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Foreword by Danielle Ofri Fiction: The Bubble by Peter Selgin Fiction: The Pittsburgh Outings by Martha Whitmore Hickman NonFiction: Flu Shot by David Watts Poetry: Field Trip, Ypsi State by Roy Jacobstein Poetry: Word by David Woo Poetry: Eight Feng Shui Postcards by A.V. Christie

Contributors’ Notes

Contributors’ Notes

Allison Amend lives in New York City, and is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.  She has received fiction awards from The Atlantic, Story Magazine, and Glimmer Train, and fellowships at the Vermont Studio Center, Saltonstall Foundation, Yaddo, and Djerassi Conference. Her fiction has been published in StoryQuarterly, Other Voices, Atlantic Unbound On-Line Magazine, and Arts & Letters Magazine. She is working on a historical novel detailing the lives of a Jewish immigrant family in Oklahoma in the 19th Century.

Angela Ball, a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, has had poems published in Partisan Review, Ploughshares, New Republic, and The New Yorker, and anthologies including The Best American Poetry 2001. Her most recent book of poetry is The Museum of the Revolution. She teaches in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Richard Blanco’s City of a Hundred Fires received the 1997 Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press. He is recipient of a Bread Loaf Fellowship and a Florida Artist Fellowship. Blanco’s work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Best American Poetry 2000, and on National Public Radio. The poems in this issue are from his forthcoming book, Directions to the Beach of the Dead. Blanco teaches at Georgetown and American University in Washington D.C.

A.V. Christie’s first book of poems, Nine Skies, was selected as a winner in The National Poetry Series by Sandra McPherson in 1997. Her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Ploughshares, Passages North, Shenandoah, Boulevard, The Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, The American Scholar, Image, and Verse. She was most recently Writer-in-Residence at Penn State Abington, and also is a Poet-in-the-Schools.

Phillip Corwin worked in Yugoslavia as a diplomatic official for the United Nations between 1992 and 1997. He is the author of Dubious Mandate: A Memoir of the UN in Bosnia, Summer 1995 (Duke University Press, 1999), and more recently, Doomed In Afghanistan (Rutgers University Press, 2003). His poems and stories have been widely published.

Mark Cunningham received an MFA from the University of Virginia and lives near Charlottesville. His poems have appeared in The Prose Poem: An International Journal, Paragraph, and Rhino. A selection of his poems is available on the Mudlark website.

Stephen Dixon has published 23 books of fiction, 13 story collections and 10 novels. His most recent novel I., the first in a trio, was published by McSweeney’s Books in June 2002.  He is currently working on a novel called Phone Rings (of which this story is a part.) Dixon lives in Towson, Maryland.

Susan Donnelly’s latest poetry collection is Transit (Iris Press). Her first book, Eve Names the Animals (Northeastern), won a Morse Prize. Her poems have appeared in journals, textbooks and anthologies in the U.S., Ireland, England, and France. Recent work is in The Atlantic, The American Scholar, and forthcoming in The New Yorker. She was featured on Poetry Daily’s website in October 2002. She writes and teaches poetry in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Susan Dworkin’s stories have appeared in Ms. Magazine’s Best of 30 Years-Fiction and The Berkshire Literary Review. Her novels include Stolen Goods (Newmarket) and The Book of Candy (Four Walls Eight Windows). She collaborated with Edith Hahn Beer on her memoir, The Nazi Officer’s Wife, (Harper Collins), which has been shown as a documentary film on A&E Network. She is president of JCCAUDIOBOOKS, preservers of fine Jewish literature on audio formats.

Phyllis Gobbell teaches English composition, literature, and creative writing at Nashville State Community College in Nashville, Tennessee. She has published two novels, a children’s book, and many short stories. In 2002, Primates won First Place in the Tennessee Writers Alliance Short Story Competition. 

Paula Goldman has an MA in Journalism from Marquette University and an MFA from Vermont College. She is a docent and lecturer at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Her work has appeared in The North American Review, Harvard Review, Poet Lore, Poet Miscellany, and in anthologies. Her manuscript Wild Beasts was a finalist for the National Poetry Series in 2001, and other competitions. She was born and raised in Atlantic City, “when the Atlantic Ocean was something.”

David W. Green was raised in Venezuela and works in the mental health field with the Latino community of Jamaica Plain in Boston. His poems have been published in kayak magazine and Lyric Poetry Review. He lives in Cambridge.

Rachel Hadas is Board of Governors Professor of English at Rutgers University (Newark), and the author of over a dozen books of poems, essays, and translations. Her most recent book, Indelible, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2001. Laws is forthcoming in 2004 from Zoo Press.

Martha Whitmore Hickman is the author of numerous books for adults and children, including Such Good People, Fullness of Time: Short Stories of Women and Aging; and Healing After Loss: Daily Meditations for Working Through Grief.  She has published  in The Christian Science Monitor, Weavings, Pastoral Psychology and other journals.  The mother of four and grandmother of six, she lives with her husband in Nashville, Tennessee.

Roy Jacobstein’s book of poetry, Ripe, won the University of Wisconsin Press’s 2002 Felix Pollak Prize after having been a finalist for the Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award. His recent work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Triquarterly, The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Daily, Parnassus, JAMA, and The Gettysburg Review, and has received nominations for the 2002 and 2003 Pushcart Prizes. He is a public health physician working in women’s reproductive health.

Meg Kearney’s collection of poetry, An Unkindness of Ravens, was published by BOA Editions Ltd. in 2001. Her work has appeared in Poetry Daily, Agni, The Gettysburg Review, Doubletake, Ploughshares, and the anthologies Urban Nature, Where Icarus Falls, and Poets Grimm (Storyline Press in 2003). She is Associate Director of the National Book Foundation in Manhattan.

Rebekah Lindberg lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in the Santa Monica Review, South Dakota Review, Salamander, and Natural Bridges, among others.

Richard McCann is the author of Ghost Letters and co-editor of Things Shaped in Passing: More ‘Poets for Life’ Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. He is currently working on a memoir, The Resurrectionist, chronicling his 1996 liver transplantation. Portions of The Resurrectionist have appeared in Tin House, The Washington Post Magazine, and Best American Essays 2000.

Toni Mirosevich, Associate Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, has written two books, Trio and The Rooms We Make Our Own. She has published essays, short fiction, and poetry in Kenyon Review, The Progressive, Best American Travel Writing 2002, San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, and elsewhere. Her work has appeared recently in Malahat Review, Hunger Mountain, Speakeasy, and Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly. In 1999, she was the recipient of the Astraea Foundation Emerging Lesbian Writer in Fiction Award. 

J. E. Pitts, a high school English and literature teacher in Mississippi, is the Poetry Editor for The Oxford American magazine. His work has recently been published in Poetry, The Southern Poetry Review, and Margie: The American Journal of Poetry.

Catherine Reid writes and teaches in western Massachusetts. Her most recent book, Coyote: A Natural History of Desire, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin.

Liz Rosenberg has published three books of poems, two novels, and numerous books for young readers, including four prize-winning poetry anthologies. She is Professor of English at SUNY Binghamton, reviews books monthly in the Boston Globe, and has published her poetry in The New Yorker, Harper’s, American Poetry Review, and Paris Review.

Jeffrey Rubin is a staff editor for The New York Times. Colonoscopy is his first published work of fiction. Born and raised in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, he now lives in Woodbridge, New Jersey, with his wife, Carolyn, his cat, Wizard, and all of the characters in his head.

Peter Selgin’s stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and have been published, or are forthcoming, in Glimmer Train, The Missouri Review, South Dakota Review, Salon.com, Oasis, Chicago Sun-Times, and Newsday Sunday Magazine. His book, S.S. Gigantic Across the Atlantic, (Simon & Schuster) won the Lemme Award for Best Children’s Book of 2000. The Bubble is adapted from his novel, Life Goes to the Movies.

Myra Sklarew’s essays, poems, and articles have appeared in Nature Medicine, JAMA, and Environmental Health Perspectives. She is the author of nine collections of poetry, a book of short fictions, and a recent collection of essays, Over the Rooftops of Time. She has worked at Yale University School of Medicine studying neurological function in Rhesus monkeys, and is currently a professor of literature at American University.

Anthony Neil Smith is from the Mississippi Gulf Coast. He is a fiction editor with Mississippi Review, and editor of the online crime-writing magazine Plots with Guns. His work has appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Barcelona Review, Connecticut Review and is forthcoming in Natural Bridge. Having recently moved to Michigan to teach at Grand Valley State University, he is homesick for high humidity and snowless winters.

Sandy Suminski is an advertising copywriter in Chicago. She is currently working on a memoir and enjoys jazz singing and returning to Paris. The City of Light is her first published work not brought to you by a corporate sponsor.

Virgil Suarez was born in Havana and has lived in the United States since 1974. He is the author, most recently, of three collections of poetry: Palm Crows, Banyan, and Guide to the Blue Tongue, and is currently working on a new novel. He lives in Florida and is on the faculty of Bennington College’s writing program.

Angelo Volandes practices and teaches internal medicine in the Boston area where he also is a student at Harvard Divinity School. He received a B.A. in philosophy from Harvard College and M.D. from Yale. His first wanderings on the shores of Cavafy’s Ithaca began in elementary school at A. Fantis Greek Parochial School in Brooklyn, New York.

David Watts is a physician, poet and NPR commentator for All Things Considered. Three books of his poetry have been published: Taking The History, Making, and Blessing. He is director of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers Writing the Medical Experience workshop, and the producer of a one-hour television special, Poetry and the Art of Medicine.

Jillian Weise’s work appears in The Atlantic, Puerto del Sol, Salt Hill, Can We Have Our Ball Back, and others. She is the Fred Chappell Fellow at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and the recipient of the Academy of American Poets John MacKay Shaw award.

David Woo was born in Phoenix, Arizona, the son of immigrants from China. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Southwest Review, and the anthologies Poems for America and The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America, and is forthcoming in The Georgia Review and Witness. He is finishing a manuscript, A Bouquet of Clouds, a collection of lyric poems about his family, including two poems in this issue of the Bellevue Literary Review.