Selections from Fall 2001 Debut issue of the Bellevue Literary Review

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Fiction: Parricide by Steve Fayer Fiction: Still Life by Marpessa Dawn Outlaw Poetry: Peeled Grapes by Sharon Olds Poetry: Art by Eric Nelson Nonfiction: 1986 by Tony Dajer

Contributors’ Notes

Contributors’ Notes

Cori Baill resides in Florida with her husband, two children, a blue-merle sheltie, and many a good book. She is indebted to Dr. Philip Deaver, of the Rollins College English Department, for encouraging her to write. Dr. Baill received her OB/GYN training at The Johns Hopkins Hospital.  She is President and Founder of The Menopause Center, and Medical Director of Planned Parenthood in Orlando.

Denitza Blagev was born in Bulgaria and moved to the U.S. with her family at age 12.  She received her B.S. degree in Biomedical Engineering from Yale University. Currently, Denitza is a third year medical student at NYU School of Medicine. She is the recipient of the Joseph Collins Award for Medical Humanities at NYU. Her first story, ‘Pleasantries,’ was published in MS JAMA Online and Agora.

Rafael Campo teaches and practices internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. His newest book, Diva (Duke University Press, 1999), written with the support of a Guggenheim fellowship, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and a Lambda Literary Award. Other poems from his next collection have appeared recently or are forthcoming in The Antioch Review, Black Book, Callaloo, The New England Review, The New Republic, Slate, TriQuarterly, The Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere.

John Chattin was born in Seattle and has called Louisville, KY; Washington, DC; and now Brooklyn, NY, home. He has a MFA in creative writing from The New School, NY. His fiction has appeared in The Baltimore Review.

Eireann Corrigan graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and the Creative Writing Program at New York University.  These poems appear in her first book, You Remind Me of You, which will be published by Scholastic in January of 2002.

Tony Dajer trained in family medicine and is now assistant director of the NYU Downtown Hospital emergency department. Since 1989, he has been a regular contributor to Discover magazine’s ‘Vital Signs’ column. Having worked in Nicaragua during the 1980s, he will never forgive congress for renaming National Airport after a certain ex-movie actor president. Dr. Dajer lives with his wife and three children in a suburb of New York.

Steve Fayer’s stories have appeared, or are forthcoming, in The Potomac Review, Jewish Currents, Potpourri, and The Falcon. He is also co-author of Voices Of Freedom, a history of the American civil rights movement (Bantam, 1990). As a documentary writer for PBS, he received a national Emmy for Eyes On The Prize and a Writers Guild of America Award for George Wallace: Settin’ The Woods On Fire.

Charlotte Jones worked in consulting for twenty years then decided she wanted to do something more creative and started writing and taking pictures.  Her writing has appeared in Seventeen, TEXAS Magazine, Suddenly III, and is slated for ¡Tex!.  Her photography recently accompanied a Houston Symphony performance.  She lives with her husband in Houston, Texas.

Ariana-Sophia M. Kartsonis’ work has most recently appeared in Quarterly West, Mississippi Review, Many Mountains Moving, and Another Chicago Magazine. ‘Pinocchio’s Elegy for the Unreal’ is from her poetry collection The Rub. She is currently teaching English composition and literature and working on a novel in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Itzhak Kronzon has published over seventy short stories in Israeli (and recently American) journals, newspapers, and magazines. Two books – Mother, Sunshine, Homeland (1985) and Who Will Get Belgium (1991) – were published in Hebrew in his native Israel. He is a cardiologist and Professor of Medicine at NYU School of Medicine, as well as Senior Professor at Tel Aviv University, and Director and Consultant at Escorts Heart Institute in New Delhi, India.

Michael LaCombe is editor of the literary section of the Annals of Internal Medicine. More than eighty of his stories and essays have been published. He is the author of Medicine Made Clear: House Calls From a Maine Country Doctor, contributor to Empathy and the Practice of Medicine: Beyond Pills and the Scalpel, Doctors Afield, The Pocket Doctor, and The Pocket Pediatrician. He has edited and contributed to two editions of On Being A Doctor. He writes and practices medicine in rural Maine

David Lehman’s  The Daily Mirror (Scribner, 2000) contains a selection of 150 of the poems he wrote after resolving to write one a day. He has continued the practice, and his forthcoming book The Evening Sun (Scribner, April 2002) reflects his efforts in 1999 and 2000. He is co-director of the celebrated poetry reading series at the KGB Bar in New York’s East Village.

Holly Leigh was severely burned in a carfire at age 23. Doctors described her as a “unique statistic” due to amputations of one arm and all the fingers on the remaining hand. Undergoing eighty operations since 1986, Leigh credits reading poetry and nonfiction for her emotional stability and recovery. She earned a journalism degree from Boston University, writes poetry and travel essays, and rides horses for solace.

Jennifer Leong graduated from Tufts University with a double major in Biology
and Biomedical Engineering, and a concentration in Community Health. She has
just finished her first year at NYU Medical School.

Jerome Lowenstein is Nonfiction Editor of the Bellevue Literary Review.

Eric Nelson is an Associate Professor in the Writing and Linguistics Department at Georgia Southern University.  His published poetry collections include The Interpretation of Waking Life and The Light Bringers. Individual poems have appeared in many periodicals and anthologies, such as Poetry, The Evansville Review, and A New Geography of Poets.  He lives in Statesboro, Georgia, with his wife and two children. 

Dan O’Brien is a playwright and short story writer. He recently completed a year-long residency at Manhattan Theatre Club. His plays have been published by Samuel French and Dramatic Publishing, and his fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals and the Doubletake/WW Norton Anthology 25 and Under: Fiction. He lives in New York City

Danielle Ofri is Editor-in-Chief of the Bellevue Literary Review.

Sharon Olds is the recipient of numerous awards and the author of six collections of poetry, including Satan Says, The Dead and the Living, The Father, and most recently Blood, Tin, Straw.  She teaches poetry workshops in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and helps run the New York University workshop program for the severely physically challenged at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island. 

Marpessa Dawn Outlaw has written about arts and culture for the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, and other publications. ‘Still Life’ is adapted from a novel-in-progress, While We Were Under Water. A former Los Angeles resident, she now divides her time between New York City and Rome, Italy. [ed note: Marpessa died an untimely death in 2005 at age 43. Her illness was woven into the backdrop of her story Still Life.]

Pat Rabby’s photographs of Nepal (‘Seeking the Invisible:  Images of Spirituality’) and Costa Rica (‘Los Festejos:  Santa Elena’) have been featured in one-person exhibitions.  In the early 1970s, she was editor and publisher of WOMEN/POEMS, perhaps the first feminist poetry journal of that period. 

Marco A. Rafala is an editor for trademark.com, a member of the New Haven Theatre Company, and the guitarist in Nova Moturba. He received his Bachelor of Arts in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from Albertus Magnus College. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and is completing a novella. “Tenebre” is his first published work of fiction.

Leslie Roberts, an MFA student in the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, is writing a book about Antarctica, environmentalists, and why some people feel compelled to “save the world.” This is how her orthopedic surgeon introduced himself, as she lay half-paralyzed following the auto accident referred to in “How Air Moves:” Standing at the foot of her bed in a peach-colored suit, he said, “Well, you’re very lucky you’re not a quadriplegic.”

Anne K. Spollen was born and raised in Staten Island, New York. Her poetry, essays and fiction have been published widely in journals such as Calyx, Amelia, The Green Hills Literary Lantern, Interim, The Sulphur River Review, Field: A Journal of Magical Realism, The Connecticut Review, and many others. Her work has been included in anthologies and she has received a Pushcart nomination for her fiction. ‘Prescription Room’ is an excerpt from her novel-in-progress, Kitchenmoon.

DeWitt Stetten, Jr. was an intern and resident at Bellevue Hospital from 1934 to 1937. During his distinguished career, he was Director of the National Institute of General Medical Science and a Senior Scientific Advisor to the National Institutes of Health. This excerpt from his memoir, How My Light is Spent, was reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.

Virgil Suarez was born in Havana, Cuba in 1962. He is the author of over twenty books of prose and poetry. He has three new collections forthcoming: Palm Crows (University of Arizona Press), Banyan (LSU Press), and Guide to the Blue Tongue (University of Illinois Press). He is Professor of Creative Writing at the Florida State University. This year he is the recipient of an NEA grant.  He divides his time between Miami and Tallahassee.

Virginia Chase Sutton’s poems have appeared in a number of literary publications including The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Antioch Review, Western Humanities Review, Boulevard and many others. She has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Walt Whitman Award, the Morse Prize, the Levis Prize, and many other literary competitions. She has been the Louis Untermeyer Scholar in Poetry at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, was a winner in the Paumanock Poetry Award series, and lives in Tempe, Arizona.

Brian Weinberg is the author of Portrait Of A Writer As A Young Fan (Sulgrave Press, 1997), about life as a diehard University of Kentucky basketball fan. His fiction also appeared this year in Northwest Review.

J. Weintraub has published fiction, essays, and poetry in such periodicals as The New Criterion, Chicago Reader, Karamu, Ascent, Crosscurrents, Kansas Quarterly, Whetstone, Cream City Review and in anthologies such as Movieworks, Mudville Diaries, and Contemporary American Satire. Last year his one-act play, You, was produced by The Theatre-Studio in New York.