Contributors' Notes

MASTHEAD

Guest Editors

Tim O'Brien and Mark Strand

Editor

Don Lee

Poetry Editor

David Daniel

Assistant Editor

Jodee Stanley

Founding Editor

DeWitt Henry

Founding Publisher

Peter O'Malley

Editorial Assistant: Maryanne O'Hara.
Interns: Heidi Pitlor, Julie Wolf, and Todd Cooper.
Fiction Readers: Billie Lydia Porter, Michael Rainho, Robin Troy, Stephanie Booth, Loretta Chen, Barbara Lewis, Will Morton, Joseph Connolly, Kevin Supples, David Rowell, Karen Wise, John Rubins, and Anne Kriel.
Poetry Readers: Mathias Regan, Bethany Daniel, Kathryn Maris, Lisa Sewell, Tom Laughlin, Renee Rooks, Mary-Margaret Mulligan, Brijit Brown, Jenny Miller, Leslie Haynes, and Mike Henry.

CONTRIBUTORS

lee k. abbott is the author of five collections of stories, most recently
Living After Midnight (Putnam). He is Director of the M.F.A. program in creative writing at Ohio State University in Columbus.

nin andrews is the author of
The Book of Orgasms. She is currently writing
The Book of Lies and studying the art of levitation.

jennifer ashton is a graduate student in English at Johns Hopkins University. Her poems have appeared in
The Paris Review, The New Republic, Chicago Review, and
Poetry Northwest.

judith berke's first book,
White Morning, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 1989. She is also the author of a chapbook,
Acting Problems. The poems in this issue are from a manuscript in progress entitled
The Sky Inside.

gina berriault's new collection,
Women in Their Beds: New and Selected Stories, will be published by Counterpoint Press in the spring of 1996. Her books include
The Infinite Passion of Expectation and
The Lights of Earth. She has been awarded grants by the Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts.

teresa cader is the author of
Guests (1991), which won the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Ohio State University Press/
The Journal Award in Poetry. Poems from her new collection,
The Paper Wasp, have appeared in
TriQuarterly, Poetry, Agni, Harvard Magazine, Radcliffe Quarterly, and
The Black Warrior Review.

robert cohen's second novel,
The Here and Now, has just been published by Scribner. He is also the author of
The Organ Builder. He teaches creative writing at Harvard University.

laura conklin holds degrees in literature from Mt. Holyoke College and Pembroke College, Cambridge University. She currently teaches English and creative writing at the Catlin Gabel School in Portland, Oregon.

wyn cooper's book of poems,
The Country of Here Below, was published in 1987. His poem "Fun," from that collection, was turned into Sheryl Crow's hit song "All I Wanna Do." He has recent poems in
Agni, Harvard Magazine, Self, and the anthology
Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms. He lives in Vermont.

janet desaulniers's fiction has appeared in
The New Yorker, TriQuarterly, The North American Review, and twice before in
Ploughshares, among other publications. A collection of her short stories is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf. She lives in Evanston, Illinois, and is currently Writer-in-Residence at Carthage College.

kathy fagan, author of
The Raft (E.P. Dutton, 1985), a National Poetry Series selection, co-edits
The Journal and teaches in the M.F.A. program at Ohio State University. Her current manuscript, from which the poems in this issue are taken, is entitled
MOVING & ST RAGE.

james finnegan lives in West Hartford, Connecticut, where he works as an underwriter in the field of banking insurance. His poems have appeared in
Chelsea, Poetry East, Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and many other literary magazines. In 1995, he was part of a four-member team representing Connecticut in the National Poetry Slam held in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

louise glück's most recent book,
The Wild Iris, received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1993. She lives in Vermont and teaches at Williams College.

jorie graham's
The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994 was published this fall by The Ecco Press. An anthology of poems,
Earth Took of Earth, will be released by Ecco in the spring of 1996.

david greenberg was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He graduated from Yale and from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He works at a neighborhood development group in New York.

linda gregerson is the author of
Fire in the Conservatory (Dragon Gate) and
The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic (Cambridge Univ.). She teaches Renaissance literature at the University of Michigan.

allen grossman's most recent books are
The Ether Dome: Poems New and Selected and
The Philosopher's Window, both from New Directions, and
The Sighted Singer, from Johns Hopkins University Press. He teaches in the English department of Johns Hopkins University.

beth gylys is currently a Ph.D. student in creative writing and literature at the University of Cincinnati. She received a master's degree in writing from Syracuse University. She has work published or forthcoming in
The
Paris Review, Poetry East,and
South Coast Poetry Journal.

daniel halpern is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently
Selected Poems, from Knopf. He is editor of The Ecco Press, and divides his time between Princeton, New Jersey, and New York City.

edward hardy's novel,
Geyser Life, is forthcoming from Bridge Works. His short fiction has appeared in
Gentlemen's Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, and
Ascent, among other magazines. Another story will soon be out in
Witness. He lives in Ithaca, New York.

edward hirsch has published four books of poems:
For the Sleepwalkers (1981),
Wild Gratitude (1986),
The Night Parade (1989), and
Earthly Measures (1994). He teaches at the University of Houston.

patricia hooper received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America for
Other Lives. She is also the author of
The Flowering Trees (State St., 1995) and two children's books. Her poems have appeared in
Poetry, The American Scholar, The Hudson Review, The New Criterion, and
The American Poetry Review.

gray jacobik is an associate professor at Eastern Connecticut State University, where she teaches courses in twentieth-century poetry and the poetry of women. New poems appear in
Prairie Schooner, American Literary Review, Crazy Quilt, and
Confrontation.

nicholas kahn and
richard selesnick have been collaborating for seven years on painting, sculpture, photography, and writing that portray the fictional world of the Royal Excavation Corps in 1930's England. They are currently building a chapel of one hundred twenty heads that will be shown in April 1996 at Monique Knowton Gallery in SoHo, New York. Their work is in numerous collections, including the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Kahn was born in New York City and now lives in Truro, Massachusetts. Selesnick, born in London, divides his time between Truro and Palisades, New York. The cover painting is a detail of
The Scotswoman of Eigg, a 55" x 55" octagonal work painted in flashe on plaster in 1993. It is reproduced by courtesy of Gallery Camino Real in Boca Raton, Florida.

david lehman is the series editor of
The Best American Poetry. He teaches at Columbia University and is on the core faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars. The poems in this issue are from the title sequence of his new book of poems,
Valentine Place (Scribner, 1996).

philip levine's
The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography and
The Simple Truth, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, were published by Knopf in 1994. He is presently teaching at New York University.

timothy liu's books of poems are
Vox Angelica (Alice James) and
Burnt Offerings (Copper Canyon). He lives in Mt. Vernon, Iowa.

susan mitchell's most recent book,
Rapture, won the first Kingsley Tufts Award and was a National Book Award finalist. She has received grants from the Guggenheim and Lannan foundations and is a professor in the English department at Florida Atlantic University.

joyce carol oates is the author most recently of the novel
Zombie (Dutton, 1995). Her story in this issue, "Easy Lay," is from a forthcoming collection,
Man Crazy, which will be published by Dutton in the fall of 1997.  She is a co-editor, with Raymond Smith, of
The Ontario Review.

jacqueline osherow is the author of
Conversations with Survivors (1994) and
Looking for Angels in New York (1988), both from the University of Georgia Press. She is currently at work on a third collection,
With a Moon in Transit, whose title poem was included in
The Best American Poetry 1995. She is an associate professor of English and creative writing at the University of Utah.

stephen sandy's recent collections of poems are
Man in the Open Air and
Thanksgiving Over the Water, both from Knopf. His work appears in
The Best American Poetry 1995 and in recent or forthcoming issues of
The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Partisan Review, The Southern Review, The New Yorker, The Yale Review, and
Western Humanities Review. Johns Hopkins published his translation of Seneca's
Hercules Oetaeus in its
Roman Drama (1995).

lisa sapinkopf co-translated and edited
Clay and Star: Contemporary Bulgarian Poets (Milkweed, 1992). Her translations from several languages have appeared in over fifty journals, including
The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Paris Review, and
Partisan Review.

charles simic's first volume of poetry was published in 1967 and fifteen others have followed. His most recent books are
A Wedding in Hell, a collection of poems from Harcourt Brace, and
The Unemployed Fortune Teller, a collection of essays and memoirs from the University of Michigan Press. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990.

greg simon lives and works in Portland, Oregon. He co-translated, with Steven F. White, Federíco García Lorca's
Poet in New York, which was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1988.

ronald wallace's nine books include
The Makings of Happiness and
Time's Fancy (Univ. of Pittsburgh). He directs the creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and edits the University of Wisconsin Press Poetry Series. He divides his time between Madison and a forty-acre farm in Bear Valley, Wisconsin.

michael waters teaches at Salisbury State University on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. His recent books include
Bountiful (1992),
The Burden Lifters (1989), and
Anniversary of the Air (1985), all from Carnegie Mellon Press. New poems have appeared in
Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and
The Georgia Review.

heather white lives in Ithaca, New York, where she is working on a dissertation about sentences in modernist poetry. She also writes for
Rogue, an online journal of cultural criticism.

michael white's book,
The Island, appeared in 1992 from Copper Canyon Press. Recent poems have appeared in
The Best American Poetry 1994, The Paris Review, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere. He teaches at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.

charles wright lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, and teaches at the University of Virginia. He had two books published in 1995:
Chickamauga, poems, and
Quarter Notes, improvisations and interviews. He was Mark Strand's student for one incandescent semester at the University of Iowa in the spring of 1962.

oksana zabuzhko, who was born in 1961, is one of the leading Ukrainian poets of her generation. She has published three volumes of poetry and a book-length essay,
Two Cultures, as well as works of criticism and aesthetic philosophy, and translated the
Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath into Ukrainian. Her work has appeared in
Partisan Review, Harvard Review, Agni, The Massachusetts Review, The Poetry Miscellany, Crosscurrents, and other journals. She spent 1994 at Harvard University on a Fulbright grant.