Contributors' Notes

MASTHEAD

Guest Editor

Thomas Lux

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

Editorial Assistants: Kris Fikkan, Eson Kim, Michelle Campo, and Jean Hopkinson.
Staff Assistant: Tom Herd.
Poetry Readers: Brian Scales, Jennifer Thurber, Tom Laughlin, Jessica Purdy, Michael J. Carter, Renee Rooks, Charlotte Pence, R. J. Lavallee, and Paul Berg.
Fiction Readers: Scott Clavenna, Monique Hamzé, Karen Wise, Emily Doherty, Leah Stewart, Tammy Zambo, Mary Jeanne Deery, Jeffrey Freiert, Jessica Olin, Michael Rainho, Gregg Rosenblum, Darla Bruno, Laurel Santini, Billie Lydia Porter, and Elizabeth Pease.

CONTRIBUTORS

chris adrian's fiction has appeared in
Story, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and
The Best American Stories 1998. He lives in Virginia, where he is a medical student.

jon anderson has just completed a new book manuscript,
So Long, Ernie Vanilla. He teaches and lives in Tucson, and has published six previous books, including
In Sepia and
The Milky Way.

angela ball lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where she teaches in the Center for Writers, University of Southern Mississippi. Her latest book of poetry is
The Museum of the Revolution: 58 Exhibits, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in January 1999.

susan berlin's poems have been published in
Controlled Burn, Cincinnati Poetry Review, The Asheville Poetry Review, and
Harvard Review, among others. She is a recent nominee for
The Pushcart Prize XXIII. She lives in Chatham, New Jersey.

laure-anne bosselaar is the author of
The Hour Between Dog and Wolf (BOA Editions, 1997). She is the editor of
Outsiders: Poems About Rebels, Exiles, and Renegades, which is due out from Milkweed Editions in April 1999. She co-edited, with her husband Kurt Brown,
Night Out: Poems About Hotels, Motels, Restaurants, and Bars (Milkweed, 1997).

kurt brown founded the Aspen Writers' Conference, and Writers' Conferences & Festivals (a national association of directors). He is the editor of
Drive, They Said: Poems About Americans and Their Cars and
Verse & Universe: Poems About Science and Mathematics. His first full-length collection of poetry,
Return of the Prodigals, will be published by Four Way Books in 1999.

michael byers is the author of
The Coast of Good Intentions (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), a book of stories. His work has appeared in various magazines and anthologies, including
The Best American Short Stories 1997. A former Stegner Fellow, he now lives in Seattle.

elena karina byrne is Director of the Los Angeles chapter of the Poetry Society of America, and Poetry Consultant for the Getty's Research Institute. She is completing her first book of poems,
Sanctuary of Hunger, and a book of essays,
Inseparable to Insignificance. Her publications include
The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Denver Quarterly, The Colorado Review, The Virginia Quarterly, and elsewhere.

jari chevalier's poems have appeared in
American Literary Review, 360 Degrees, Santa Barbara Review, Pivot, and other literary magazines. She received her B.A. from Columbia University and her M.A. from City College of New York, where she was awarded an Academy of American Poets Prize. She teaches creative writing and lives in Ojai, California.

vincent cioffi is pursuing his M.F.A. in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in
The Iconoclast and
Parting Gifts. He lives in southern Vermont with his wife, Laura, and their three sons, Mitchel, Jeremiah, and Michael.

scott coffel's poetry has appeared in
The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, The American Scholar, The Wallace Stevens Journal, The Iowa Review, The Paris Review, and
Salmagundi. He lives in Iowa City with his wife and son.

billy collins's most recent collection is
Picnic, Lightning (Pittsburgh, 1998).

lucy corin's fiction recently appeared in
The Southern Review. Other stories, published under the name Lucy Hochman, have been in
The Iowa Review, The Mid-American Review, The North American Review, and the anthologies
New Stories from the South 1997, Under 25: Fiction, and
On the Edge: New Women's Fiction Anthology. "Wizened" is included in her story manuscript,
Imaginary Wars in Bellford County.

robert danberg is a college administrator and teacher. His work has appeared in
Kerem and
Literacy Harvest. He lives with his wife, Mary Biggs, and his son, Rubin, in New York City.

chard deniord's poems and essays have appeared recently in
The Pushcart Prize XXII, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Agni, Harvard Review, and
The Mississippi Review. He is the author of
Asleep in the Fire (Alabama, 1990). He teaches English, comparative religions, and philosophy at the Putney School in Vermont.

stephen dobyns's most recent book of poems is
Common Carnage, and his latest novel is
Saratoga Strongbox, both from Viking. His book of essays on poetry,
Best Words, Best Order, was published by St. Martin's Press in 1996. He lives in Watertown, Massachusetts.

sherry fairchok is a technical writer at IBM in White Plains, New York. She received her M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in 1997 and was subsequently awarded a residency by the Constance Saltonstall Foundation of Ithaca, New York. Her poems have appeared in
Calyx, Passages North, and
Cimarron Review.

robert fanning received his B.A. from the University of Michigan and his M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College. Recently, he won the Foley Poetry Award. His poems have appeared in
The Hawaii Review and
America.

d. a. feinfeld edited the literary magazine at the University of Rochester and currently studies poetry with Thomas Lux and Natalie Safir. His poems have appeared in
The Centennial Review, The Hollins Critic, Slant, and
G.W. Review, and his book,
What Do Numbers Dream Of?, was recently published by University Editions.

timothy ferine writes and lives in New York City. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, he is Poetry Editor of
Gimlet Eye, an e-zine (www.gimleteye.com). He can be reached by e-mail at tferine@erols.com.

michael fitzgerald is the author of ten books, most of them distributed by Kalimat Press of Los Angeles. His
Selected Poems 1984-1994 was published by George Ronald Publisher, Oxford, England. He also has eight recordings of music and poetry with Falling Mountain Music, an acoustic independent label. He studied at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

richard p. gabriel is a poet, essayist, and computer scientist. His most recent book is a collection of essays called
Patterns of Software: Tales from the Software Community. His manuscript,
Leaf of My Puzzled Desire, was a finalist for the National Poetry Series.

christine garren's book of poems,
Afterworld, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1993 and was a finalist for
The Los Angeles Times Book Award.

doreen gildroy received her M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College. Her poems have appeared in
The American Poetry Review, The Antioch Review, The Colorado Review, The Marlboro Review, TriQuarterly, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and
Volt.

cindy goff received her M.F.A. from George Mason University in 1993, and has since taught composition and literature courses at several colleges. Her poetry has appeared in many publications, including
Poetry East, The Quarterly, Exquisite Corpse, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Indiana Review, and the anthology
Last Call. She currently lives in Warrenton, Virginia.

mark halperin has taught in Japan, Estonia, and Russia, and is a professor of English at Central Washington University. His poems and translations have appeared widely, and his most recent book of poems,
The Measure of Islands, was published by Wesleyan. He and his wife, the painter Bobbie Halperin, live near the Yakima River, which he fishes avidly.

james haug is the author of
The Stolen Car, a collection of poems. The Center for Book Arts in New York has just published his chapbook,
Fox Luck.

john hazard teaches English at the Cranbrook Educational Community in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. His poems have appeared in several magazines, including
Cincinnati Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, and
Passages North.

elizabeth holmes is a freelance writer and editor in Ithaca, New York. Her poems have appeared in
Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and other journals. Her first book,
The Patience of the Cloud Photographer, was published in 1997 by Carnegie Mellon University Press.

fanny howe is the author of over twenty books of poetry and fiction, including
Saving History, Famous Questions, and
The Quietist. She is a professor of writing and American literature at the University of California, San Diego.

mary karr is the author of the best-selling memoir
The Liars' Club and three collections of poems,
Abacus, The Devil's Tour, and
Viper Rum, which was published this past spring by New Directions.

maurice kilwein guevara's poem in this issue is from a recently completed book of prose poems,
Autobiography of So-and-so. His other books include
Postmortem (Georgia, 1994) and
Poems of the River Spirit (Pittsburgh, 1996). His work also appears in Ray Gonzalez's anthology
Touching the Fire: Fifteen Poets of Today's Latino Renaissance (Anchor/Doubleday, 1998).

steve kowit is the author of
In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet's Portable Workshop. His most recent collection is
Epic Journeys, Unbelievable Escapes, from State Street Press. He lives in the Southern California backcountry near the Mexican border.

adrian c. louis teaches on the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota. His most recent book of poems is
Ceremonies of the Damned (Nevada, 1997). A new chapbook,
Skull Dance, is available from Bull Thistle Press in Jamaica, Vermont.

suzanne lummis teaches poetry through UCLA Extension, and received their Outstanding Teacher Award in 1996. She is a founding member of the experimental performance troupe
Nearly Fatal Women, and the editor of
Grand Passion: The Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond. Recent poems appear in
Solo and
Poetry Flash.

r. j. mccaffery is a poet and reviewer who lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island. He may be contacted at rjmccaffery@geocities.com.

jeffrey mcdaniel is the author of
Alibi School and
The Forgiveness Parade, both from Manic D Press. His poems have appeared in
New (American) Poets, Best American Poetry 1994, and on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" and a CNN special on poetry slams. He is seeking a publisher for an anthology project,
A Tongue in Both Ears, featuring performance poets of the nineties whose work stands on the page. He lives in Los Angeles, where he works as a freelance writer and a teacher.

h. bruce mcever has taken poetry workshops at Sarah Lawrence College with Thomas Lux and Kevin Pilkington and in New York City with Brooks Haxton, J. D. McClatchy, David Lehman, Hugh Seidman, Katha Pollitt, and Pearl London. He is also the president of Berkshire Capital Corporation, an investment banking firm in New York City. He and his wife live on a farm in Salisbury, Connecticut.

campbell mcgrath won
Ploughshares' 1997 Cohen Award for Best Poem. The poem in this issue is from his new book,
Road Atlas, forthcoming from Ecco Press in 1999.

wesley mcnair's fifth book of poems,
Talking in the Dark, was published this past fall by David R. Godine, which also reprinted
The Town of No; & My Brother Running in 1997. He received the 1997 Sarah Josepha Hale Medal for his "distinguished contribution to the world of letters."

joshua mehigan lives in Brooklyn, New York, and works as an online editor. His poems have appeared in
The Formalist,
Verse,
Pequod,
Pivot, and other journals. His work was nominated for inclusion in
The Pushcart Prize XXIII. Confusing Weather, a chapbook, was printed this year by Black Cat Press.

orlando ricardo menes is a Cuban American who teaches English and creative writing at the University of Illinois in Chicago. New poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in
The Antioch Review, Chelsea, The Indiana Review, and
Callaloo. His second poetry collection,
Rumba Atop the Stones, is being considered by a number of presses.

w. s. merwin is the author of more than fifteen books of poetry, including
The Folding Cliffs, Flower and Hand: Poems 1977-1983, The Vixen, Travels, and
The Carrier of Ladders, which won a Pulitzer Prize. He has also published numerous plays, nearly twenty books of translation, and four books of prose, including
The Lost Upland, his memoir of life in the south of France. He lives in Hawaii.

george mills, who passed away this summer, was the author of several books of poems, including
The House Sails Out of Sight of Home, which won the 1991 Morse Poetry Prize.

judith moore has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and twice from the NEA. She is co-author with Sue Coe of
X, and author of
The Left Coast of Paradise. Her essay collection,
Never Eat Your Heart Out, was published in 1997. She is an editor and staff writer for
The San Diego Reader. She lives in Berkeley, California.

kirk nesset's poems and stories have recently appeared in
The Paris Review, The Iowa Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Antioch Review, The Boston Review, Prairie Schooner, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere. His story "Mr. Agreeable," published last year in
Fiction, was selected for
The Pushcart Prize XXI. His nonfiction study,
The Stories of Raymond Carver, was published in 1995 by the Ohio University Press. He teaches creative writing at Allegheny College.

steve orlen's most recent book is
Kisses (Miami, 1997). He teaches at the University of Arizona in Tucson and at Warren Wilson College's M.F.A. Program for Writers.

maureen pilkington, after working in book publishing as a subsidiary rights director, received her M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in 1997. Her most recent story appeared in the Spring issue of
Santa Barbara Review. She is currently working on a collection of short stories and lives in Rye, New York.

robin reagler lives in Houston, Texas. Her poems have appeared in
The Colorado Review, ACM (Another Chicago Magazine), Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, and other journals. She is Executive Director of Writers in the Schools (WITS).

clenn reed has had poems published in
Ploughshares, The Alaska Quarterly Review, and several other periodicals. He was a recent winner of the Aldrich Museum Emerging Poets Reading Series. He lives in New York City, where he teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College, Long Island University, and Mercy College.

kirstin m. roehrich recently received her M.F.A. from Emerson College, where she studied with Bill Knott. She lives in Pittsburgh.

frazier russell is Assistant Director and a core faculty member of The Writers Studio, a private school for writers based in Manhattan. His poems have appeared in
The American Voice, Global City Review, and other journals. In 1996, his chapbook novella,
Fweivel: The Day Will Come, was published by Ridgeway Press.

michael ryan's autobiography,
Secret Life, was a
New York Times Notable Book for 1995. Among the many awards he has won for his poetry are the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, fellowships from the NEA and Guggenheim Foundation, a Whiting Writer's Award, the Lenore Marshall/
The Nation Award, and the Cohen Award from
Ploughshares.

natasha sajé is the author of
Red Under the Skin (Pittsburgh, 1994) and essays in
The Henry James Review, The American Voice, and
Legacy: Journal of American Women Writers. She teaches at Westminster College of Salt Lake City and in the M.F.A. in Writing Program of Vermont College.

faith shearin teaches high-school English at Cranbrook Schools outside Detroit. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including
The Iowa Woman, The Alaska Quarterly Review, New York Quarterly, The Charlotte Poetry Review, and
The Chicago Review. She was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where she later served on the Writing Committee, and was the 1996 Writer-in-Residence at the Interlochen Arts Academy.

eva skrande lives in Houston.

bruce smith is the author of three books of poems. A new collection,
The Other Lover, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. He teaches at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

teresa starr was born in Kentucky and currently lives in New York State.

marc j. straus has recent or forthcoming poems in
The Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. His first collection of poetry,
One Word, was published by TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press in 1994, and his second collection,
Not God, is due out from Northwestern in 1999. He received The Robert Penn Warren Award from Yale University Medical School in 1998. He runs a medical oncology practice in White Plains, New York.

terese svoboda is the author of a novel,
Cannibal, and three collections of poetry,
Laughing Africa, All Aberration, and
Mere Mortals. A new novel,
A Drink Called Paradise, is forthcoming from Counterpoint Press.

wislawa szymborska was born in 1923 in Kórnik, Poland. She started publishing shortly after World War II, and has received the Goethe Prize, the Herder Prize, and the 1996 Nobel Prize for Literature. She lives in Krakow, Poland, where she enjoys making collages for friends.

daniel tobin grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and currently teaches at Carthage College and at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has appeared in many journals, among them
Poetry, DoubleTake, The National Forum, and
The Tampa Review. He was awarded the Discovery/
The Nation Award in 1995, and an NEA fellowship in 1996. His book of poems,
Where the World Is Made, won the 1998 Bakeless Prize.

joanna trzeciak has been an authorized translator for WislawaSzymborska since 1989. Her translations have appeared in
The New Yorker, The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, and
The Paris Review. She is currently at work on a collection of her translations of Szymborska's poetry. Her translation of Tomek Tryzna's novel
Panna Nikt (Miss Nobody) is scheduled to be published by Doubleday this winter. She is a doctoral student in Russian Literature at the University of Chicago.

peter turchi is the author of a novel,
The Girls Next Door, a collection of stories,
Magician, and a book of nonfiction. The recipient of an NEA fellowship, North Carolina's Sir Walter Raleigh Prize, and an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award, he teaches in and serves as Director of Warren Wilson College's M.F.A. Program for Writers.

lee upton's third book of poems,
Approximate Darling, appeared in 1996 from the University of Alabama Press. Her third book of criticism,
The Muse of Abandonment: Origin, Identity, Mastery in Five American Poets, was published by Bucknell University Press this fall.

mathew r. weaver lives in Brooklyn, New York. His work has been exhibited in New York, Ohio, Canada, The Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland, and is included in numerous private collections in the U.S. and Europe. He has been an artist-in-residence at The Millay Colony, Yaddo, and Anderson Ranch Arts Center.

charles harper webb is a rock singer turned psychotherapist and professor of English at California State University, Long Beach. His first book,
Reading the Water (Northeastern), won the 1997 Morse Poetry Prize and the 1998 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.