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Foreward by Danielle Ofri Fiction: A Room With No Door by Megan Corazza Fiction: Ask Him If He Knows Jesus by Clarence Smith NonFiction: Going South by Natalie Pearson Poetry: Cemetary Plums by Jim Tolan Poetry: Mood Swings by Erica Funkhouser Poetry: wifebeat by Michael Casey

Contributors’ Notes

Contributors’ Notes

Jan Lee Ande’s first book, Instructions for Walking on Water, winner of the 2000 Snyder Award, was published by Ashland Poetry Press. Her second book, Reliquary, won the 2002 X.J. Kennedy Prize and was published by Texas Review Press. Her poems appear in New Letters, Image, Mississippi Review, Notre Dame Review, Nimrod, and Poetry International. She teaches poetry, ecopoetics, and history of religions at Union Institute & University.

Priscilla Atkins was born and raised in central Illinois. She holds degrees from Smith College and the University of Hawaii. Her work has appeared in such journals as Poetry, The North American Review, The Laurel Review, and Passages North. She has taught elementary school and served in the Poets-in-the-Schools program on Oahu; currently she is the arts librarian at Hope College, in Holland, Michigan.

Daniel C. Bryant graduated from College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in 1965 and practiced internal medicine in Portland, Maine until retirement in 1999. His poems have been published in both medical journals and literary magazines. Home Free is Daniel’s first published work of fiction. He has created a web site profiling nearly 400 physician writers (http://members.aol.com/dbryantmd/index.html).

Michael Casey’s first book Obscenities was in the Yale Younger Poet Series in 1972. His later books are Millrat (Adastra Press, 1999) and The Million Dollar Hole (Orchises Press, 2001). He teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and Northern Essex Community College.

Megan Corazza is a recent graduate of Whitman College, where she majored in Asian Studies and completed a pre-medical program. She spent a year in Nepal volunteering at a medical clinic, studying tuberculosis and interviewing traditional healers. In the summers she runs a commercial fishing boat in Alaska. Currently Megan is building a log cabin and coaching high school cross-country skiing.

Sharon Dolin is the author of Heart Work (Sheep Meadow). Her collection of ekphrastic poems, Serious Pink, has just been published this spring by Marsh Hawk Press, and another book of poems, Realm of the Possible, will be published by Four Way Books in 2004. She teaches poetry workshops at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd St. Y and is the Coordinator and Co-judge of The Center for Book Arts Annual Letterpress Poetry Chapbook Competition.

Steve Fayer’s story, Parricide, appeared in the Fall 2001 Bellevue Literary Review. Recently he has also published fiction in Potpourri, The Potomac Review, Jewish Currents, and New York Stories. Fayer is co-author of Voices Of Freedom, a history of the civil rights movement (Bantam, 1990). As a writer for PBS, he received an Emmy for Mississippi: Is This America?, a  part of the Eyes On The Prize series, and a Writers’ Guild of America Award for George Wallace: Settin’ The Woods On Fire.

Erica Funkhouser’s fourth book of poetry, Pursuit, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 2002. She teaches Poetry Writing at MIT and lives in Essex, MA.

Meghan Hickey’s poems are published or forthcoming in The Cream City Review, Harvard Review, The Larcom Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and The Saint Ann’s Review. She lives near and works in Newark, New Jersey.

Susan Ito is the coeditor of A Ghost at Heart’s Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption, a literary collection published by North Atlantic Books. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies, including The Readerville Journal, Hip Mama, Making More Waves, and Growing Up Asian American. She lives in Oakland, California with her family.

Jesse Lee Kercheval is the author of the poetry collection, World as Dictionary, and the memoir, Space. Her new collection, Dog Angel, is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press. She teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she directs their new MFA program.

Sandra Kohler’s poems have appeared in magazines including The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, The Gettysburg Review, The Colorado Review, Elixir, and The Southern Review. Her first book of poems, The Country of Women, was published by Calyx in 1995. Her second book, The Ceremonies of Longing, is the winner of the 2002 AWP Award Series in Poetry, and will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She lives and writes in Selinsgrove, a small town on the Susquehanna River in Central Pennsylvania.

Sheila Kohler is the author of four novels: The Perfect Place, The House on R Street, Cracks, and Children of Pithiviers, and two collections of short stories: Miracles in America and One Girl. Kohler has been awarded the O. Henry, the Open Voice, and the Smart Family Foundation prizes, as well as the Willa Cather Prize, judged by William Gass, for One Girl.

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.

Marylee MacDonald, a former restoration carpenter, is the editor of River Oak Review, a Chicago literary magazine. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in StoryQuarterly, Four Quarters, and River Oak Review as well as a number of national consumer and trade publications. In 2000, she was an Illinois Arts Council Finalist, and she received an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in 2001.

H. L. McNaugher has had fiction and poetry in Blithe House Quarterly, The 12th Street Review, Beacon Street Review, and Anteup. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in English at SUNY Binghamton.

David Milofsky is the author of three novels, and his fourth book, A Friend of Kissinger, will be published in the spring of 2003. His short stories, articles, and reviews have appeared in a variety of publications, including Prairie Schooner, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. He has twice won grants from the NEA and currently is Professor of English at Colorado State University where he edits the Colorado Review and serves as director of the Center for Literary Publishing.

Robert Nazarene’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, The Oxford American, Ploughshares, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University and is founding editor of Margie / The American Journal of Poetry.

Natalie Pearson completed her MFA in Nonfiction Writing at the University of Iowa in December, 2002. She has worked as a teacher, reporter, and editor. Her stories and essays have been published in regional magazines and newspapers, as well as in Salon and Writers Write. She also writes essays aired on public radio.

Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poetry has appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, New Yorker, and elsewhere. His books include Hands Collected (Pavement Saw Press, 2000), Touching the Headstone (Stride Publications, 2000), and The Autochthon Poems (Split/Shift, 2001).

Joan Reibman is Associate Professor of Medicine and Physiology in the Division of Pulmonary & Critical Care Medicine at NYU School of Medicine and Bellevue Hospital.

Linda Goodman Robiner’s chapbook, Reverse Fairy Tale, was published by Pudding House. More than 220 of her poems as well as five short stories have been published. She has taught at Notre Dame College, Cuyahoga Community College, Ursuline College, Cleveland State University, and John Carroll University. She delights in facilitating writing workshops.

Ruthann Robson’s work discussing her cancer experience has recently appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Another Chicago Magazine, Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, Out, and Self. She is the author of several works of fiction including the novel A/K/A (St. Martin’s Press, 1998) and many works on legal issues of interest to lesbians including Sappho Goes To Law School (Columbia University Press 1998). She is Professor of Law at the City University of New York School of Law.

Clarence Smith is in his third year of medical school at Vanderbilt University. He has a short story forthcoming in Rosebud.

James Tate, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, has also won Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, the Tanning Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and the William Carlos Williams Award. His first book of poems, The Lost Pilot, won the Yale Younger Poets series award in 1967. His most recent collection is Lost River (Sarabande Books, 2003).

Jim Tolan’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Literary Review, Atlanta Review, Indiana Review, International Quarterly, Louisiana Literature, Luna, Many Mountains Moving, Margie, Salt Hill, Windsor Review, and Wisconsin Review, among others. He runs Tuesday Nights at The Muddy Cup, a poetry series in Staten Island.

Abraham Verghese is Professor of Medicine and the director of The Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics at University of Texas School of Medicine at San Antonio. His first book, My Own Country, about a doctor’s struggle with the new AIDS epidemic, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1994 and was the basis for a movie. His second book, The Tennis Partner, was a New York Times notable book and a national bestseller. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Granta, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. He is currently completing a novel.

Kristin Camitta Zimet is the author of Take in My Arms the Dark, a collection of poems published by the Sow’s Ear Press in 1999. She works as a nature guide in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.