Contributors' Notes

MASTHEAD

Guest Editor

Sherman Alexie

Editor

Don Lee

Poetry Editor

David Daniel

Assistant Editor

Gregg Rosenblum

Assistant Fiction Editor

Maryanne O'Hara

Associate Poetry Editor

Susan Conley

Founding Editor

DeWitt Henry

Founding Publisher

Peter O'Malley

Assistant Fiction Editor: Nicole Hein Kelley.
Editorial Assistants: Thomas Fabian and Coppelia Liebenthal.
Poetry Readers: Sean Singer, Christopher Hennessy, Tracy Gavel, Jill Owens, Joanne Diaz, Kristoffer Haines, Scott Withiam, Jennifer Thurber, Ellen Wehle, Michael Carter, and Aaron Smith.
Fiction Readers: Darla Bruno, Elizabeth Pease, Laurel Santini, Eson Kim, Wendy Wunder, Hannah Bottomy, Emily MacLellan, Geraldine McGowan, Jay Baron Nicorvo, and Kathleen Stolle.

CONTRIBUTORS

kathleen alcalá's books include a story collection,
Mrs. Vargas and the Dead Naturalist, and three novels,
Spirits of the Ordinary, The Flower in the Skull, and, most recently,
Treasures in Heaven, all set in nineteenth-century Mexico. A cofounder of and contributing editor to
The Raven Chronicles, she also has work in
The Colorado Review and
Hopscotch. Her Web page is at www.kathleenalcala.com.

angela ball's most recent book of poetry is
The Museum of the Revolution: 58 Exhibits. She teaches in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi.

rebecca barry is a freelance writer living in Ithaca, New York. Her articles have appeared in publications such as
Mademoiselle, Glamour, CosmoGirl!, George, and
The New York Times Magazine. She was a finalist in
Esquire's fiction contest this year, and is currently working on a collection of short stories. "Love Him, Petaluma" is her first published piece of fiction.

edward bartók-baratta is an anti-death penalty/prison industrial complex activist. He has poems in
Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, Chelsea, Verse, Manoa, and elsewhere. As part of the Paumanok Poetry Award/Visiting Writers Program, he will have a featured reading at SUNY Farmingdale in April 2001.

robin behn's poems appear in recent issues of
The Cortland Review, The Ken­yon Review, Field, Luna, and
The Iowa Review. A recent Guggenheim fellow, she directs the M.F.A. program at the University of Alabama. Her books are
The Red Hour, Paper Bird, and a co-edited volume,
The Practice of Poetry.

mary biddinger received an M.F.A. in poetry from Bowling Green State University, and is currently teaching creative writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she is finishing her Ph.D. in English. She is working on her first book, and most recently her poems have appeared in
Indiana Review, Rhino, and
Whiskey Island Magazine.

justin bigos was born in New Haven in 1975. He studied writing at Carnegie Mellon University, and is at work on his first collection of poems. His poetry has appeared in
Indiana Review and
The Seattle Review, and is forthcoming in
Crazyhorse.

sophie cabot black's poems have appeared in
The Atlantic, The Partisan Review, and
The American Poetry Review, among other journals. Her book,
The Misunderstanding of Nature, was published by Graywolf Press in 1994. She currently teaches at Columbia University and divides her time between New England and Colorado.

donna brook is the author of four books of poetry, most recently
A More Human Face (Hanging Loose, 1999), and a history of the English language for children,
The Journey of English (Clarion, 1998). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

rafael campo teaches and practices general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. His most recent book,
Diva (Duke, 1999), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and a Lambda Literary Award. Poems from his next collection have appeared or are forthcoming in
Black Book, New England Review, The New Republic, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere.

christine deavel's work has appeared in
Fence, Talisman, The American Poetry Review, and other magazines. She lives in Seattle.

elizabeth edwards is originally from Pittsburgh and now lives in Kittery, Maine. She earned an M.A. in writing from the University of New Hampshire and has published poems in
The Southern Review, Witness, The Antioch Review, The Carolina Quarterly, The Cream City Review, Sycamore Review, The Florida Review, and others.

chris forhan won the Bakeless Poetry Prize for his volume
Forgive Us Our Happiness (New England, 1999). A long poem,
x, has recently been published as a chapbook by Floating Bridge Press. He is Visiting Poet at New Mexico State University and teaches in Warren Wilson College's M.F.A. Program for Writers.

juan carlos galeano was born in the Amazon region of Colombia. He is the author of
Baraja inicial (1986),
Pollen and Rifles (1997), a book on the poetry of violence, and
Amazonia, which is forthcoming in Colombia. He has also translated anthologies of poems by Charles Simic,
El pollo sin cabeza, and by Sharon Olds,
Los muertos y los vivos. He teaches Latin American poetry at Florida State University.

dagoberto gilb is the author of
The Magic of Blood,
The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña, and, most recently,
Woodcuts of Women, all published by Grove Press.

maggie golston lives in Salt Lake City, where she is finishing her Ph.D. at the University of Utah. She has an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona in Tucson. A Southwestern native, she is also a singer/songwriter.

daniel gutstein's work has appeared or is forthcoming in
Prairie Schooner, Fiction,
The American Scholar, TriQuarterly, StoryQuarterly, and elsewhere. A former economist, farmhand, editor, and tae kwon do instructor, he currently teaches creative writing and works with students with disabilities, both at George Washington University. His manuscript,
Reverse Imprint, was a finalist for the 2000 Bakeless Prize.

laura henrikson writes and lives in Chicago with her husband and son. A 2000 Illinois Arts Council Fellow, her poems are forthcoming in
Spoon River, Many Mountains Moving, and
Witness.

robert hershon's eleventh poetry collection,
The German Lunatic, was published by Hanging Loose Press in 2000. He is co-editor of the press, which has its thirty-fifth anniversary in 2001, and is executive director of The Print Center. His awards include three fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

tony hoagland is the Jenny Moore Writer in Washington, D.C., this year. Next year he will join the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh. His last book was
Donkey Gospel, from Graywolf Press.

holly hunt's poems have appeared in
Poetry, The Southern Review, Westview, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, and other journals. Originally from Hot Springs, Arkansas, she now lives in Portland, Oregon, where she is an approvals book specialist with the Academic Book Center, a division of Blackwell International.

larry wayne johns's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in
Image, Prairie Schooner, and River Styx, among others. His chapbook,
An Invisible Veil Between Us (Thorngate Road), received the first annual Frank O'Hara Award.

jennifer knox's work has been published in
The Best American Poetry 1997, The New York Times, The Iowa Review, and
Black Warrior Review. Co-captain of the Midwestern Ocean Association of the United States of America and ordained minister of the Universal Life Church, she lives in New York City with her husband, writer Sean McNally, and her cat, Tokyo Roy.

steve kronen
's new manuscript,
The World Before Them, was a finalist for the DiCastagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. His first book,
Empirical Evidence, was published by the University of Georgia Press in 1992.

alex kuo's most recent books are the novel
Chinese Opera, the poetry volume
This Fierce Geography, and the short story collection
Lipstick.

dorianne laux is the author of three collections from BOA Editions:
Awake, 
What We Carry, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and
Smoke. She also co-authored, with Kim Addonizio,
The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry. Recent poems have appeared in
The Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, The Washington Post, DoubleTake, and
The Best American Poetry 1999. She is an associate professor at the University of Oregon.

jeffrey levine is editor of The Tupelo Press in Dorset, Vermont. He won the 1998 Larry Levis Prize from
The Missouri Review, and he has new work out or forthcoming in
Quarterly West, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Many Mountains Moving, The North American Review, The Notre Dame Review, Poetry International, Yankee Magazine, 5 AM, Crab Orchard Review, Barrow Street, Cimarron Review, Nimrod, Luna, and elsewhere.

chip livingston is the author of the novel
Naming Ceremony, which won the 2000 First Book Award for Prose from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas. He is an English professor at the University of the Virgin Islands on St. Thomas. His writing has appeared recently in
Cimarron Review, A&U, and the anthology
Bar Stories.

adrian c. louis teaches at Southwest State University in Minnesota. His most recent collection of poems is
Ancient Acid Flashes Back (Nevada, 2000). A new collection,
Bone & Juice, is due in 2001 from Northwestern University/Tri­Quarterly.

j. w. marshall is co-owner and operator of Open Books: A Poem Emporium in Seattle. Poems of his have appeared in
Poetry, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Talisman, Hayden's Ferry Review, and other magazines. He co-edited
Fine Madness magazine for fourteen years before retiring recently.

cleopatra mathis's fifth book of poems,
What to Tip the Boatman?, will be published by Sheep Meadow Press in spring 2001. Other poems from that collection have recently appeared in
TriQuarterly, The Yale Review, The Georgia Review, and
Poetry. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.

gretchen mattox has been a fellow at the Edward Albee Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at Loyola Marymount University and Antioch University. Her manuscript
Goodnight Architecture was a National Poetry Series finalist, and her work has appeared in numerous journals, including
Mudfish, Pequod, and
The North American Review.

campbell mcgrath, named a MacArthur Fellow in 1999, teaches at Florida International University and lives in Miami Beach. The poem in this issue is from a forthcoming book,
Florida Poems (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2001).

kirk nesset's poems and short stories have appeared lately in
The Paris Review, Raritan, Boston Review, and elsewhere. His story "Mr. Agreeable," originally published in
Fiction, appeared in
The Pushcart Prize 1999. The author of a nonfiction study,
The Stories of Raymond Carver (Ohio, 1995), he teaches creative writing and literature at Allegheny College. Until recently, he sang and played guitar in a post-punk, postindustrial, neo-goth band called Cousin Stanley.

d. nurkse's most recent book is
Leaving Xaia (Four Way Books). Forthcoming are
The Rules of Paradise (Four Way Books) and poems in
The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and
TriQuarterly. He teaches at The New School and in the prison system.

chris offutt is the author of two books of short stories,
Out of the Woods and
Kentucky Straight. He has also published a novel,
The Good Brother, and a memoir,
The Same River Twice. The recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, he is currently teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

simon ortiz is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and storyteller. His books include
Men on the Moon, Speaking for the Generations, After and Before the Lightning, Woven Stone, Fightin': New & Collected Stories, and
The People Shall Continue. The recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, and the New Mexico Humanities Council, he lives in Tucson, Arizona.

greg pape is the author of
Sunflower Facing the Sun, Storm Pattern, and several other books of poems. New work from his recently completed book,
American Flamingo, has appeared in
DoubleTake and
The Atlantic. His poems have appeared in many anthologies, including
Poems of the American West and
The Viking Portable Western Reader. He lives in the Bitterroot Valley and teaches at the University of Montana.

heidi pitlor is an editor living in Boston.

donald platt's chapbook
Leap Second at the Turn of the Millennium was published in the spring of 2000 by the Center for Books Arts in New York City. His first book,
Fresh Peaches, Fireworks, & Guns, was published by Purdue University Press in 1994, and his poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in
The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, and
The Best American Poetry 2000. He is an associate professor of English at Purdue University.

kevin prufer's
Strange Wood won the 1997 Winthrop Poetry Series. He is also editor of
The New Young American Poets (Southern Illinois, 2000) and
Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing. He has new poems in
TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, LIT, and
Chelsea.

evan smith rakoff's poetry has appeared recently in
The Paris Review and
Green Mountains Review. He has been a fellow at the Millay Colony, Ragdale, and Yaddo. A native of North Carolina, he lives in Manhattan with his wife, poet Joanna Smith Rakoff.

catherine reynolds received her M.F.A. from Naropa University. Her work has appeared in
Sulfur, and she was the recipient of a 1999 Artist Trust Literature Fellowship. She currently works for Seattle Arts & Lectures and their Writers in the Schools program.

catie rosemurgy teaches at Northwest Missouri State University, where she also co-edits
The Laurel Review. Her first poetry collection,
My Favorite Apocalypse, is forthcoming in June 2001 from Graywolf Press. Her poems have appeared in such places as
American Poetry: The Next Generation and
The Best American Poetry 1997.

harvey shapiro is the author of ten books of poetry, including his
Selected Poems (Wesleyan, 1997) and
A Day's Portion (Hanging Loose, 1994). His new work,
How Charlie Shavers Died and Other Poems, will be published by Wesleyan in the spring.

julie sheehan is a graduate of Columbia University's writing program. After many years in New York City, she now lives on the east end of Long Island. Her work is forthcoming in
The Paris Review, The Texas Review, and
Western Humanities Review.

maurya simon's most recent volume of poetry is
The Golden Labyrinth. Her fifth book,
Weavers, based on paintings by L.A. artist Baila Goldenthal, is forthcoming from Blackbird Press in 2001, as is her chapbook,
A Brief History of Punctuation, from Sutton Hoo Press. The poem in this issue is from a work-in-progress about the lives of St. Jerome and St. Paula. A 1999 NEA fellow, she teaches at the University of California, Riverside, and lives in the Angeles National Forest.

alex smith received his M.F.A. from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener Fellow. He won
River City's Fiction Contest in 1997 and
Nimrod's Katherine Anne Porter Prize in 1995. He and his twin brother, Andrew, co-wrote the screenplay for
The Slaughter Rule, which was a 1998 Sundance Lab Project, and which they will co-direct this winter. They are currently writing scripts for Columbia Pictures and HBO.

andrew smith's work has been published in journals including
Barrow Street, Gulf Coast, and
The Alaska Quarterly Review. A native of Montana, he has received a Montana Arts Council Individual Artist Grant for his poetry. He splits his time between western Montana and Brooklyn, and his energy between writing and filmmaking.

brian teare, a recipient of a Stegner Fellowship for 2000-02, received his M.F.A. from Indiana University. A former poetry editor for
Indiana Review, he has poetry and prose-poetry appearing or forthcoming in
Crazyhorse, The Bellingham Review, Gulf Coast, Quarterly West, Pleiades, and
Third Coast, among other journals. He lives in the Bay Area.

charlene teters is a member of the Spokane Tribe in Washington State and currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she is Interim Dean at the Institute of American Indian Arts. This year she had exhibitions in Santa Fe; Limerick, Ireland; Gent, Belgium; and New London, Connecticut. In May 2000 she was the recipient of an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from Mitchell College in New London.

mark turcotte is a Chippewa writer whose work has most recently appeared in
Poetry and
Prairie Schooner. His newest collection,
Exploding Chippewas, is due from TriQuarterly Books in late 2001. He lives in Fish Creek, Wisconsin, with his wife and son, where he drives a truck for a lumberyard.

ryan g. van cleave is the Anastasia C. Hoffman Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Institute for Creative Writing. His work has appeared in recent issues of
Southern Humanities Review, Quarterly West, and
American Literary Review, and new work is forthcoming in
TriQuarterly and
The Journal. His most recent books are
Say Hello (Pecan Grove, 2000) and the anthology
American Diaspora: Poetry of Displacement (Iowa, 2001).

paul violi is the author of ten poetry books, including
Breakers (Coffee House). His poems have recently appeared in
The Best American Poetry 2000, Hanging Loose, and
The Pushcart Prize 2001. Awarded a poetry grant in 1999 from The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art, he teaches at NYU and Columbia.

tony whedon's essays, poetry, and fiction have appeared in
The American Poetry Review, The Antioch Review, Crazyhorse, Chicago Review, The Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, The Threepenny Review, and
Western Humanities Review. He teaches in the B.F.A. in Writing program at Johnson State College.

max winter's poems and reviews have appeared in
The Paris Review, Boulevard, The New Republic, The Yale Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Boston Review, American Letters & Commentary, and other publications. He is Associate Editor of
Fence.

john witte's poems have appeared in recent issues of
The Ohio Review, The Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, The Massachusetts Review, and
The Kenyon Review.

dean young's latest book of poems is
First Course in Turbulence. New poems have appeared in
Fence, Jubilat, and
Forklift.