Prairie Schooner 75th Anniversary Celebration and Conference

Susan Aizenberg was Poetry Editor of Nebraska Review for ten years and is currently a contributing editor. She is co-editor, with Erin Belieu, of The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Columbia UP, 2001), and author of two poetry collections, Peru (Graywolf, 1997, Take Three Series), and Muse (Southern Illinois UP, forthcoming). She is Assistant Professor in the creative writing program at Creighton University.

Judith Arcana's work is published in various journals, including Prairie Schooner. She has received a poetry award from the Deming Memorial Fund, a poetry fellowship from Literary Arts, grants from the Puffin Foundation, the Rockefeller Archive Center, and the Union Institute Graduate College, and, recently, resides at Soapstone in Oregon and the Montana Artists Refuge. A longtime teacher of writing, literature, and women's studies, Judith is the author of Grace Paley's Life Stories, A Literary Biography (U of Illinois Press, 1994), as well as two classic books about motherhood: Our Mothers & Daughters and Every Mother's Son, both from Women's Limited Press.

Stephen K. Bauer's "Reading the Currents" was included in Best of Prairie Schooner: Personal Essays. His work has appeared in Sewanee Review, American Fiction and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from Vermont College and directs the graduate business writing program at Babson College.

Robin Becker is the author of five collections of poems including The Horse Fair (U of Pittsburgh P, 2000) and All-American Girl (U of Pittsburgh P, 1995) which won the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry. She has won fellowships from The Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, The Massachusetts Artists Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems and book reviews appear widely in journals including American Poetry Review, Boston Globe, Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. Becker has been a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies at the City University of New York and has served on the Board of the Associated Writing Programs. She is currently Professor of English and Women's Studies at Pennsylvania State University where she teaches in the MFA program. Becker also serves as Poetry Editor for Women's Review of Books, a publication of the Wellesley Center for Research on Women.

Marvin Bell, author of seventeen books of poetry and essays, has been called "a maverick" and "an insider who thinks like an outsider." His poetry, teaching and essays have influenced two generations of poets. His literary awards include the Lamont Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and Senior Fulbright appointments to Yugoslavia and Australia. Bell's latest book, Nightworks: Poems 1962-2000, contains both selections from the poetic form first employed in The Book of the Dead Man and Ardor, and a further development of it in new poems called Sounds of the Resurrected Dead Man's Footsteps. He is a longtime member of the faculty of the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he is Flannery O'Connor Professor of Letters. Additionally, he has taught for Goddard College and the Universities of Hawaii and Washington. Bell lives in Iowa City, Iowa, where he now teaches one semester a year; Sag Harbor, New York; and Port Townsend, Washington. In the year 2000, the State of Iowa named him its first Poet Laureate.

Erin Belieu, who received a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska-Omaha, is author of Infanta (Copper Canyon Press, 1995), selected by Hayden Carruth for the National Poetry Series. The book was also named one of the ten best books of 1995 by Library Journal, the National Book Critics Circle, and Washington Post Book World. Her new collection is One Above and One Below (Copper Canyon, 2000). Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Atlantic Monthly, Yale Review, New York Times, Best American Poetry 2000, and elsewhere. She has taught at Washington University and Kenyon College and currently teaches at Ohio University.

Mary Biggs is Professor of English at the College of New Jersey. She also had a long career in academic librarianship. She has published widely on a range of subjects in addition to literature: library services, intellectual freedom, technology, publishing, and feminist issues.

David Boles presently teaches English at Fordham University and American Sign Language at New York University. He is a freelance author and serves as the founder and publisher of GO INSIDE Magazine where 2.5 million readers a month discover the work of new and established writers. Boles is also president of United Stage, a worldwide consortium of twenty-five thousand international theater professionals and amateurs who vehemently believe playwrights should be allowed to direct the first productions of their plays. More information is available online at http://boles.com/ where events are frequently updated.

Marta Boswell is Poetry Editor of Missouri Review. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Connecticut Review, Poet Lore, Rattle, and Prairie Schooner.

Denise Brady is a letterpress printer and hand binder who publishes limited editions of contemporary poetry under her imprint, Bradypress. She directs the Nebraska Book Arts Center at University of Nebraska at Omaha and is typographic designer for two literary magazines, Nebraska Review and Curious Rooms.

Robert Brooke is Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he directs the Nebraska Writing Project and edits the Studies in Writing and Rhetoric monograph series. His publications include over thirty articles and essays primarily on the teaching of writing, in addition to his books Writing and Sense of Self and Small Groups in Writing Workshops: Invitations to a Writer's Life. This year, he is completing another book, Place Conscious Writing: Writing Instruction for Community Involvement. For the past decade, he has used Prairie Schooner and other literary magazines regularly in classes that address writing, genre, reading, and the teaching of writing.

Janet Burroway is the author of plays, poetry, children's books, and seven novels, including The Buzzards, Raw Silk, Opening Nights, and Cutting Stone. Her collection of personal essays, Embalming Mom, has just been published by University of Iowa Press. Her text Writing Fiction, now in its fifth edition, is used in more than three hundred colleges and universities in the US, and a further text, Imaginative Writing, is due out next year. She is Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor at Florida State University in Tallahassee.

Ariel Bybee, mezzo-soprano, has sung at the Metropolitan Opera for eighteen consecutive seasons. For more than thirty years she also has performed in opera houses throughout Europe, singing roles such as Carmen, Hansel, Nicklausse, Museta, Suzuki, and Jenny in Kurt Weill's Mahagonny, the role that launched her major career. She is currently an artist-in-residence at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she teaches, works with the opera program, and performs on and off campus.

Richard Chess is the author of two books of poetry, Chair in the Desert (U of Tampa P, 2000) and Tekiah (U of Georgia P, 1994). His poems are included in the Prairie Schooner Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Writing and in TELLING AND REMEMBERING: 100 years of American-Jewish Poetry (Beacon 1997). He directs the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.

Paul Christensen is author of eleven books of prose and poetry. His most recent are Blue Alleys (Page One, 2001), West of the American Dream: An Encounter with Texas (Texas A&M UP, 2001), and Hard Country (Thorp Springs Press, 2001). He has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a "Best Short Fiction Prize" by the Texas Institue of Letters, a "Distinguished Prose" award by Antioch Review, and a William Bronk Fellowship.

Judith Ortiz Cofer is author of a novel The Line of the Sun, two collections of essays and poetry: Silent Dancing and The Latin Deli: Prose and Poetry, and of two books of poetry: Terms of Survival and Reaching for the Mainland. The recipient of numerous awards, her work has appeared widely in journals, prize series, and several anthologies used in classrooms across the U.S.

Gavin Cologne-Brookes is Senior Lecturer (Professor in US terms) of English and Creative Studies at Bath Spa University College, England. He is currently completing Dark Eyes on America: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates. His previous books are The Novels of William Styron (Louisiana State UP, 1995) and the co-edited Writing and America (Longmans, 1996) He has also written on John Steinbeck and Bruce Springsteen.

Robert DeMott co-edited Back Door with its founder, Dave Smith, from 1973-1979. DeMott's recent books include Dave Smith: A Literary Archive, The Weather in Athens (poems), and Conversations with Jim Harrison, an edited collection of interviews. DeMott teaches at Ohio University where he is Edwin and Ruth Kennedy Distinguished Professor of English.

Wheeler Winston Dixon is Ryan Professor of Film Studies, Chairperson of the Film Studies Program, and Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and he is Editor-in-Chief of Quarterly Review of Film and Video.

Mary Ellen Ducey joined University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries as Assistant Professor and Special Collections/Archives Librarian in August 1999. Ducey obtained a B.A. from University of Nebraska-Lincoln, a Masters in Library Science from Indiana University, and an M.A. in History from University of South Dakota. In addition to her work as an archivist, Ducey teaches a course in the management of archival collections through the Museum Studies Program at UNL.

A.B. Emrys's work has appeared in many journals and collections, currently including Mississippi Review's issue of Hamlet parodies, Nebo, Prairie Schooner, and Yoga: Narratives of the Path and Practice (Beacon Press). She has been editor for Black Maria, Sun Dog, and guest edited Platte Valley Review's issue on pop culture at University of Nebraska-Kearney, where she teaches writing.

Julie Fay's current collection of poetry is The Woman Behind You (U of Pittsburgh P); several of Fay's poems are "letter poems" written to Marilyn Hacker, in response to Hacker's letter poems collected in Hacker's book, Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons. Fay teaches English at East Carolina University.

Leslie Leyland Fields lives on Kodiak Island in Alaska where she is Assistant Professor of English at Kodiak College. Summers she commercial fishes with her husband and five children. She is author of The Entangling Net (U of Illinois P), The Water Under Fish (Trout Creek Press), and Out on the Deep Blue (St. Martin's Press, forthcoming). Her essays have recently appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Creative Nonfiction, and Orion. Her essay, "If Thou Hurl Me to the Shark. . . " won Prairie Schooner's Virginia Faulkner Award in 2001.

Annie Finch's books of poetry include Eve (Story Line, 1997), the epic poem Marie Moving (Story Line, forthcoming), and Calendars (a 2000 National Poetry Series finalist). She has also published a critical book on poetics and edited several anthologies of and about poetry. She is currently Associate Professor at Miami University of Ohio.

Amy Fleury is an assistant professor of English at Washburn University of Topeka, where she teaches creative writing and literature and is a fellow of the Center for Kansas Studies. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Laurel Review, Red Rock Review, South Dakota Review, 21st, and other journals and anthologies. She was awarded a 1999 mini-fellowship in fiction from the Kansas Arts Commission and a residency fellowship at the MacDowell Colony in the summer of 2000.

Professor James E. Ford generally teaches literary criticism and research methods in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's English Department. Recently, he has been collaborating with Ariel Bybee on projects involving music and literature, including their program "'I Must Have Music': Songs and Arias in Willa Cather's Fiction." He will codirect a revival of the opera The Bohemian Girl for a tour beginning at the rededication of the Red Cloud Opera House in April 2002 and continuing on through four Plains states. He is also organizing a symposium on opera and literature for the revival.

Charles Fort holds the Reynolds Endowed Chair in Poetry and is Professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. A MacDowell Fellow, he has received major awards from the Poetry Society of America, Writer's Voice, and the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize. He has published poems in Best American Poetry 2000 and Best of Prose Poem International. His books include The Town Clock Burning (Carnegie Mellon UP, 2nd edition, 1991), Darvil (St. Andrews Press, 1993), and We Did Not Fear the Father, As the Lilac Burned the Laurel Grew, and Immortelles, all published by Reynolds Chair Books in 1999.

Alice Friman, born in New York City, is professor Emerita of English and creative writing at the University of Indianapolis. Published in twelve countries and anthologized widely, she's written seven collections of poetry, including Inverted Fire (BkMk 1997) and Zoo (U of Arkansas P, 1999), winner of the Ezra Pound Poetry Award. Among her other awards are three prizes from PSA and fellowships from the Arts Council of Indianapolis and the Indiana Arts Commission.

Ted Genoways is the founding editor of the literary journal Meridian, and is currently an acquisitions editor at the Minnesota Historical Society Press. Genoways received his B.A. (1994) from Nebraska Wesleyan University, his M.A. (1996) from Texas Tech University, and his M.F.A. (1999) from the University of Virginia. His poetry and essays have appeared in several publications, including Shenandoah, Ploughshares, New England Review, Southern Poetry Review, DoubleTake, Hawaii Review, Boston Book Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Partisan Review, The Washington Post, and in edited collections.

John Gery has published three collections of poems: Charlemagne: A Song of Gestures (Plumbers Ink, 1983), which received the Plumbers Ink Poetry Award; The Enemies of Leisure (Story Line, 1995), honored by Publishers Weekly as a "Best Book of 1995" and awarded a 1995-96 Critics Choice Award from the San Francisco Review of Books and Today's First Edition television series; and American Ghost: Selected Poems (Raska Skola, 1999; Cross- Cultural, 1999), a bilingual English-Serbian collection translated by Biljana D. Obradovic. A new book of poems, Gallery of Ghosts, is forthcoming from Story Line Press in 2002. His other books include his major critical study, Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry: Ways of Nothingness (University Press of Florida, 1996), and For the House of Torkom (Cross-Cultural Communications, 1999), co-translated with Vahe Baladouni, a bilingual volume of the prose poems of Armenian poet Hmayyag Shems. His awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the European Award of the Circle Franz Kafka in Prague, two Deep South Writers Poetry Awards, and the Academy of American Poets Poetry Award. He is a Research Professor of English at the University of New Orleans, and since 1990 he has served as the founding Director of the Ezra Pound Center for Literature at Brunnenburg Castle, Italy.

Elizabeth Goldring is senior fellow at Center for Advanced Visual Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her books of poetry include Laser Treatment and Without Warning (Helicon Nine Editions). Video work includes The Inner Eye: From the Inside Out, A Visual Language for the Blind, Interactive Cybervision Entertainment, and Eye Dance. Her current work is Accessing Architecture: A Visual Program for People Who Are Visually Challenged.

Marilyn Hacker is the author of nine books, including Presentation Piece, which received the National Book Award in 1975, Winter Numbers, which received a Lambda Literary Award and the Lenore Marshall Award both in 1995, and the verse novel, Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons. Edge, her translations of Claire Malroux's work appeared in 1996; A Long-Gone Sun, a new book of translations, was published in 2000. Her most recent book Squares and Courtyards was published by Norton in 2000. She is director of the M.A. program in English and Creative Writing at City College of New York.

Kate Myers Hanson received her M.F.A. degree from Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1998. Prairie Schooner published her short story "Book of Names" in 1999, which won the Bernice Slote Award and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Hanson's new collection of short stories, Narrow Beams, was published by Carnegie Mellon Press in winter 2001. Currently she is Assistant Professor on the writing faculty at Northern Michigan University and Editor-in-Chief of Passages North.

Henry Hart is author of critical studies of Geoffery Hill, Seamus Heaney, Robert Lowell, of a biography of James Dickey, and two collections of poetry. He is Mildred and J. B. Hickman Professor of Humanities at the College of William and Mary.

Jonathan Holden is University Distinguished Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence at Kansas State University. His most recent books are Knowing: New and Selected Poems and The Old Formalism: Character in Contemporary American Poetry, both with the University of Arkansas Press.

Poet and essayist Art Homer is a former editor of CutBank, Portland Review, and SmokeRoot Press. At the University of Nebraska at Omaha Writer's Workshop since 1982, he teaches creative writing and edits the Nebraska Review. He is a recipient of fellowships from the NEA and Nebraska Arts Council, a Pushcart Prize, and a Regents Professorship from the University of Nebraska. Books include The Drownt Boy (U of Missouri P, 1994), a finalist for the AWP award in creative nonfiction, and his poetry collection Skies of Such Valuable Glass (Owl Creek Press, 1990).

Richard Jackson is UC Foundation Professor of English at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga and author of four books of poems, most recently Heartwall (U of Massachusetts P, Juniper Prize Winner, 2000), two books of criticism including Dismantling Time in Contemporary Poetry (Alabama Agee Prize Winner, 1989), and two anthologies, Double Vision: Four Slovene Poets and The Fire Under the Moon. His chapbooks of translations include The Woman in the Land: Cesare Pavese's Last Poems and Love's Veils: Imitations from Italian Poets. He has been awarded Fulbright, National Endowment for the Arts, and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, as well as four Pushcart Prizes, and CrazyHorse and Prairie Schooner prizes for poetry. In May of 2000 he was awarded the Order of Freedom from the president of Slovenia for his editing and humanitarian contributions in Slovenia and the Balkans. He edits Poetry Miscellany, mala revija and PM's Eastern European chapbook series, and directs the Meacham Writers' Workshop and Sast European Exchange.

Greg Johnson is a fiction writer who has published two novels and three short story collections, as well as three books on Joyce Carol Oates: Understanding Joyce Carol Oates, Joyce Carol Oates: A Study of the Short Fiction, and Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates.

Marilyn Kallet is author of eight books, most recently Sleeping With One Eye Open: Women Writers and the Art of Survival, co-edited with Judith Ortiz Cofer (U of Georgia P, 1999). She has been commissioned by the University of Tennessee's Judaic Studies Program to write a series of poems on the Holocaust for the conference, "Restoring Lost Communities," April 1-3, 2001.

William Kloefkorn, Professor Emeritus of English at Nebraska Wesleyan University, has published more than a dozen collections of poetry, most recently Welcome to Carlos, Covenants, and Loup River Psalter. He has a collection of short stories, A Time to Sink Her Pretty Little Ship, and a memoir, This Death by Drowning (U of Nebraska P). He was named Nebraska State Poet by the Unicameral in 1982. He is married to Eloise; they have four children and a delightful assortment of grandchildren.

Robert Knoll is D.B. and Paula Varner Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the author of numerous books and editor of the letters of Weldon Kees. His articles have appeared in journals such as American Speech, College English, Hudson Review, and Prairie Schooner.

Lynn Levin is the author of one collection of poems, A Few Questions About Paradise (Loonfeather Press, 2000) and The Forest, a chapbook of translations of poems by the contemporary Albanian writer, Besnik Mustafaj (Poetry Miscellany Chapbooks, 2001). Her critical introduction to the work of Israeli poet, Amir Or, appears in Or's collection Language Says, forthcoming from Poetry Miscellany Chapbooks in 2001. Levin was 1999 Bucks County Pennsylvania Poet Laureate. Her poems have appeared in North American Review, Poetry Miscellany, Poetry New York, Yellow Silk II, and other places. She teaches at Drexel University.

Trudy Lewis is author of the novel Private Correspondences for which she was awarded the 1994 William Goyen Prize for Fiction (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern U P). Her short stories have appeared in American Short Fiction, Atlantic, Five Points, New England Review, New Stories from the South, Witness and others. In 1998 she received Prairie Schooner's Lawrence Foundation Award for her story "Geographic Tongue." Lewis has recently completed a collection of fiction, The Bones of Garbo, and a novel, Pilgrim's Companion to Alexandria. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Women's Studies at University of Missouri-Columbia.

Monica Loeb holds a B.A. in French from Barnard College and a Ph.D. in English from Umeå University where she is now Associate Professor of English. Loeb has translated Joyce Carol Oates's poetry into Swedish and has published many articles on Oates. Recently she has completed Literary Marriages, a study of intertextuality in a series of short stories by Oates.

Glenna Luschei has edited and published Solo Press for the past 32 years. In 2000 she was named Poet Laureate of San Luis Obispo City and County.

Lee Martin is the author of a story collection, The Least You Need to Know (Sarabande Books, 1996), a memoir, From Our House (Dutton, 2000), and a novel, Quakertown (Dutton, 2001). He is Associate Professor of English in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at The Ohio State University.

Dionisio D. Martínez is author of four volumes of poetry, including Bad Alchemy (Norton 1995), which was included on the New York Public Library's "Books to Remember" list of 1995, and Climbing Back (Norton 2000) a National Poetry Series selection. He is co-founder of the Tampa chapter of YMCA Writer's Voice, where he conducts advanced poetry workshops for adults. He has had residencies at Writers at Work, Intersection for the Arts, the University of Tampa, and Seaside Institute, and has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Whiting Foundation. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, New Republic, Norton Anthology of Poetry, Best American Poetry and numerous other journals in the U.S. U.K. Spain, and India.

Nancy McCabe's creative nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Massachusetts Review, Fourth Genre, and Puerto del Sol, among others; an essay which appeared in Prairie Schooner won a 2000 Pushcart Prize. Her work has also been listed among "Notable Essays" in 1998 and 1999 editions of Best American Essays. She is a graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Ph.D. program in English and Creative Writing, and teaches at Bradford branch of the University of Pittsburgh.

Sandra Meek is Assistant Professor of English at Berry College, where she teaches creative writing and contemporary literature. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, her poems have appeared in Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, and other journals, and work also has been featured on the online Poetry Daily. Her chapbook, The Circumference of Arrival, was published by Elixir Press in 2001 and a full-length collection, Nomadic Foundations, will come out with Elixir in 2002.

Jerry Mirskin's work was included in Prairie Schooner's special issue dedicated to contemporary Jewish American writers. He's worked on a dairy farm, as a carpenter and as a New York State Poet in the Schools. His manuscript, Picture a Gate Hanging Open and Let that Gate be the Sun, was recently chosen as the winner of the Mammoth Books prize for poetry and will be published in the spring/summer of 2001. He is currently an Associate Professor of Writing at Ithaca College.

Anna Monardo's novel The Courtyard of Dreams (Doubleday, 1993) has been translated into German, Norwegian, and Danish, and recently reissued by iUniverse.com. Her short stories, essays, and poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Fourth Genre, The Sun, Laurel Review, and Redbook, among others. Her fiction has also been included in the NPR reading series, "Selected Shorts." Currently, she is working on a second novel. She teaches in the Writers' Workshop at University of Nebraska-Omaha, where she has been a recipient of a UCR Grant and a Nebraska Arts Council grant.

Joyce Carol Oates has twice been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature and her writing has earned much praise and many awards, including the PEN/Malamud award for Excellence in short fiction, the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy-Institute of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the O'Henry Prize for Continued Achievement in the Short Story, and the National Book Award for her novel, them. In 2000, her novel Blonde, a fictional biography of Marilyn Monroe, was published to much acclaim, and her novel We Were the Mulvaneys was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club selection. Other recent publications include Broken Heart Blues, My Heart Laid Bare, The Collector of Hearts (short stories), and a children's book, Come Meet Muffin.

Biljana D. Obradovic, originally from Yugoslavia, has a BA in English Language and Literature from Belgrade University, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, Poetry from Virginia Commonwealth University, and a Ph.D. in English with a creative dissertation from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her second collection of poems is entitled Le Riche Monde, a bilingual edition (Belgrade, Raska Skola, and Merrick, NY, Cross-Cultural Communications 1999). Her first collection of poems, Frozen Embraces, a bilingual edition (Belgrade, Center of Emigrants from Serbia, 1997), won the Rastko Petrovic Award for the Best Book of 1998. Her poems also appear in Three Poets in New Orleans (Xavier Review Press, 2000). Her other works include a Serbian translation of John Gery's American Ghosts: Selected Poems, a bilingual edition (Belgrade, Raska Skola, and Merrick, NY, Cross-Cultural Communications 1999). Her work has appeared in such magazines as Poetry East, Bloomsbury Review, Prairie Schooner, Plum Review and Knjizevne Novine. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize twice and is the winner of the Masaryk medal from the Czech Academy of Arts. She is a Member of the Association of Writers of Serbia and Assistant Professor of English at Xavier University of Louisiana, in New Orleans.

Rick Oehling contributed to the chapter on Doris Lessing in the recently published volume A Reader's Companion to the Short Story in English (Greenwood 2001). He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Carole Simmons Oles is the author of six books of poetry: The Loneliness Factor, Quarry, Night Watches: Inventions on the Life of Maria Mitchell, Stunts, The Deed, and Sympathetic Systems. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Poetry, TriQuarterly, The American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Ploughshares, and other literary magazines. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Poetry, a Gertrude B. Claytor Prize from the Poetry Society of America, a Pushcart Prize, a Writer's Choice Award, the Virginia Prize for Poetry, and the Prairie Schooner Poetry Prize. She is currently Professor of English at California State University, Chico where she also coordinates the Consortium MFA in Creative Writing.

Jacqueline Padgett is a comparatist whose research interests include religious issues in literature; she has recent publications on the work of Joyce Carol Oates and Andre Dubus. She is Associate Professor and Chair of English at Trinity College in Washington, D.C.

Maggie Paul is a native of Boston, Massachusetts who currently resides in Santa Cruz, California. She received her MA in English from Tufts University, and her MFA in Poetry from Vermont College. She writes poetry, creative non-fiction, essays, and interviews. Her poems have been published in a number of literary journals including Poetry Miscellany, Talking Points, Sarasota Review of Poetry, and In Print. She teaches composition and literature at Gavilan College in Gilroy, California.

Joel Peckham, a recent graduate of the doctoral program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and former editorial assistant for Prairie Schooner, currently teaches English at Hope College. His poetry has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Malahat Review, Poetry of New England, Sycamore Review, Southern Review, and Yankee. His collection Nightwalking is forthcoming from Pecan Grove Press in 2001. He is also co-founding editor of the on-line literary journal Milkwood Review (http://www.geocities.com/milkwoodreview).

Susan Atefat Peckham is author of a collection of poems, That Kind of Sleep (Coffee House Press, 2001), winner of the National Poetry Series, and a book of creative nonfiction, Black Eyed Bird, which was runner up for the Beryl Markham Award from Story Line Press and a final round selection for the Associated Writing Programs Intro Award. Her work has appeared most recently in Prairie Schooner, International Quarterly, Literary Review, Northwest Review, Puerto del Sol, Southern Poetry Review, and others. She is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Hope College, and is at work on a second collection of poems and a book-length memoir, and she is editing two anthologies of Middle Eastern American writing. She is a graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Ph.D. program in English and Creative Writing.

Robert Phillips is John & Rebecca Moores Scholar at the University of Houston, where he was Director of the Creative Writing Program from 1991-1996. He is author and editor of thirty books, most recently a collection of poetry, Spinach Days (Johns Hopkins UP). He is the literary executor for the estates of poets Delmore Schwartz and Karl Shapiro.

Eileen Pollack is author of a novel, Paradise, New York, and a collection of short fiction, The Rabbi in the Attic. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, New England Review, and other journals. She has won two Pushcart Prizes, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and fellowships from the Rona Jaffe, Michener, and Massachusetts Arts Foundations. She is on the M.F.A. faculty at the University of Michigan.

Carol Potter's third book of poems, Short History of Pets, won the 1999 CSU Poetry Center Award. She has poems recently in Poetry, Field, and The Women's Review of Books, and has been awarded residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, Centrum, Fundacion Valparaiso, and Villa Montalvo. Other awards include the Tom McAfee Discovery Award from The Missouri Review, and the New Letters Poetry Award. She lives in western Massachusetts.

James Reed serves as Fiction and Managing Editor for Nebraska Review. His own work has appeared in West Branch, River Styx, and Appalachee Quarterly. He has received an Individual Artist Fellowship Master Award for Literature from Nebraska Arts Council.

Timothy Schaffert is editor-in-chief of The Reader, the arts and culture newsweekly in Omaha, Nebraska. He has won the Henfield/Transatlantic Review Award and the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award, and has twice received fellowships from the Nebraska Arts Council. His work was also short-listed in The O.Henry Awards: The Best of 1999. His novel, The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters, will be published by Blue Hen, a division of Penguin Putnam, in 2002.

Steven Schneider is Professor and Chair of the English Department at the University of Texas Pan American. He is author of Prairie Air Show and A.R. Ammons and the Poetics of Widening Scope, and editor of Complexities of Motion.

Grace Schulman's new poetry collection is The Paintings of Our Lives (Houghton Mifflin, 2001). Schulman's earlier books of poems include For That Day Only, Hemispheres, and Burn Down the Icons, and she is also author of Marianne Moore: The Poetry of Engagement, editor of Ezra Pound, translator from the Hebrew of T. Carmi's At the Stone of Losses, and co-translator from the Spanish of Pablo Antonio Cuadra's Songs of Cifar. She is the recipient of a Delmore Schwartz Award for poetry, a Poetry Fellowship from New York Foundation for the Arts, and two Pushcart Prizes. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 1995 and The Best of Best American Poetry 1988-1998, as well as New Yorker, New Republic, Paris Review, Antaeus, Kenyon Review, and others.

Maureen Seaton's fourth book of poetry, Little Ice Age, is forthcoming from Invisible Cities Press in 2001. Furious Cooking (U of Iowa P, 1996) won the Iowa Poetry Prize and the Lambda Literary Award; The Sea Among the Cupboards (New Rivers, 1992) won the Capricorn Award and the Society of Midland Authors Award; and Fear of Subways (Eighth Mountain Press, 1991) won the Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize. Seaton's work has been published in Paris Review, Green Mountains Review, Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, and elsewhere. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, an Illinois Arts Council Grant, the Pushcart Prize, and other awards. She is currently Artist-in-Residence at Columbia College in Chicago.

Steven B. Shively is an Assistant Professor of English at Northwest Missouri State University, where he specializes in English education and American Literature. He earned a PhD at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln after several years as a high school English teacher. Steve is co-editor of Teaching Cather and has published essays on several Nebraska writers including Weldon Kees, Loren Eiseley, Willa Cather, Mari Sandoz, and John Janovy.

Daniel Siedell has served as Curator of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery since 1996. He earned a Ph.D. in Modern Art History from the University of Iowa and edited Weldon Kees and the Arts at Midcentury (U of Nebraska P, forthcoming).

Jim Simmerman is author of four books of poetry, most recently Kingdom Come (Miami UP, 1999), and he is co-editor of Dog Music: Poetry About Dogs (St. Martin's Press, 1995). His many grants and awards include the Larry Levis Prize in Poetry for 2000 from Prairie Schooner. He is Professor of English at Northern Arizona University.

Tim Skeen was born in the coal mining region of eastern Kentucky. After working as a soldier and a laborer, he went to college and eventually earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In 1996, he returned to Appalachia to teach. His poems have won awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Associated Writing Programs, and they have appeared in many magazines and journals including the Antioch Review, the Journal of Kentucky Studies, and Prairie Schooner. He is a recipient of a 1999 Al Smith Individual Artisit Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. His collection of poems Kentucky Swami is winner of the 2001 John Ciardi Prize for Poetry and will be published by BkMk Press out of University of Missouri-Kansas City. He lives in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, with his wife, Pam Weiner, and daughter Iris.

Judith Skillman's book Storm received an Eric Mathieu King Award from the Academy of American Poets, and was published in 1998 by Blue Begonia Press. Her most recent volume is Red Town (Silverfish Review Press, 2001).

Judith Sornberger's books are Open Heart (Calyx Books), All My Grandmothers Could Sing: Poems by Nebraska Women (edited), Judith Beheading Holofernes (winner of 1993 Talent House Press chapbook competition) and a chapbook, Bifocals Barbie: A Midlife Pantheon (Talent House Press). She is Professor of English and Women's Studies at Mansfield University of Pennsylvania.

Brent Spencer is author of Are We Not Men?, a collection of stories from Arcade (1996) and The Lost Son, a novel (Arcade, 1995). He has served as director of creative writing at Creighton University in Omaha, and is editor of Creighton University Press. He received the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, where he was also a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing, and he received the James Michener Award at Iowa Writers' Workshop, where he earned an M.F.A. He also holds an M.A. from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University. His fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Atlantic Monthly, Antioch Review, American Literary Review, Missouri Review, GQ, and elsewhere. Are We Not Men? was voted one of the twenty-five best books of 1996 by the editors of Village Voice Literary Supplement.

Mary Helen Stefaniak writes fiction and essays. She is Director of Creative Writing at Creighton University and a former Fiction Editor for Iowa Review.

Tonya Marie Stremlau is an associate professor in the Gallaudet University English department where she teaches a wide variety of courses from developmental reading and writing to honors English and literature. Her recent work includes an essay "Models for Vocies: A Narrative Essay Assignment" that will appear in a forthcoming book on best teaching practices in composition and is currently working on a series of short stories exploring the dynamics of deaf-hearing relationships.

Gordon O. Taylor, a native of Los Angeles, is Chapman Professor of English at the University of Tulsa, where he teaches American Literature.

Elaine Terranova is author of three books of poems: The Cult of the Right Hand, winner of the 1990 Walt Whitman Award; Damages; and The Dog's Heart, forthcoming from Orchises Press. She is also author of a verse translation of Euripides's Iphigenia at Aulis. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, New Yorker, American Poetry Review and other magazines. She is Associate Editor of the on-line book review Frigate (frigatezine.com). She was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1997.

Reetika Vazirani is author of White Elephants (Beacon Press, 1996), winner of the Barnard New Women Poets' Prize. Poems from her new manuscript appear in Best American Poetry 2000, the 2000 Pushcart Prize anthology, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and Prairie Schooner. She is currently Bannister Writer-in-Residence at Sweet Briar College.

Lisa Verigin's poetry has been published in Gay and Lesbian Review, Quarterly West, American Literary Review, Poet Lore, Nebraska Review, Comstock Review, and elsewhere. One of the founding members of The Guerilla Ontologists (later, Zero G Club), Verigin performed her work with music in numerous clubs and coffee houses in Atlanta and Athens, GA during her several years of southern living. Her exploration of lesbian poetics, "The Only Poem We Ever Write," was honored with the Karen Dunning Women's Studies Award in 1998, the same year her poetry won the Vreeland Prize in Creative Writing. Currently a candidate for the Ph.D. in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Verigin is also an editorial assistant for Prairie Schooner.

Jeanne Murray Walker's poetry has won many awards, among them a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Pew Charitable Trust Fellowship, and the Strousse Award from Prairie Schooner. Her work has regularly appeared in Prairie Schooner since 1985, and has also been published in the Nation, Georgia Review, and Shenandoah. She is author of five books of poetry, most recently Gaining Time (Copper Beech Press).

Sharon Oard Warner is author of Deep in the Heart (Dial Press, 2000, Delta, 2001) and Learning to Dance and Other Stories (New Rivers, 1992). She is also editor of The Way We Write Now: Short Stories from the AIDS Crisis (Citadel Press, 1995). She directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of New Mexico and is Founding Director of UNM's Taos Summer Writing Conference.

Nancy Ann Watanabe is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oklahoma in Norman and Visiting Pacific Rim Research Professor at the University of Washington. She is author of Love Eclipsed: Joyce Carol Oates's Faustian Moral Vision, Beloved Image: The Drama of W. B. Yeats, and "Noh Native Visions: Yeats's Dreaming of the Bones and Walcott's Dream of Monkey Mountain" in Yeats and Postcolonialism. She has been awarded Fulbright Fellowships and regularly presents at conferences in the U.S. and abroad.

Nancy Welch is Associate Professor of English at the University of Vermont. Her stories have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Threepenny Review, Other Voices, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Ph.D. program in English and Creative Writing.

Marilyn C. Wesley is Cora A Babcock Professor of English at Hartwick College. She is author of Refusal and Transgression in Joyce Carol Oates's Fiction and Secret Journeys: The Trope of Women's Travel in American Literature.

Kathleene West grew up on a farm three miles west of Genoa, Nebraska. She was educated at the University of Washington and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she earned her Ph.D. in English Literature. She is the poetry editor of the literary journal Puerto del Sol, published at New Mexico State University where she is a Professor in the English Department. She was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Iceland for two years, a National Endowment of the Arts apprenticeship award, and Honorable Mention in the Binational Border Poetry Contest (Mexico and the United States). She has lectured and given readings of her poems in the United States, Iceland, China, Mexico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. She has published nine books of poetry and fiction including Water Witching (Copper Canyon Press) and The Farmer's Daughter (Sandhills Press) Her most recent book is a bi-lingual book of poetry, Romance Tercermundista/ Third-World Romance, published by Catedral Press, Santiago de Cuba. She presented the book during the International Festival of Poetry 2000 in Cuba. Current translation projects include contemporary Cuban poetry for a special issue of Puerto del Sol and poetry from the Dominican Republic for a forthcoming anthology. She was on the faculty of the Summer Literary Seminar at Altos de Chavón, Dominican Republic in June.

G. K. Wuori's stories and poems have appeared in such journals as Prairie Schooner, Gettysburg Review, Missouri Review, Other Voices, New York Stories, Flaunt, and Hayden's Ferry Review. A Pushcart Prize winner, he has also published a story collection, Nude In Tub, and a novel, An American Outrage, both from Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. He lives in Sycamore Illinois, in a house with eight gables.

Sandra Yannone received her Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She currently is Director of the Writing Center at Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington. Her poems and reviews are published or forthcoming in Calyx, Connecticut Review, Evergreen Chronicles, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She is the recipient of an AWP Intro Award and the Academy of American Poets Prize.