Selections from Spring 2002 issue of the Bellevue Literary Review

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Foreward by Danielle Ofri Fiction: The Properties of Magic by Ray Gonzalez Fiction: Waking the Garden by Linda Woolford Nonfiction: Sleeping on the Perimeter by Gaynell Gavin Poetry: Above the Angels by Philip Levine Poetry: Writing Poems on Antidepressants by Nikki Moustaki

Contributors’ Notes

Contributors’ Notes

Renée Ashley’s books include Salt (Brittingham Prize in Poetry, University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), The Various Reasons of Light, and The Revisionist’s Dream (Avocet Press Inc, 1998 and 2001). She is on the faculty of the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

Sally Ball’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Southwest Review, Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Arizona.

Susan Bavaria has an M.A. in Communication from the University of Colorado and manages communications for a major equine association. Snow Upon My Heart is from a longer work in progress about life with her husband and daughter entitled Cuddling the Cactus, a story that continues to unfold.

Toby Leah Bochan received her MFA at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as The Threepenny Review, Quarterly West, and The Beloit Poetry Journal and is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol and GoodFoot. She lives in New York City.

Teresa Cader’s Guests won the Journal Award in Poetry from Ohio State University Press and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her second book, The Paper Wasps, was published by TriQuarterly Books (Northwestern University Press) in 1998. A section of that book won the George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.

Jack Coulehan teaches and practices medicine at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His poems and essays appear frequently in medical and literary magazines. He is the co-editor of Blood & Bone: Poems by Physicians (1998). His most recent books are The Medical Interview: Mastering Skills for Clinical Practice (2001) and The Heavenly Ladder (2001), a collection of poems.

 Walter Cummins has published 100 stories in such magazines as Kansas Quarterly, Other Voices, Crosscurrents, Florida Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Confrontation, and on the Internet. His story collections are Witness and Where We Live. He also has published essays, articles, and reviews. From 1984 to 2002, he served as Editor-in-chief of The Literary Review: An International Journal of Contemporary Writing.

Charles Bukowski worked at the post office until he was 49, virtually unknown. With a small stipend from John Martin of Black Sparrow Press, he quite his job and devoted himself to writing. Over the next twenty-two years he published more than forty-five books, all of which are in print in a dozen languages. He died in 1994 shortly after finishing his last novel, Pulp. His uncollected poetry and letters continue to be published by Black Sparrow Press.

Gaynell Gavin’s work has appeared in various literary journals including The Comstock Review, Kansas Quarterly, Natural Bridge, and Tulane Review. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she also teaches and is an editorial assistant at Prairie Schooner.

Celia Gilbert is the author of An Ark Of Sorts, winner of the first Jane Kenyon Chapbook Award and two previous books of poetry, Bonfire, and Queen Of Darkness. She has published in The New Yorker, Poetry, Grand Street, Southwest Review and Ploughshares. She is the winner of a Discovery Award. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and is now working on a sequence of poems about her mother.

Phyllis Gobbell is a writer and teacher in Nashville, Tennessee. While working on her M.A. in English at Austin Peay State University this year, she has had two short stories and an essay published. “Marie” won First Place in the Creative Nonfiction Contest of The Writers’ Workshop in Asheville, North Carolina. Previously Gobbell has published two novels, a children’s book, and short stories in Vanderbilt Review, Old Hickory Review, Tetrahedra, and several anthologies. She is working on a short story collection.  

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.

Eamon Grennan is the author of several volumes of poetry including Wildly for Days, What Light There Is, As if it Matters, and Relations: New and Selected Poems (1998). In 1991, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He is originally from Dublin and presently teaches at Vassar College.

John Grey is an Australian-born poet, playwright, and musician. He has been a US resident since late 1970’s. His work has recently appeared in Chiron Review, South Carolina Review, and Peregrine, and will be appearing in 360 Degrees and Pennsylvania English. He is the winner of the 1998 Rhysling Award for Science Fiction Poetry. He currently works in Data Processing.

Lyn Halper is a transpersonal psychologist and adjunct professor of Religious Studies at Rockland Community College of the State University of New York. Her articles have appeared in periodicals and in Fate Magazine, and she has authored a memoir, Adventures of a Suburban Mystic. She is on the staff of The Writing Mews in New Rochelle, New York.

Barbara Kantrowitz is a writer at Newsweek, covering education and family issues. She started writing fiction last year and her work has been accepted for publication in The MacGuffin. She has been inspired by many writers, especially Alice Munro and Lorrie Moore. Her greatest source of material, however, is her two sons – who find new ways to amaze her every day.

Kathryn Kulpa is still waiting to do nothing else but write fiction. In the meantime she has worked as a librarian, editor, pet-sitter, house cleaner, legal secretary, methadone clinic receptionist, and carnival ring-toss booth attendant. She has received the Florida Review Editor’s Award and the Bridport Prize (England), and was a finalist in the Iowa Short Fiction Awards. Her work has appeared in Madison Review, Larcom Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Seventeen, and Leviathan.

Philip Levine’s most recent book is The Mercy, published by Knopf in 1999. He has received many awards for his books of poems, among them the National Book Award for What Work Is (1991) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Simple Truth (1995).

Kent Maynard is an anthropologist at Denison University.  A chapbook of his poems based on living with the Kedjom people of Cameroon, entitled Sunk Like God Behind the House, as well as an anthropological study of their medicine, Making Kedjom Medicine: A History of Public Health and Well-Being in Cameroon‹are, both forthcoming.  Recent poems appear in Borderlands, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and The MacGuffin.

Nikki Moustaki, author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing Poetry, holds an M.A. from NYU and an M.F.A. from Indiana University. She has taught writing at both universities, as well as at Gotham Writers’ Workshop in New York. Nikki is the recipient of a 2001 National Endowment for the Arts grant in poetry Her publication credits include TriQuarterly, Quarterly West, Cream City Review, Alaska Quarterly, Spoon River Poetry Review, Many Mountains Moving, PIF Magazine, American Literary Review, Yemassee Review, Madison Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Amaranth, and Yankee Magazine, among others.

Sandra Opdycke is Associate Director of the Institute for Innovation in Social Policy at Fordham University. Besides writing No One Was Turned Away, she is the author of the Routledge Historical Atlas of Women in America and Placing a Human Face on the Uninsured: 50 New Yorkers Tell Their Stories. She attended Vassar College and has a Ph.D. in American History from Columbia University.

Joyce Peseroff’s three books of poems are The Hardness Scale, A Dog in the Lifeboat, and Mortal

Education. She is Visiting Professor and Poet in Residence at theUniversity of Massachusetts, Boston

Elizabeth Schultz, a freelance copywriter, lives in the Boston area with her husband and son. You Know What She Means, her first published piece, is based on her experience with polio. Currently, she is working on a novel about growing up in the early sixties.

Adam Sexton teaches writing at New York University and Parsons School of Design. His books include Desperately Seeking Madonna, Rap on Rap, and the forthcoming Love Stories, scheduled for publication by Kensington Books in 2003. He recently completed a novel set in the 1970’s called Teeth. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Ilana Stanger is earning her Masters in Fiction at Temple University, where she holds a University Fellowship. A 1998 graduate of Barnard College, Ilana has had her fiction published in The Red Rock Review and Seedhouse Review. In addition, she is Senior Writer at The Art Biz.com, which regularly features her nonfiction articles and interviews with visual artists.

Scott Temple is a clinical psychologist and associate professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of Iowa. He is a founding fellow in the Academy of Cognitive Therapy, specializing in the treatment of schizophrenia and anxiety disorders. He is an MFA student in the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program.

Jessica Treadway is the author of And Give You Peace, a novel (2001), and Absent Without Leave and Other Stories, which won the John C. Zacharis First Book Award in 1993. Her work has been published in The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, and other literary magazines. She teaches creative writing and literature at Emerson College in Boston.

Gerald Weissman is Professor of Medicine and Director of the Biotechnology Study Center at the NYU School of Medicine. A member of PEN, his essays and reviews of cultural history and science have been published in The New Republic, The London Review of Books, and The New York Times Book Review and have been collected in seven volumes, from The Woods Hole Cantata (1985) to The Year of the Genome (2002). His Darwin’s Audubon has just been reissued in paperback.

Thomas Wictor is the author of In Cold Sweat: Interviews with Really Scary Musicians, published by Limelight Editions and available at www.thomaswictor.com. He was a freelance music journalist for ten years, including five years as a contributing editor at Bass Player. He has recently finished a novel about love, anger, and weight loss entitled Invisible Idiot.

Linda Woolford has an MFA from the Bennington College Graduate Writing Seminars. She lives in Massachusetts.