a caseworker. He has also been a photographer, an electrician, a founding member of a cooperative gallery, and a ship's captain. In 1991-92, he was a writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center. He now lives in Brooklyn, and is working towards an M.A. at New York University. He has been writing for as long as he can remember.
HELEN FREMONT, 35, attended Wellesley College and Boston University law school. Upon graduation, she joined the Peace Corps and taught English and science in Lesotho, Southern Africa. Five years ago, while working full-time as a public defender in Boston, she began taking graduate fiction workshops, and in 1991 completed her M.F.A. at Warren Wilson College. She is in the process of leaving her job to work on a novel she began last year at the Cummington Community of the Arts. Her short fiction has appeared in
The Harvard Review and
Phoebe.
ANNE LAURA FRIEDMAN grew up in Lexington, Mass., and now lives in Brookline, Mass. She majored in economics at Mount Holyoke College. After realizing the error of her ways, she wrote her thesis on Wallace Stevens and went on to graduate school at Boston University, where she studied with George Starbuck and Derek Walcott. Her poems have appeared in
Poetry East and
The Painted Bride Quarterly. She works at
The Harvard Business Review, which pays the rent but keeps her writing well into the night.
DAVID GEWANTER grappled with his first poems while living in London. After teaching in Barcelona and San Francisco, Gewanter finished a doctorate at Berkeley, working on poems with Robert Pinsky, Thom Gunn, and Frank Bidart. He also studied with Seamus Heaney at Harvard. His poetry and prose have appeared in
The Threepenny Review, Agni, Sagetrieb, New England Review, Victorian Poetry, Poetry Flash, Occident, New Voices Anthology, and
Tikkun, where he serves as consulting editor. He teaches expository writing at Harvard, and is newly married to the writer Joy Young. His manuscript of poems is nearly complete.
STEPHEN R. GIBSON was born and raised in Washington, D.C., where he worked for many years as a bicycle messenger. He attended Tufts University and the Museum School of Fine Arts in Boston. He then lived in New York, working with a gallery, and is currently in Seattle finishing an M.F.A. at the University of Washington. He has a poem forthcoming in
Poetry Northwest, and continues to work on his manuscript.
RICHARD GILES grew up in Mississippi, and for fifteen years worked as a farmer in Mississippi and Alabama. In the early 1980s, when the farm where he was employed began to fail, he attended Don Hendrie's fiction workshop at the University of Alabama. Since then, he has made a living through teaching, photography, and writing. For the past few years he has been residing in a small studio in downtown Birmingham with the artist Karen Graffeo and, until recently, with his eighteen-year-old son, Lincoln, a dancer-two people he considers as his community. He has published fiction in
The Chariton Review, The Florida Review, and
Story.
LUCY GREALY was born in Dublin, Ireland, raised in Spring Valley, N.Y., and educated at Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Iowa. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, the Bunting Institute, and, currently, the Fine Arts Work Center. Her poems have been published in
The Paris Review and
The London Times Literary Supplement, among other places, and an autobiographical essay is forthcoming in
Harper's. She is working on a nonfiction book for Houghton Mifflin and is looking for a publisher for her full-length manuscript of poems.
JEFF HULL, 30, was born in New York City and raised in Fremont, Ohio. After earning his B.A. in English from Penn State in 1984, he lived in Hilton Head, S.C., and then Newport, R.I., working in advertising, public relations, and newspaper reporting. He moved to Missoula, Mont., where he now lives, to attend the M.F.A. program at the University of Montana. He has since returned to freelance writing, which he has supplemented with bartending, roadside herbicide spraying, working as a moving man, and running shuttles for fly-fishing guides. He is working on a novel about modern medicine.
JOSEPH HURKA, 31, received his undergraduate education at Bradford College, where he was Andre Dubus's teaching assistant. In 1986, after graduating from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he worked with the Coast Guard Reserve as a military journalist and, later, as a free-lance public relations writer in the Chicago area and New Hampshire. At 27, he started teaching at a community college in Illinois, then at Tufts University and Emerson College in Boston. A songwriter as well, his stories have appeared in various literary quarterlies and in the story anthology
Into the Silence. He is finishing his first novel.
MICHAEL KLEIN was raised mostly in New York City and educated at Bennington College and Brooklyn College. He received his M.F.A. from Vermont College and was a 1990-91 Fine Arts Work Center Fellow. His poems and reviews have appeared in
New England Review, The Kenyon Review, and many other journals. He edited
Poets for Life: 76 Poets Respond to AIDS, and is at work on a book-length memoir about his experience as a groom for the champion racehorse Swale. His first book of poems,
1990, is forthcoming from Provincetown Arts Press. He lives in Provincetown, and teaches in the M.F.A. in Writing Program at Goddard College.
ANNE-MARIE LEVINE was born in Belgium and raised in Beverly Hills. After touring as a concert pianist for several years, she settled in New York City and began to write poetry. She is the founder of the Poets & Performers series at the Asphalt Green, and a member of the board of directors of Poets House. She was the recipient of a 1989-90 fellowship in poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has completed two full-length manuscripts. Recently she performed a one-woman show based on her poems at the Cornelia Street Café and at the New York Theatre Workshop.
FRED MARCHANT grew up in Providence, R.I., attended Brown University, and enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1968. Two years later he left the Marines as a conscientious objector and began graduate school at the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought. In 1980, he finished a doctoral dissertation on Frost, Williams, and Stevens, and has since taught at Harvard, Boston University, and now Suffolk University. In the past few years, his work has appeared in
Agni, The Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere. His recently completed manuscript of poems,
The Foot of the Mountain, is a meditation on the continuum of private and public violence in end-of-the-century American life.
JEFFREY MCDANIEL was born in 1967 in Philadelphia. In 1990, he graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, where Thomas Lux was a guiding influence. He now attends George Mason University and edits
Phoebe. In addition, he performs in Poetry Theatre, a traveling troupe of poets, and combines slides, video, rap, and dance with poetry. He is the author of a chapbook,
The Boy Inside the Turtle (Stop Light Press), and a one-act play,
The Pedestal, and is also the poetry editor of
Hyper Age (San Francisco). He has completed a first manuscript called
House of Separate Beds. In September he is moving to Prague.
JANE MEAD was educated at Vassar College, Syracuse University, and the University of Iowa. Poems from her unpublished full-length collection,
The Lord and the General Din of the World, have appeared or are forthcoming in
The Virginia Quarterly, The Antioch Review, Pequod, The Iowa Review, and
The American Poetry Review, as well as in anthologies, including
The Best American Poetry of 1990. Her long poem,
A Truck Marked Flammable, was published by State Street Press as a chapbook. She lives in San Francisco and teaches at the Academy of Art College and at the University of California at Berkeley Extension School. She received a Whiting Writer's Award this year.
MALENA MÖRLING was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1965, and moved to the U.S. when she was fifteen. She attended Hampshire College and New York University, and now lives in Northport, N.Y. Besides working in various offices, libraries, restaurants, and magic shows, she has published translations of Philip Levine's poems in the Swedish journal
Artes, and is currently translating Levine's
Selected Poems. Her work appeared in the Fall 1992 issue of
New England Review.
SUZANNE OWENS grew up in Toronto, Canada. From the age of eleven, she wrote poetry while performing with the Toronto Children's Players. After receiving her B.A. from the University of Western Ontario, she performed in Toronto, London, and finally New York City, where she graduated from the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. After her youngest child entered school, Owens enrolled in Emerson College's M.F.A. program, where she worked with Bill Knott. She has been published in
The Ontario Review, The Mississippi Review, The Seneca Review, and elsewhere. She has finished a full-length manuscript and is working on a second while she teaches writing at Salem State College, the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and Mount Wachussett Community College.
SUZANNE PAOLA was born in Atlanta, Ga. Although her parents were both accountants, she credits the two sides of her large extended family-British and Italian-for instilling in her an attention to language, a simple emphasis on mastering image and story. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Virginia, and along the way did just about every kind of writing for hire: business, medical, and food writing, restaurant reviews, even a brief stab at a Harlequin romance. She now teaches at Western Washington University and is currently sending out her manuscript of poems,
Glass.
CANDICE REFFE was born in Paterson, N.J., in 1954. She received her M.F.A. from Columbia University in 1985 after a ten-year hiatus from literature, which included a post in Kenya with the Peace Corps. Twice chosen as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, she has been awarded a Massachusett's Artists Foundation Fellowship and a Grolier Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in the anthology
New Voices 1984-88, and in numerous literary magazines, including
Agni, The Antioch Review, Crazyhorse, and
The Threepenny Review. For many years she made her living as a poet in the schools, and is now part-owner of a seasonal clothing shop. She is circulating her manuscript of poems,
Tattoo, and is now working on a novel.
MARTHA RHODES was born in 1953 in Boston, and has lived in New York City since 1971. After years as Executive Vice President of a busy graphics studio specializing in advertising, she returned to writing full time, and in 1991 she received her M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College. She is a founding editor of
Four Way Books, Publishers of Poetry and Short Fiction, and directs the Civic Center Synagogue Reading Series in New York City. She teaches poetry workshops, both privately and in the Writers Exchange Program at the Winsor School in Boston. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in
The Virginia Quarterly Review, Agni, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere.
JASON SHINDER was born in 1955 in Brooklyn, and graduated from Skidmore College and the University of California at Davis. He has worked as an anthologist, teacher, and screenwriter, and he founded The Writer's Voice and The National Writer's Voice Project, a network of literary art centers at YMCAs across the country. His forthcoming anthologies include
More Light: Father and Daughter Poems, the third in a series of parentchild collections, and
Screen Gems: Movie Poems. His poems appear regularly in
Agni, The American Poetry Review, and
The Kenyon Review, and his first book of poems,
Every Room We Ever Slept In, is forthcoming in 1993. He lives in New York City.
MARC J. STRAUS was born and raised in Brooklyn. He graduated college as a history major, went to medical school, then into academic oncology. He now runs a practice in White Plains, N.Y. He collects avant-garde art and is President of the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. Three years ago he took poetry workshops with Thomas Lux at the 92nd Street Y and then classes in the Sarah Lawrence M.F.A. program, followed by a poetry residency at Warren Wilson College. He began submitting to magazines a year ago, and now has work appearing or forthcoming in
Field, Phoebe, TriQuarterly, and
The Kenyon Review. He has just finished a manuscript for his first book.
FREDERICK TIBBETTS was born at West Point, N.Y. in 1960, the son of an Army officer. From ages eight to twelve, his family was stationed in West Germany, where he discovered the folk tales that lie behind the poems in this issue, which are also included in his booklength manuscript,
Houses Like Ours. Since 1981 he has lived in Princeton, N.J. He has an M.A. in Romance languages from Princeton University and has nearly completed his Ph.D. dissertation on Rimbaud. His poems have appeared in
The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and
Raritan.
ANDREW TOWLE was born in 1967 and grew up in River Forest, Ill., outside Chicago. Inspired by a modern verse class at Vassar College, he began writing poetry, and after receiving encouragement from professors, he submitted his work to small magazines. His first publication was in
Poetry. Upon graduation, he received a W. K. Rose Fellowship from Vassar, as well as a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford. As a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, he started working on
Nights of the Hunted, a novel-in-progress about a group of friends living in post-AIDS San Francisco. He has published in
The Yale Review, Shankpainter, and
Christopher Street, and has finished a manuscript of poems,
The Dead Sea at Dinner. He lives in New York City.
MARK TURPIN, 39, has been a carpenter in the Oakland-Berkeley hills for fifteen years. He has two children from his first marriage, which lasted seventeen years; in 1991, he was remarried to Suzanne Qualls, a poet and performance artist. In terms of his development as a poet, he feels the most debt to Robert Pinsky, who invited him to audit a graduate writing workshop at UC Berkeley in 1986 and 1987. He has been published in
The Paris Review and
The Threepenny Review, and has nearly completed a book-length manuscript entitled
Nailer.
KATHERINE WEISSMAN, 47, received her B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis, and now makes her home in New York City. In her twenties, she held a variety of jobs, including proofreading for an anarchist press and assisting a veterinarian. During the '70s, she was an editor for
Liberation, a collectively run radical magazine, then went on to edit for
The Ladies' Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, and
Mademoiselle, where she is Associate Editor. Four years ago, she started taking fiction workshops at the Writer's Voice at the West Side Y and also at the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y. "The Divorce Gang" is her second published story. She is at work on a novel called
The House of Delight.
NANCY WHITE began teaching English at Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn immediately after graduating from Oberlin College in 1982. While teaching, she earned an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, by which time her first poems were published in
Ploughshares. She took a sabbatical in 1991-92 to concentrate on her writing, with residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Fine Arts Work Center, and finished her first book. The book,
Sun, Moon, Salt, won the Washington Prize and is due out from WordWorks in early 1993.
SANDRA YANNONE, born in 1964, lived her entire childhood in Connecticut. She received her B.A. in English from Wheaton College in 1986, and completed half of her course work toward a law degree at Boston University before deciding to enroll in Emerson College's M.F.A. program. Currently she is a Ph.D. candidate in creative writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She spent one year working full time as the first editor of
The Long-term View, a public-policy journal at the Massachusetts School of Law. She has published poems in
Quarterly West, Phoebe, and other magazines, and has finished a full-length manuscript entitled
Other Woman.