Selections from Fall 2002 issue of the Bellevue Literary Review

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Foreward by Danielle Ofri Fiction: The Facts by Mark Rigney NonFiction: Sweet Blood by Pappi Tomas Nonfiction: Visual Anguish by Carol Zoref Poetry: How Snow Arrives by Michael Collier Poetry: Jim And John by Matthew Thorburn Poetry: After by Joanna Catherine Scott

Contributors’ Notes

Contributors’ Notes

Julia Alvarez is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. She was born in New York City but grew up in the Dominican Republic, the homeland of her parents. She emigrated to this country and language at age ten. Her novels include How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, In The Time Of The Butterflies, iYO!, and In The Name Of Salome. She has also published two books of poems: The Other Side/El Otro Lado, and Homecoming: New And Collected Poems and a book of essays, Something To Declare. Her books for children are The Secret Footprints, How Tia Lola Came To Visit/Stay and Before We Were Free. She lives in Vermont.

Jeannette Brown has a master’s degree in Urban Studies. Her work experience includes publicity for theatre, dance, and other arts groups, as well as writing copy for an ad agency. Her work has been published in the Texas Observer, ArtSpace, Mother Earth, Breathing the Same Air—An East Tennessee Anthology, Suddenly IV and other publications. She is a screener for and the assistant coordinator of the Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel, and the editor of Literary Lunch, a food anthology.

Susann Brigit Cokal is the author of Mirabilis (Penguin Putnam, 2001), a novel about a miraculous wet nurse in fourteenth-century France; she has also published numerous short stories in journals such as Gulf Stream and Hayden’s Ferry Review. She grew up near Santa Fe but is currently an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at California Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo, where she is working on a novel set in the Wild West.

Michael Collier’s fourth book, The Ledge, was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist.  He teaches at the University of Maryland and is the director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Michael Collier is the Poet Laureate of Maryland.

Cortney Davis is the author of a memoir, I Knew a Woman (Random House), a poetry collection, Details of Flesh (Calyx Books), and co-editor of Between the Heartbeats: Poetry and Prose by Nurses (University of Iowa Press).  She has co-edited Intensive Care: More Poetry and Prose by Nurses, which is forthcoming from Iowa in 2003. Recipient of an NEA Poetry Fellowship, she has published poems in Poetry, Hudson Review, Massachusetts Review, Literature & Medicine and other journals, and works as a nurse practitioner in women’s health.  

Douglas Goetsch is the author of four collections of poems, most recently First Time Reading Freud, winner of the 2002 Permafrost award. His poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in many magazines, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse, online at Samsara Quarterly, and in the anthology American Poetry: The Next Generation. Goetsch teaches creative writing to incarcerated teens at Passages Academy in The Bronx

Ray Gonzalez is the author of Memory Fever, Turtle Pictures (recipient of the 2001 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry), The Underground Heart: Essays From Hidden Landscapes, as well as six other books of poetry and two story collections, The Ghost of John Wayne and Circling the Tortilla Dragon. His poetry has appeared in the 1999 and 2000 editions of Best American Poetry and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses 2000. He has served as Poetry Editor of The Bloomsbury Review for 22 years and founded LUNA, a poetry journal, in 1998. He is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

Therése Halscheid’s writing has appeared in numerous magazines including Paterson Literary Review, New Millennium Writings, and Lullwater Review.  Her second book of poems, Without Home, was released in 2001.  Her poetry has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes.  She is a teacher of creative writing in varied settings. 

Stephanie Hammer teaches Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside.  She is the author of three scholarly books and more than 20 articles on the European Enlightenment, the American and German Theatre, science fiction, satire, and postmodernism.  Her poetry and prose have appeared in Mosaic, Thresholds, Bridges, and The Café Irreal.  A former New Yorker, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.

Rebecca Hardin-Thrift is originally from Belmont, North Carolina. She performed her one-woman show, The Becky Show, this year at the New York Fringe Festival. She graduated from the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is now teaching at the University of Nevada in Reno. She lives all over with her husband, the historian Bryan Hardin Thrift and their rowdy, teenage cats.

Katharine Jager received her MFA from New York University, where she was also a Starworks Teaching Fellow at the Babies and Children’s Hospital of New York-Presbyterian Hospital. She is an adjunct professor of English at Bronx and LaGuardia Community Colleges, CUNY, and lives in sunny Astoria, NY.

Eric Jones is a graduate of the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. He recently finished a collection of personal essays about the body entitled Fishing the Aquarium.  A former house painter, tent raiser, veterinary technician, and boarding school teacher, he currently works as a free-lance science editor. His next project is a book about inmate prison hospice volunteers.

Miriam Karmel is working on a collection of short stories that explore the effect of illness on family. One story in the collection is scheduled for publication in Talking Stick. Her creative non-fiction has appeared in Sidewalks, An Intricate Weave: Women Write about Girls and Girlhood, and Jewish Women’s Literary Annual: 2000-2001. She has written essays for numerous publications including Self, Utne Reader, Melpomene Journal and Family Circle. She lives in Minneapolis.

Joan Kip has been a hospice counselor for many years. She writes about aging and matters of the heart and is currently finishing her memoirs. Her work was most recently published in the San Jose Mercury News. She is eighty-four years old and makes her home in Berkley, California.

Jennifer L. Knox was born in Lancaster, California—where the space shuttle lands.  Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry and the anthology, Sad Little Breathings and Other Acts of Ventriloquism.  Her work will also appear in the anthology Great American Prose Poems: from Poe to Present next spring.  She is currently at work on her first book, A Gringo Like Me.

Gerry LaFemina is the author of several collections of poetry including 23 Below, Shattered Hours, and Zarathustra in Love.  He is also co-translator with Sinan Toprak of Voice Lock Puppet poems by contemporary Turkish poet Ali Yuce.  His fiction has appeared in many journals including Colorado Review and White Pine Review among others.  He,s at work on a novel and a new collection of poems.

Karen Lamberton has written for a number of genealogical and historical publications including the American Genealogist and the New York City Corrections History Society. Currently engaged in writing a book on the General Slocum disaster from the viewpoint of the descendants, she is actively soliciting the stories of the victims, survivors, rescuers, and bystanders to create the first genealogically based reference on the event and its impact on the German-American community. An expanded description of the project may be viewed at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~generalslocumbook/

Dylan Landis has won grand prizes in the SouthWest Writers and New York Stories fiction contests, a Writers’ Conferences & Centers scholarship, and second prize in the Summer Literary Seminars contest. She has stories forthcoming in Tin House, and her novel-in-progress, Floorwork, was a finalist for the Dana Award in the Novel. Printouts is her first poem.

Barbara F. Lefcowitz has published seven books of poetry, a novel, a collection of essays, and individual poems and prose works in over 450 journals.  She has won writing fellowships and prizes from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others, and is also a visual artist.  Born in New York, she now lives in Bethesda, Maryland and has taught writing for over 30 years in both the US and various places abroad, including China and Romania.

Lee Martin is the author of a novel, Quakertown  (Dutton 2001), a memoir, From Our House (Dutton 2000), and a story collection, The Least You Need to Know (Sarabande Books, 1996). He teaches in the creative writing program at The Ohio State University.

Thomas McCall is a physician who lives with his family in Wisconsin.  He has had short fiction published by The Missouri Review and two mystery novels—A Wide And Capable Revenge and Beyond Ice, Beyond Death—by Hyperion (New York).

Heather McHugh’s last collection of poems was The Father of the Predicaments (Wesleyan University Press).  Her essays (Broken English: Poetry and Partiality) were recently reissued, and with Nikolai Popov she co-translated the collection Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan.  She divides her year between the University of Washington in Seattle and at the University of California in Berkeley.

Rick Moody is the author, most recently, of The Black Veil as well as the novels The Ice Storm and Purple America, and two collections of stories, The Ring Of Brightest Angels Around Heaven and Demonology.

Robert Oldshue is a med/peds physician in Boston.  He is married and has a three year-old son who likes to wrestle and a five year-old daughter who likes to write stories.  Her teacher said that a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.  Her father said that most of the time his stories have a beginning, any number of middles, and no end anywhere in sight. The Mona Lisa is his first publication.

David Parker currently serves as an instructor at the University of Alabama, teaching English Composition, his true favorite, and Creative Writing.  He also avidly collects, restores, and, yes, writes with vintage fountain pens.

Mark Rigney has worked as a zookeeper, a technical director for a college theater, and as a retail trainer.  His first book, Deaf Side Story, is forthcoming from Gallaudet University Press, and his fiction has appeared in journals such as Rain Crow and Sou’wester.  The Facts, based very loosely on actual events, is one of an ongoing cycle of tales exploring the ever-elusive Doctor Robert October.

Elizabeth Schultz, recently retired from over thirty years of teaching English at the University of Kansas, has been liberated from academic prose. She has published extensively on Melville, African-American fiction, American biography, and Japanese culture, but writing her memoir, Shoreline (Michigan State University Press, 2001), has given her the courage to commit herself now to writing poetry.

Joanna Catherine Scott is the author of Indochina's Refugees: Oral Histories from Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam; Charlie and the Children, a novel of Vietnam (VVA Veteran Book-of-the-Month); and The Lucky Gourd Shop, a novel of South Korea (Book Sense Top Ten Titles pick). Her poetry collections Birth Mother, Coming Down from Bataan, and New Jerusalem, won the Longleaf, Acorn-Rukeyser, and Capricorn Poetry Awards, respectively. She recently received the 2002 North Carolina Poet Laureate Award.

Carole Stone is Professor of English at Montclair State University where she teaches literature and creative writing.  Her poems appear in numerous anthologies from Doubleday, Feminist Press, and St. Martin’s, a collection from Carriage House Press, three chapbooks, and many journals. She has received three Fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Tim Suermondt has published two volumes of poetry, The Dangerous Women with Their Cellos (Manny Trio Press, 1998) and Greatest Hits (Pudding House Publications, 2002). His work has appeared in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Barrow Street, Indiana Review, Southern Poetry Review, Northeast Corridor, and River Styx, among others. He is a winner of the 63^rd Street Y Open Voice Award, and has been nominated numerous times for the Pushcart Prize. His current manuscript, Barnstorming into Paradise has been a finalist in several competitions. Tim is an executive recruiter of stockbrokers.

Matthew Thorburn is a graduate of the University of Michigan, where he was a two-time Hopwood Award winner, and of the MFA program at The New School. His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner and elsewhere. He lives in Jersey City, New Jersey, where he co-edits the poetry magazine Good Foot.

Pappi Tomas lives with his wife in Seattle. He has been a healthy diabetic for over fifteen years. A graduate of the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, he has published essays in The Iowa Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. This is his first New York publication.

Lisa Zimmerman received her M. F. A.  from Washington University in St. Louis.  Her poetry and short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Many Mountains Moving, Atlanta Review, The Sun, and Slant, among other magazines. In 1986 her story, The Youngest Old Lady in The World, won Redbook magazine’s short story contest. Her two chapbooks are In Places Without Time Nothing Hurries and the recently published Traveling Among the Animals (Pudding House Publications.) She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Northern Colorado. 

Carol Zoref is a fiction writer and essayist.  She is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Hall Farm Center for Arts, and In Our Own Write; winner of I.O.W.W. Emerging Artist Award; and finalist for the Henfield and American Fiction awards.  She is the Writing Coordinator at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y. and lives in Manhattan.