CONTRIBUTORS

Poetry

Julia Kasdorf's books of poetry Sleeping Preacher and Eve's Striptease were both published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. A collection of essays, The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life, is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press in fall 2000. She teaches in the creative writing program at Pennsylvania State University.
On writers: "I can't forget these final lines from Peter Meinke's 'Naked Poetry,' which I read in the Spring 2000 Georgia Review: here's the church    here the steeple/Poets are/ unhealthy people/whether sinful or too pure:/Writing is the only cure.

Rebecca Balcarcel's work has appeared in various literary journals including South Dakota Review, Clockwatch Review, Aura Literary Review, and White Heron. She is working on a low-residency M.F.A. in Writing and Literature at Bennington College, Vermont, where she received a Jane Kenyon Scholarship. She is a member of the North Texas Professional Writers Association and conducts workshops in local high schools and libraries. She is a mother of three boys; her oldest is five and the identical twins are two. Time for writing comes "in the middle of the night!"
On writers: "I was fortunate to hear Coleman Barks read his translations of Rumi in January and I continually reread Mary Oliver."

Ken Fifer was born in New York City and grew up in housing projects in Manhattan and the Bronx. He has a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from The University of Michigan, where he received several writing awards. His poetry has appeared in many literary magazines, including Ploughshares, Partisan Review, and New Letters; he also has published two books of poetry and edited three anthologies of poems by children. Ken is a Professor of English at a liberal arts college in eastern Pennsylvania and lives in Center Valley, Pennsylvania, with his wife Betsy and son Ben.
On writers: "Two writers I have been reading lately and who are important to me: Wislawa Szymborska and Seamus Heaney."

Richard Cecil's third collection of poetry, In Search of the Great Dead, was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 1999. He teaches in the Honors College and English Department of Indiana University.
On writers: "The writers I've been reading lately are Anita Brookner and George Gascoigne, the Renaissance poet who complained bitterly of failure. Both are kindred spirits--I am an Anita Brookner character, whether she knows it or not. I rediscovered Gascoigne while reading the new enormous history of English poetry. I pulled out a 60's paperback of Renaissance poetry from my wife's library and started reading Gascoigne, who sounded a lot like me. His 'Lullaby' ought to be as famous as 'On the Late Massacre in Piedmont.'"

John Sokol is a writer and painter living in Akron, Ohio. His poems have appeared in America, Antigonish Review, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Georgetown Review, New Millennium Writings, The New York Quarterly, and Quarterly West, among others. His short stories have appeared in Akros, Descant, Mindscapes, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Redbook, and other journals. One of his stories has been translated into Danish, and another, into Russian. His drawings and paintings have been reproduced on more that thirty-five book covers. His chapbook, Kissing the Bees, winner of the 1999 Redgreene Press Chapbook Competition, is available through Amazon.com.

Fleda Brown's third book of poems, The Devil's Child, was published in 1999 by Carnegie Mellon University Press. She is professor of English at the University of Delaware, where she directs the Poets in the Schools Program.

Elizabeth Crowell received an M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia University in 1991. She writes fiction and poetry, and teaches high school English. Her work has been published in various publications, including The Larcom Review and Nimrod.
On writers: "I return to Elizabeth Bishop again and again for her emotional truth and mastery of narrative in a poem."

Richard Fein has been published in numerous print and web journals. Some of them are: Mississippi Review, Poetic Justice, Poet's Edge, Elf: Eclectic Literary Forum, Licking River Review, Musing, Comstock Review, Whiskey Island Review.
On writers: "Robert Frost is my favorite poet."

Jeffrey Green moved to Israel in 1973 after getting a doctorate in comparative literature from Harvard. He has mainly worked as a translator from Hebrew and occasionally French into English. He has translated eight books by the prominent Israeli author, Aharon Appelfeld, as well as fiction by other writers, and academic non-fiction for major university presses. His book, Thinking Through Translation, is due to be published by the University of Georgia Press. He has written an autobiographical work and a novel in Hebrew, and the Holocaust memoir he wrote with Trudi Birger, A Daughter's Gift of Love, was published in America by the Jewish Publication Society and has also been translated into Hebrew, German, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, Finnish, and other languages. He has published some short fiction in Harper's and in literary magazines and only recently has turned to poetry.
On writers: "It would be boastful to say that I have been influenced by the great Hebrew author, Shmuel Yosef Agnon, but he is definitely the writer who most interests me at the moment. I have been teaching Agnon (in Hebrew) in an Israeli college in Tel Aviv for the past two years and every time I approach him, I am overwhelmed once again by his mastery of the Hebrew language and his literary genius. I translated a story by Agnon, "Pisces," which appears in a collection of his short fiction, A Book That Was Lost, published by Schocken and available in paperback. Agnon in English is a pale reflection of Agnon in Hebrew, but it is worthwhile to read that anthology. I have also been reading the poetry of Adrienne Rich, Anthony Hecht, Joseph Brodsky, and Philip Levine, though not as intensely as they deserve."

Virgil Suarez was born in Cuba in 1962. Since 1974 he has lived in the United States. He is the author of over fifteen books of prose and poetry, most recently In the Republic of Longing, published by Bilingual Review Press/Arizona State University. Next spring, his sixth collection of poetry, Palm Crows, will be published by the University of Arizona Press. He divides his time between Miami and Tallahassee.
On writers: "Poets I'm currently reading and enjoying: Martin Espada's new book, A Mayan Astronomer in Hell's Kitchen, and Sherman Alexie's One Stick Song, both very new. I'm enjoying in both cases how the poet moves from the self into the political. With a very natural voice, they both delve into poetry that requires the reader to think about the world, our world, the world of injustice and human turmoil. I find myself rereading, thinking of how poetry and politics blend together so well in the hands of these two poets."

B.H. Fairchild was born in Houston, Texas, and grew up in small towns in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. He attended the University of Tulsa and University of Kansas. His book of poems, The Art of the Lathe (Alice James Books), received the William Carlos Williams Award, PEN West Award, Kingsley Tufts Award, California Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has received Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. His poems are forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Yale Review, and Sewanee Review. B.H. Fairchild's latest collection of poems, The Arrival of the Future, was published in June 2000 by Alice James Books.
On writers: "I tend to read several books at once -- lately the Charles Nichols biography of Rimbaud in Africa, Blaise Cendrars, the Gass book on translating Rilke, and Delillo's White Noise. I've also been rereading early Lowell and the collected Amy Clampitt. Cendrars' prose is important (as allusion, sort of) in a long poem I'm working on. I don't think I've been influenced by Clampitt but would like to be. Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle and Mills of the Kavanaughs was long ago important to me, mainly for the sound, the vowel/consonant textures. I wanted to make that sound."

Susan Donnelly is the author of Eve Names the Animals, a Morse Prize poetry collection from Northeastern University Press, and of two chapbooks: tenderly pressed, and The Ether Dome. Her poetry has appeared recently in Poetry, The Massachusetts Review, and The Atlantic Monthly. The founder of the 20-year-old writers group, "Every Other Thursday," she lives, writes, and teaches poetry in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
On writers: "I am very impressed, actually delighted, with Yusef Komunyakaa's Magic City and look forward to reading all his work. Other American poets I admire are Stanley Kunitz, Elizabeth Bishop, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Philip Levine, and Jane Hirshfield. I recommend the new Vintage Book of African American Poetry, edited by Michael Harper and Anthony Walton. I respond to the real life narrative, specific imagery and personal tone, ability to convey strong emotion and often social protest in ways that are not cliches, ability to keep a child's viewpoint into adulthood, and spiritual dimension that these writers, in varying degrees, bring to their poems. I also have great respect and liking for Irish poets. Seamus Heaney, Patrick Kavanagh, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson, and Eavan Boland come to mind."

Fiction

Lindsay Cobb grew up in Seaside Heights, New Jersey, and now lives in Keene, New Hampshire. He received his M.F.A. at Goddard College. His articles and reviews have appeared in such publications as Poets & Writers, Fiction Writers Market, The Boston Herald, The Keene Sentinel, Dirty Linen, and online at the Folk & Acoustic Music Exchange, http://www.acousticmusic.com. He has had a poem published in Poetry Motel. "The Shape of Her Footprints" is his first published short story.
On writers: "Growing up, I was most influenced by John Gardner, Richard Brautigan, and Kurt Vonnegut. Some really wonderful books I've read lately include The Walking Tour, by Kathryn Davis (Houghton Mifflin, 1999); A House in Earnest, by Terry Farish (Steerforth Press, 2000); Ruben Moser's Miracle, by H. Christopher Gould (mwynhad, 2000); and Written on the Body, by Jeanette Winterson (Vintage, 1993)."

Randy Boyagoda was born in Oshawa, Ontario, a town outside of Toronto. He is in the second year of the Ph.D. program in English Literature at Boston University. His fiction has previously appeared in the Queen Street Quarterly (Toronto, 1999).
On writers:"The two writers who exert the greatest influence upon me are William Faulkner and T.S. Eliot. Faulkner's tortured lyricism, haunting imagery, and startling evocations of consciousness continually amaze and exhaust me. Eliot's sensitivity towards the intersection of religious and aesthetic concerns, and his ability to turn such perfect lines in his poetry offer standards which we must all admire. Right now, the writer I'm most impressed with is Jhumpa Lahiri, whose Interpreter of Maladies is a wonderful read."

Robert Miltner is Assistant Professor of English at Kent State University Stark Campus in Canton, Ohio. He teaches creative writing classes and composition, sometimes contemporary American or Irish literature (Seamus Deane, Brian Friel, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland). His poetry has appeared in Barrow Street, The Montserrat Review, CrossConnect, The New York Quarterly, and Chiron Review, among other places. He also written three poetry chapbooks: On the Off-Ramp (Implosion Press), The Seamless Serial Hour (Pudding House), and Against the Simple (Kent State University Press) which won the Wick Chapbook Award.
On writers: Robert cites Russell Edson, "King of the American Prose Poem," Campbell McGrath ("especially Road Atlas"), Jorie Graham (Swarm, Errancy), Robert Bly, and Raymond Carver.

Cover Art

Cover painting by Emily Mason. Ms. Mason's work with color and organic sense of shape infuses her abstractions with emotion and depth. Her work has been exhibited throughout the country in regional museums and galleries. She has had several one-woman shows in New York, and her work has appeared in two New England venues. Examples of Ms. Mason's work can be found at the Spheris Gallery on Main Street, Walpole, New Hampshire.

The Spheris Gallery features fine art by regional, national, and international artists, including oil painting, pastel, works on paper, photogravure, and three-dimensional work. The gallery's main site is in Walpole, New Hampshire, with an exhibition schedule from April through January each year.



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