Issue No. 12, Fall 2004 – Contributors

Lisa J. Ampleman received her MFA in creative writing from George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, where she received the Virginia Downs Award in poetry. Her poems have appeared in Folio, So to Speak, and Phoebe. Both of the poems in this issue have titles taken from Keats’ letters.

Robert Arnold is editor and co-founder of the online journal, Memorious. He received his MFA from Emerson College in Boston and his BFA in photography from the University of Washington in Seattle.

Adam Berlin is the author of the novels Belmondo Style (St. Martin’s Press, 2004) and Headlock (Algonquin Books, 2000). His stories and poems have appeared in numerous journals including Washington Square, Bilingual Review, Northwest Review, The Greensboro Review, and the Notre Dame Review. He received his MFA from Brooklyn College and is an English professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.

Ben Berman teaches English at a high school in Boston. He won the 2002 Erika Mumford Prize from the New England Poetry Club.

Laurie Berry’s essays have appeared in The Miami Herald, The Orlando Sentinel, The Dallas Times-Herald and Gulf Coast. She is a winner of the World’s Best Short Short Story contest. Her fiction has appeared in American Way, Tropic, Florida Magazine, Sundog, Zelo, and the anthology MicroFiction. She holds an MFA from the University of Houston and lives in Coral Gables, Florida.

Cortney Bledsoe was born and raised on a catfish farm in eastern Arkansas. He has work in Nimrod, Hobart Pulp, Eyeshot, Story South, Euphony, Snow Monkey, The Dead Mule, Arkansas Literary Forum, Lifelines, and Apalachee Quarterly, among other places. He will be attending the MFA program at Hollins this fall.

Anne Blonstein, who lives in Basel, Switzerland, has published two volumes of poetry—the blue pearl (Salt Publishing, 2003) and worked on screen (Poetry Salzburg, forthcoming)—and two chapbooks—sand.soda.lime (Broken Boulder Press, 2002) and that those lips had language (Plan B Press, forthcoming).

Wendy Bishop taught writing at Florida State University for eighteen years and lived in Tallahassee and Alligator Point, Florida. She is the author of Thirteen Ways of Looking for a Poem: A Guide to Writing Poetry; co-author of Metro: Journeys in Writing Creatively; and has creative nonfiction in Crab Orchard Review and Alligator Juniper, fiction in Kalliope, and poetry in The Louisville Review and Cream City Review. After a brief illness, she died in Tallahassee on November 21, 2003. A special session, “Wendy Bishop’s Legacy in Writing Pedagogy,” has been proposed for The Modern Language Association’s annual conference in December, 2004. Two weeks before she died, On Writing: A Process Reader, which she had finished in the hospital, arrived from the publisher. She has posthumously published Acts of Revision: A Guide for Writers and Finding Our Way: A Writing Teacher’s Sourcebook, co-authored with Deborah Coxwell-Teague. Her husband, Dean, and several of her closest friends are working to put together a collection of selected poems, reading through hundreds that span a publishing career of almost thirty years. Dean, Wendy’s children, Morgan and Tait, and her step-children, Jesse, Jeremy, Eowyn, and Dean, miss her terribly.

Kevin Breen is a short story writer and wilderness lover from Grand Rapids, Michigan. His stories have been accepted into a dozen or so journals, including most recently Thought Magazine, Snake Nation Review, Eureka Literary Magazine, and Other Voices.

Michelle Brooks has work published or forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Orchid, Phoebe, Baltimore Review, Other Voices, Nerve Cowboy, Madison Review, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, No Half-Measures Here, won The Ledge contest and will be published this fall. A native Texan, she now lives in Detroit.

Lawrence Cady’s story “Guardian of the Secret” appeared in Other Voices #41.

Travis Catsull was born in Texas in 1975 and is the author of Open Spirit (Tsunami Inc 2000, 2002) and Isle of Asphalt (Effing Press, 2003). He is the editor of Haggard and Halloo and assistant editor of Walking Mountain Range. His second album of experimental country music was released by Business Deal Entertainment in spring 2004.

Jim Daniels’ most recent books are Show and Tell: New and Selected Poems (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003) and Detroit Tales, fiction (Michigan State University Press, 2003).

Mark DeFoe’s fifth book of poetry is The Green Chair (Pringle Tree Press 2003). He has new work coming out in Smartish Pace, The South Carolina Review, Bloomsbury Review, Luna, Kestrel and Cumberland Poetry Review. He teaches at West Virginia Wesleyan College.

Carl Dennis is the author of nine books of poetry including Practical Gods, which in 2002 was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. In 2000 he received the Ruth Lilly Prize from Poetry Magazine and the Modern Poetry Association for his contribution to American poetry. His most recent collection is New and Selected Poems 1974-2004 (Penguin Books, 2004).

Matt Dennison’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Motel, Nerve Cowboy, Chiron Review, Sho, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Mississippi with his wife and daughter.

Terry Dubow has placed short stories in Story Quarterly, The MacGuffin, Confrontation, and Ascent among other journals. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and earned him a grant from the Ohio Arts Council. He lives with his wife and daughters in Cleveland where he teaches at the Hathaway Brown School.

Sarah Rose Exoo studied Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Her poems have appeared in publications such as Confrontation and Terminus. She currently lives in North Carolina with her husband, Joshua Exoo.

Rupert Fike has had short fiction and poems appear in the Georgetown Review, Rosebud, Snake Nation Review, Cumberland Poetry Review and others. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Rosebud in 2000. His new non-fiction book, Voices from the Farm, about life on a large spiritual community in the 1970s, has recently been published. A poem of his is inscribed in a downtown plaza in Atlanta.

Jeff Friedman is the author of four collections of poetry: The Record-Breaking Heat Wave (BkMk Press-University of Missouri-Kansas City, 1986), Scattering the Ashes (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1998), Taking Down the Angel (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2003), and Buying Another Year (forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press). His poems and translations have appeared in many literary magazines, including American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Antioch Review, The Missouri Review, New England Review, Natural Bridge, and The New Republic. He is a core faculty member in the M.F.A. program in Poetry Writing at New England College.

George Held’s translations of Lorinc Szabo, from the Hungarian, appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, and those of Martial’s epigrams are forthcoming in Circumference, Connecticut Review, and one trick pony. He has published five chapbooks and a book of poems, and reviews poetry books for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Amy Herschleb is an unemployed graduate of FSU. Her fabulous childhood was spent in the small town of Fort White, FL, where her lovely parents live. She plans to become obnoxiously famous.

Dennis Hinrichsen earned a M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Iowa. His books include Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights, winner of the 1999 Akron Poetry Prize, The Rain That Falls This Far, The Attraction of Heavenly Bodies, and Cage of Water.

Ruth Holzer‘s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Exit 13, Connecticut River Review, Mid-America Poetry Review and Freshwater, among others. Her chapbook, The First Hundred Years (Finishing Line Press) is scheduled for publication in Summer 2004. She works as a translator.

Cecily Iddings’ fiction and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Pleiades, Southeast Review and Slope.

Franz Kafka (1885-1924) wrote of parables that they “set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter.”

Jeff Knorr is the author of five books including a collection of poems, Standing up to the Day (Pecan Grove Press, 1999) and Keeper, a collection of essays and poems (Mammoth Books, 2004). His poetry has appeared in Connecticut Review, Chelsea, and Red Rock Review, among others. He currently resides in California’s central valley and teaches writing and literature at Sacramento City College.

Barbara Lau‘s first collection of poems, The Long Surprise, won the 2000 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize and is published by Texas Review Press. Recently, her poems have appeared in Iowa Review, Southern Review, and River Styx. Lau teaches at Kirkwood Community College in Iowa, plus tends her garden and two wildflower daughters.

Lyn Lifshin’s Before It’s Light (Black Sparrow Press, 2000) won the Paterson Poetry Prize. She is also the author of Cold Comfort (1997) and Another Woman Who Looks Like Me (2003), also published by Black Sparrow Press. Other recent books include A New Film by a Woman in Love with the Dead (March Street Press), and Persephone (Red Hen Press).

Marcus Valerius Martialis (A.D. 40-104), or Martial, was born in Spain and flourished in Rome. His greatest achievement remains his 1500 epigrams, in which he depicts, often satirically, the behavior of his fellow Romans and perfects the form in Latin. His influence appears in the work of virtually every epigrammatist since.

John Pleimann writes, “When I’m not deconstructing the evening news, I do the usual writerly things such as read, daydream, and procrastinate.” He is an associate professor of English at Jefferson College in Hillsboro, MO and his poems have appeared in Cimarron Review, Defined Providence, and Cape Rock.

Frances Reidy does free-lance editing and adjunct instructing in English at local colleges & universities in her native St. Louis. (This is after working in NYC after college, from which she has more writing ‘material’ and profound questions than she knows what to do with.) Her other affiliations in St. Louis include NAMI, PREP (now known as PROMO), the St. Louis Poetry Center and she enjoys much of the great music all around.

Richard Robbins’ poetry collection Famous Persons We Have Known was published by Eastern Washington University Press in September 2000. He currently directs the creative writing program and Good Thunder Reading Series at Minnesota State University, Mankato.

Lynn Veach Sadler, former college president, has published widely. She won The Pittsburgh Quarterly’s 2001 Hay Prize, tied for first in Kalliope’s 2002 Elkind Contest, was a runner-up for Spoon River Poetry Review’s 2002 Contest, and won the 2003 Poetry Society of America’s Hemley Award and Asphodel’s Poetry Contest.

Henry Shapiro taught for many years in the Philosophy Department of the University of Missouri-St. Louis. He has translated the fiction of Heinrich von Kleist and Franz Kafka.

Kent Shaw is a graduate of the MFA program in poetry at Washington University, St. Louis and the founder of the Underwood Poetry Series.

Alisa Slaughter lives in Southern California, where she teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Redlands. Her work has been published in Missouri Review, Santa Monica Review, and Rhapsoidia.

Mark Thalman‘s work has appeared recently in Gin Bender, Muse Apprentice Guild, Pebble Lake, Dicey Brown, and Half-Drunk Muse. His work will also be appearing in The Great American Poetry Show and Hymns to the Outrageous: American Poetry Sampler. He received his MFA from University of Oregon and teaches English in the public schools.

DeAnna Stephens Vaughn earned a M.F.A. from George Mason University. She is a recent Pushcart Prize nominee and has received fellowships to write in St. Petersburg, Russia, and at the Vermont Studio Center. In 2003, she co-founded Tar Wolf Review, a journal of poetry and art.

Courtney Walsh is a retired high school teacher and lives in a small village in upstate New York. More and more these days she spends her time writing. Of “Bill Bronk Reading,” she writes, “Bill Bronk was a neighbor and—though I didn’t realize it at the time—a mentor, too.”

Ellen Wehle is a college tutor and poetry editor at Agni, with new work in FIELD, Delmar, The New Republic, US Catholic, Southern Humanities Review, South Carolina Review, and Red Wheelbarrow. She lives near the beach in Winthrop, MA with her husband and two stepchildren.

Sarah White lives in New York City, and would like to have been a composer-poet like the troubadour Countess of Dia. Instead, her poems have appeared unaccompanied in magazines including Paris Review, Exquisite Corpse, and Hanging Loose.