Contributors' Notes

MASTHEAD

Editor
Don Lee

Poetry Editor
David Daniel

Managing Editor
Gregg Rosenblum

Associate Fiction Editor
Maryanne O'Hara

Founding Editor
DeWitt Henry

Founding Publisher
Peter O'Malley

Assistant Fiction Editor: Jay Baron Nicorvo. Editorial Assistant: Reem Abu-Libdeh. Bookshelf Advisors: Fred Leebron and Cate Marvin. Proofreader: Megan Weireter.

Fiction Readers: Kathleen Rooney, Maureen Cidzik, Eson Kim, Matthew Modica, Joanna Luloff, Asako Serizawa, Christopher Helmuth, Simeon Berry, Leslie Busler, Cortney Hamilton, Erin Lavelle, Wendy Wunder, Megan Weireter, Hannah Bottomy, Leslie Cauldwell, Michelle Mulder, Scarlett Stoppa, Laura Tarvin, Jeffrey Voccola, and Tammy Zambo. Poetry Readers: Kathleen Rooney, Simeon Berry, Zachary Sifuentes, Christopher Tonelli, Megan Weireter, Robert Arnold, Tracy Gavel, Scott Withiam, Jennifer Thurber, and Elisa Gabbert.

CONTRIBUTORS

nuar alsadir has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous periodicals, including The Kenyon Review, Grand Street, Agni, The New York Times Magazine, and Bookforum. She teaches writing at New York University.

richard baker is an artist living in Brooklyn, New York. His work is represented by the Joan T. Washburn Gallery in Manhattan. This is his third cover painting for Ploughshares.

katherine bell was born in Wales, and has spent almost exactly half her life on each side of the Atlantic. She now lives in Iowa City, where she attends the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is working on a collection of stories and a novel. This is her first published story.

allison benis is completing her first collection of poems, Curtainsfall. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, Indiana Review, Margie: The American Journal of Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. She received the 2001 Indiana Review Poetry Prize, and a 2002 St. Louis Poetry Center Best Poem Prize, selected by Louise Glück.

david blair's poems have appeared in recent issues of Alaska Quarterly Review, The Greensboro Review, and Verse. He lives in Medford, Massachusetts, and teaches English and creative writing at The New England Institute of Art, formerly Massachusetts Communications College.

jaswinder bolina was born and raised in Chicago. He received his M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he is currently a lecturer. This is his first publication.

jennifer boyden teaches at Walla Walla Community College in eastern Washington. Her work has appeared in journals such as The Paris Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and Poetry East, among others. Currently, she is working on a book-length essay series about a single walk taken over the course of a year.

susan browne recently won the Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry. Her first collection, Buddha's Dogs, will be published in 2004. Her poems have appeared in various journals, including River City, The Mississippi Review, and Gargoyle. She lives in Oakland, California, and teaches at Diablo Valley College.

darrell burton passed away in December 2002 at the age of forty-one. He received his B.A. from the University of Arkansas, Little Rock, and his M.F.A. from Indiana University. His work appeared in The Ryder, Crab Orchard Review, Equinox, and elsewhere. He had been a college scholarship basketball player, electronic technician in the Navy, chef, and professional fashion model. He had recently completed a collection of poems called Weather Within.

john casteen lives in Virginia with his wife and daughter. He is a self-employed designer and builder of furniture, and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop; he has also worked as a farmhand, canoe guide, and carpenter. His poems have appeared previously in The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and Southern Poetry Review.

alicia l. conroy has published stories recently in Ontario Review, The Chattahoochee Review, and Connecticut Review. She has an M.F.A. in creative writing from Bowling Green State University and a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College. Recently she moved back to her hometown of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

mark conway currently has work in The Paris Review and The Journal.

rachel dewoskin completed her M.A. in poetry at Boston University in 2000 after spending six years in China. She has published work in The Boston Globe, Boston Review, and elsewhere. She won an American Academy of Poets Award in 2000, and is now the Associate Poetry Editor at Agni. Her first book, Foreign Babes in Beijing, will be published by W.W. Norton in 2004.

patrick michael finn was born in Joliet, Illinois, and was raised there and in rural Southern California. He received his B.A.from the University of California, Riverside, and completed his M.F.A. at the University of Arizona. His work appeared in Quarterly West in conjunction with the AWP Intro Award for Fiction.

julie funderburk lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she teaches at Queens University. Her poems appear in The Greensboro Review, Two Rivers Review, The Louisville Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. She is a graduate of the M.F.A. Writing Program at Greensboro.

alexai galaviz-budziszewski grew up in Chicago. He has published work in many journals, including The Indiana Review, TriQuarterly, and Alaska Quarterly Review. He still lives and works on the South Side of Chicago.

dobby gibson's work has appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Conduit, New England Review, Slope, Third Coast, and Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety, among other publications.

kathleen graber is the recipient of a 2003 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship and a 2003 Rona Jaffe Fellowship. She is a recent graduate of New York University's Creative Writing Program and is currently a faculty instructor in the Expository Writing Program there.

todd hearon's recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, Literary Imagination, and Partisan Review. The recipient of a number of awards for his poetry, drama, and translation—including a 2003 Dobie-Paisano Creative Writing Fellowship—he currently lives and teaches at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.

james heflin's work has appeared in Poetry Ireland Review and Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English. He is a musician and an arts writer at the Valley Advocate in western Massachusetts.

christopher hennessy's poems and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Natural Bridge, Wisconsin Review, Writer's Chronicle, Lambda Book Report, and elsewhere. His book Outside the Lines: Interviews with Contemporary Gay Poets is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press. Heis an associate editor at the Gay and Lesbian Review-Worldwide.

angie hogan is originally from Parrottsville, Tennessee. She earned her B.A. from Vanderbilt University and her M.F.A. from the University of Virginia. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Third Coast, The Greensboro Review, New Orleans Review, Willow Springs, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. Currently, she edits a humanities database for InteLex Corporation.

rodney jack received his M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College, where he was a Holden Minority Scholar. He has also been a scholar at the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers' conferences. His work has appeared in numerous magazines, including Poetry, which awarded him the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize.

tanya larkin's poems have appeared in Quarterly West, Fence, and Poetry Daily. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, and teaches at The New England Institute of Art.

jay leeming has had poems published in The Bitter Oleander, Rattapallax, Northwest Review, and Heliotrope, among other magazines. He has been employed as a social worker, musician, office worker, and carpenter's assistant. He lives in Ithaca, New York.

teresa leo's work has appeared in The American Poetry Review'sPhilly Edition, New Orleans Review, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Painted Bride Quarterly, Xconnect, and elsewhere. She has received grants from the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, the Leeway Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She works at the University of Pennsylvania.

sarah maclay's poems appear in current or recent issues of Field, Pool, and Hotel Amerika. Her first full-length collection, Whore, which won the 2003 Tampa Press Poetry Prize, will be available in early 2004. She reviews books for Poetry International and teaches in Los Angeles.

kathryn maris has published work in Poetry, Fence, the anthology New Voices: University and College Prizes 1989–1998, and elsewhere. She is an editor of Poetry London magazine and a second-year fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

mark m. martin's poems have appeared in The Cream City Review, New Millennium Writings, Slipstream, Red Rock Review, Vox, and in the anthology Sweet Jesus: Poems About the Ultimate Icon. He received his M.F.A. in creative writing from Florida International University and lives in Hollywood, Florida.

ted mathys's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Canary, Fence, Good Foot, Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, and Swerve, as well as the anthology City Voices: Hong Kong Writing in English , 1945 to the Present. Originally from central Ohio, he currently makes his home in New York and works in book publishing.

jill mcdonough's poems have been published in Poetry, Harvard Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Slate. Formerly a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center and the Boston Athenaeum, she teaches writing in Massachusetts universities and prisons.

emily moore teaches English at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. Her writing has appeared in The Yale Review and Newsweek.

michael morse teaches English at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City. Previous poems have appeared in The Literary Review, Tin House, Agni, Bomb, Field, The Antioch Review, The Iowa Review, Fine Madness, and Spinning Jenny.

kathy nilsson received her M.F.A. from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Post Road, 5 AM, and Volt. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and son.

jeff parker's fiction, nonfiction, and hypertext have appeared in Tin House, CutBank, Spin, and The Iowa Review Web. A chapter from his novel-in-progress, Ovenman, is forthcoming in Life and Limb: Writing by Skateboarders (Soft Skull, 2004). He is co-editor of Amerika: Essays by Contemporary Russian Writers on the US (Dalkey, 2004).

jeffrey pethybridge received his M.A. in poetry from Boston University, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in creative writing at the University of Missouri. He grew up in Virginia. This is his first publication.

stephanie pippin holds an M.F.A. from Washington University, where she is currently a writer in residence. Her poems have appeared in The North American Review and Hayden's Ferry Review.

christina pugh's chapbook Gardening at Dusk was published by Wells College Press in 2002. Recently her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Provincetown Arts, Columbia, and the anthology Poetry 180. A recipient of the Grolier Poetry Prize and Poetry magazine's Ruth Lilly Fellowship, she teaches at Northwestern University.

sadaf qureshi graduated from Bennington College in 2001, and has an M.A. in creative writing from Boston University. She has lived in Nigeria and Pakistan. This is her first publication.

minal k. singh has lived in central Pennsylvania and middle Georgia. Her M.F.A. is from Georgia College and State University. She currently attends Sarah Lawrence and resides in New York. This is her first published poem.

brittani sonnenberg was born in Hamburg, Germany, and grew up in Philadelphia, London, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Shanghai, and Singapore. She is a senior English concentrator at Harvard University, and is writing a short fiction thesis. This is her first published story.

rebecca soppe recently received her M.F.A. from the University of Florida, and she now teaches writing at the University of North Florida and Florida Community College in Jacksonville. This is her first published story.

pireeni sundaralingam was born in Sri Lanka and currently lives in San Francisco. She was awarded a Rosenthal Fellowship by PEN USA in 2003, and is co-editor of the forthcoming Writing the Lines of Our Hands, the first anthology of South Asian poets in the US.

pauline uchmanowicz's poems and essays have appeared in Crazyhorse, The Ohio Review, The Massachusetts Review, Z Magazine, and elsewhere. A columnist for The Woodstock Times, she is an associate professor of English at the State University of New York, New Paltz, where she teaches writing, ethnic literature, and world poetry.

alissa valles studied languages, history, and literature in London, St. Petersburg, and Houston. She currently works for the Institute of War Documentation in Amsterdam and as a freelance translator of Russian and Polish. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Verse, Pleiades, The Antioch Review, The Iowa Review, Jewish Quarterly, and elsewhere.

kris vervaecke, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, grew up in Nebraska. "The Quarrel" belongs to a novel-in-stories that she is completing. Another story from the book, "Ice," has been selected for a prize in the 2003 Nelson Algren Short Story contest, sponsored by The Chicago Tribune.

sharmila voorakkara is currently the 2003–2004 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow from 1999–2000.

nicole walker is currently pursuing her Ph.D. at the University of Utah. She has published most recently in New American Writing, Barrow Street, and Margie, and twice won the Larry Levis Prize. In addition to teaching at the university, she hosts visiting writers and is a poetry editor for Quarterly West.

ted weesner, jr., has published his work in The Boston Globe, Scribner's American Writer, National Public Radio, and elsewhere. The recipient of a PEN/New England Discovery Award and grants from the St. Botolph Club and Somerville Arts Council, he teaches writing at Tufts University and Emerson College. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is completing a novel.

kevin wilson, a native of Winchester, Tennessee, is currently a student in the M.F.A. program at the University of Florida. His work has appeared in Shenandoah, The Oxford American, The Carolina Quarterly, and Other Voices.

beth woodcome grew up in Sterling, Massachusetts, and is currently an M.F.A. candidate at Bennington College. She has poems published or forthcoming in Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Gulf Coast, and Del Sol Review, and she was named co-winner of the 2003 Grolier Prize. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.