Contributors’ Notes

Contributors

Daniel Alarcón was born in Lima, Peru, and raised in Birmingham, Alabama. His work has been published in The New Yorker, and is forthcoming in Glimmer Train, Virginia Quarterly and other journals. Harper Collins will publish his first collection, War By Candlelight, in 2005. He lives in Iowa City.

Steve Almond's story collection, My Life in Heavy Metal, is out in paperback. His stories have been anthologized in the Pushcart Anthology, Best New Stories from the South, Best of Zoetrope, and Best American Erotica. Algonquin will publish his next book, Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America, in the spring. To find out what music he listens to, check out www.stevenalmond.com.

Linda Brewer grew up in the Siuslaw National Forest in Oregon and now lives in the Sonora Desert.  Besides reading and writing she enjoys long-distance running. She works in a medical lab and also does restaurant columns and features for the Tucson publication The Desert Leaf. She attends a weekly writing workshop taught by Meg Files at Pima Community College. She is at work on a collection of stories set in Western states and a novel set in Southwest Arizona.

One of David Buckley's novels, written at Michigan, won a Hopwood Award; another, Pride of Innocence, was published by Holt. In addition to writing a number of short stories that have appeared in The Literary Review, The Florida Review, Confrontation, and several other literary journals, he has recently returned to an earlier interest, the writing of poetry.

Lollie Butler is published widely and has received a special literary award from The George Bush Presidential Library at Texas A&M University, where her poem, The One Free Women in America, dedicated to civil rights activist, Rosa Parks, remains on display.  Granted an Arizona Commission On the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing, she has taught creative writing to women inmates of the Arizona State Prison.  Since two of her books for children were published, she presents prose and poetry programs to children in schools and libraries throughout the southwest.  She lives in Tucson with husband Jim.

Benjamin Cheever has been a reporter for a daily newspaper, and an editor at The Reader’s Digest. He has published three novels, The Plagiarist, The Partisan, and Famous After Death. He has taught at Bennington College and The New School for Social Research. He has had work in The Nation, The New York Times, and The New Yorker.  Selling Ben Cheever was brought out by Bloomsbury USA in the fall of 2001.  The Good Nanny, whose first two chapters are printed here will be issued in June 2004, also by Bloomsbury USA.

Allen C. Fischer brings to poetry a background in business where he was director of marketing for a large corporation. His poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Indiana Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Rattapallax, and River Styx.

Starkey Flythe served with the U.S. Army in the Middle East.  His stories have been anthologized in the Best American Short Stories, O. Henry, and New Stories from the South, 04.  He lives in South Carolina.

Erica Funkhouser's fourth book of poetry, Pursuit, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2002.  It appeared in paperback in February of 2004.  Her work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry and other publications.  She lives north of Boston and teaches at MIT.

Margaret Gibson is the author of eight books of poetry: Autumn Grasses (2003); Icon and Evidence, (2001); Earth Elegy, New and Selected Poems (1997); The Vigil, A Poem in Four Voices, a Finalist for the National Book Award in 1993; Out in the Open (1989); Memories of the Future, The Daybooks of Tina Modotti, Co-winner of the Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America in 1986-87; Long Walks in the Afternoon, the 1982 Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets; and Signs (1979). Five of her books have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and she has published poems in numerous anthologies and literary magazines, such as Gettysburg Review, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Shenandoah, Iowa Review. She has been a Visiting Professor at The University of Connecticut since 1993. She has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, a Lila Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fellowship, and grants from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. Earth Elegy, the title poem of her New and Selected, won the James Boatright Poetry Prize. Archaeology was awarded a Pushcart Prize for 2001 and House of Stone and Song won a Pushcart for 2002. Icon and Evidence was a Finalist for the Virginia Center for the Book Award in Poetry and a Finalist for the Connecticut Center for the Book Award in Poetry, 2002.

Sandra Kohler's second collection of poems, The Ceremonies of Longing, winner of the 2002 AWP Award Series in Poetry, was published in November, 2003 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. A previous collection, The Country of Women was published by Calyx in 1995. Her poems have appeared recently in The Gettysburg Review, The Women's Review of Books, and Sou'wester.

Mark Lungariello began writing with a brief stint as a contributor to Emixshow: The Urban DJ Magazine from January-April 2003.  There he learned how to "properly misuse" the English language.  Most recently his poem, I Can Only Imagine What's in Store for Dessert appeared in the anthology The Colors of Life.   Mark is 24 and lives in Westchester County, NY.

Toni Mirosevich is the author of two books of poetry and prose: Trio: Toni Mirosevich, Charlotte Muse, Edward Smallfield (Specter Press) and The Rooms We Make Our Own, (Firebrand Books). Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in Kenyon Review, The Progressive, Best American Travel Writing—2002, Crowd, among other literary journals. New work appeared recently in Bellevue Literary Review, San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, Malahat Review, and Hunger Mountain.  In 1999, she was the national recipient of the Astraea Foundation Emerging Lesbian Writer in Fiction Award. She teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University.

Peter Orner is the author of Esther Stories (Houghton Mifflin), a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award and a New York Times Notable Book. His work has appeared in Best American Stories, the Pushcart Prize, the Atlantic Monthly, and Epoch, among other journals. Orner is the winner of the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and currently teaches at San Francisco State University.

A graduate of Harvard College and the Iowa Writers Workshop, Rachel Pastan’s work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Mademoiselle, The Threepenny Review, New Letters, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Georgia Review, among other journals.  She is a winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Project and her stories have been broadcast on National Public Radio. A past recipient of state arts grants from Wisconsin and Delaware, she now lives near Philadelphia.  Viking will publish her first novel, This Side of Married, in 2004.

Jean Tupper has worked as a writer and editor, but her first love is poetry.  She presents poetry both solo and with the Wood Thrush Poets, a group of six published poets, as well as with the Fine Line Poets. Her poems have appeared in or been accepted for publication by Oregon East, Wisconsin Review, Southern Poetry Review, Worcester Review, The Madison Review, The Paterson Literary Review, Piedmont Literary Review, RE:AL, Rio Grande Review, and many other literary magazines.

Harry Waitzman was raised on a farm in Rockland County.  He served in Naval Air Corps during World War II.  He received a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, and an L.L.B. from Columbia Law School.  He practiced law for thirty-five years, Town Justice for 10 years.  He then received an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in 1993.  His work has appeared in Tikkum, Seattle Review, Mudfish, Lumina, Slipstrean, Abiko Journal, and others. Alms House Press published his chapbook, Seven Views of Hudson’s River, in 1987.

Lucinda Watson holds a B. A. from Sarah Lawrence College and an M.A. in Speech/ Communication from San Francisco State University.  She taught at the Haas School of Business for ten years before deciding to focus solely on writing. She wrote How They Achieved: Stories of Personal Achievement and Business Success (John Wiley & Sons, Inc. March, 2001).  Work is forthcoming in Phantasmagoria and The Distillery.  She has written poetry all her life but never attempted to publish until this year.