Notes on the contributors to our 50th issue of Quarterly West
STEVE ADAMS won Glimmer Train’s 1994 New Writers Award and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His work has since been anthologized in Sudden Fiction, (Continued), and published in Chicago Review, Georgetown Review, Glimmer Train Stories, and The Missouri Review. He’s been a guest artist at the University of Texas and his plays have been produced in New York and across the country.
DEBORAH AGER has worked as a copywriter, columnist and, briefly, as an obituary editor. She’s associate editor of The Metropolitan Review, and earned an MFA from the University of Florida. Her work has appeared in New England Review, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere.
RANE ARROYO’s latest collection of poetry is Pale Ramón (Zoland Books). He has been published widely, including a long poem on Ponce de León published in The Caribbean Writer. Arroyo spent most of his lost years in Utah and lives in current exile in Toledo, Ohio, where he is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Toledo.
BENJAMIN BALTHASER is currently a candidate in the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He lives in Northampton.
BRUCE BEASLEY’s fourth book, Signs and Abominations, is forthcoming from Wesleyan. He won the 1996 Colorado Prize for Summer Mystagogia. He teaches at Western Washington University.
DAVID BERG-SEITER is a web developer in Manhattan. His work has also appeared in The Cimarron Review, The Quarterly, and Midland Review.
LILLIAS BEVER lives in Seattle, where she is pursuing a degree in Library Science at the University of Washington. She has poems forthcoming in Prairie Schooner and Cimarron Review.
KRISTIN BOCK lives and teaches in Northampton, Massachusetts, and is a recent graduate of the MFA Program in Poetry at the University of Massachusetts. Recent publications include Hayden’s Ferry Review and Sonora Review.
GAYLORD BREWER is an Associate Professor at Middle Tennessee State University, where he edits Poems & Plays. His most recent collection of poems, Devilfish, won the inaugural Red Hen Press Poetry Contest, and was published in the fall of 1999.
CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY is Chair of the Creative Writing Department at the University of California, Riverside. His most recent book of poetry is Fall From Grace (BkMk Press, 1998). With Gary Young, he has edited The Geography of Home: California and the Poetry of Place (Heyday Books, 1999). His eleventh collection of poetry, Star Apocrypha, will be published by TriQuarterly Books in the Fall of 2000.
RICK BURSKY lives in Los Angeles. His work has appeared or is forthcoming from many journals, including Mid-American Review and Harvard Review. This is his second appearance in Quarterly West.
RICK CAMPBELL is the Director of the Anhinga Press and the Anhinga Prize for Poetry and he teaches English at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee. He has published work in many places, including The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, The Southern Poetry Review, Puerto del Sol, and Prairie Schooner. He has published two chapbooks, Driving to Wyoming and The Breathers at St. Marks, and has won an NEA Fellowship in Poetry and two Poetry Fellowships from the Poetry Arts Council. He lives with his wife and daughter in Gadsden County, Florida.
MICHAEL CHITWOOD is the author of three books of poetry, the most recent of which is The Weave Room (University of Chicago Press). His work has appeared in Poetry, Threepenny Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly, and numerous other magazines.
RON CLAYTON’s paintings have been shown in Salt Lake City, Chicago and other venues around the country. The painting reproduced on this issue’s cover, "Tokchugol," is part of a series that was done in response to travel in Korea, when the artist was there as a recipient of the Korea Foundation’s Fellowship for Korean Studies. He is the first painter thus far to be awarded this fellowship. He is a native of Salt Lake City, and now lives and teaches as Professor of Painting and Drawing in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
NICOLE CUDDEBACK grew up in Florida and now lives in Florence, Italy. More of her work has most recently appeared in Antioch Review, Western Humanities Review, and Prairie Schooner.
MARK CUNNINGHAM lives in Keswick, Virginia. He received an MFA from the University of Virginia, liked the area and stuck around. "The Male Nipple" is from a manuscript titled Body. Body parts and other poems have recently shown up or will appear soon in issues of Virginia Quarterly Review, The Prose Poem: An International Journal, and Key Satch(el).
ASHLEY CURTIS has degrees in Chinese and Bible from Yale University. His mystery stories have appeared in anthologies in the U.S. and in France. He currently teaches at the Ecole d’Humanité in Switzerland.
CHRISTOPHER DAVIS’s second book of poetry, The Patriot, was published in the spring of 1998 by the University of Georgia Press. His third collection will be titled A History of the Only War, and new poems have appeared recently in VOLT, Fence, Denver Quarterly, Harvard Review, and other journals.
OLIVER DE LA PAZ teaches English at Arizona State University. He has recently been published in The Marlboro Review and The Asian Pacific American Journal, with work forthcoming in Borderlands and elsewhere.
FRED DINGS has published two books of poetry, After the Solstice (Orchises, 1993) and Eulogy for a Private Man (TriQuarterly Books, Northwestern University Press, 1999). His work has appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and Quarterly West. He currently teaches in the MFA Program at Wichita State University.
JAMEY DUNHAM is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He has work in or forthcoming in Boulevard, Key Satch(el), The Iowa Review, and Boston Review.
JEFF ENCKE, a graduate student at Columbia University, has published work in The Cream City Review, American Writing: A Magazine and Boomerang!, among others. "Display, Our Burning Home" is part of an unpublished manuscript of prose poems entitled Eunuch Shower Song.
PATRICK MICHAEL FINN is completing his MFA at the University of Arizona where he teaches composition and Creative Writing.
JON FISCHER received his MFA from Eastern Washington University. His work has appeared in Heliotrope, The Seattle Review, and Pontoon III: An Anthology of Washington State Poets.
LAURIE FOOS is the author of the novels Ex Utero, Portrait of the Walrus as a Young Artist, and, most recently, Twinship. Her short fiction has appeared in the anthologies Girls Just Want to Have Fun and Chick-Lit: Post-Feminist Fiction, and in numerous literary magazines. She lives in Massachusetts.
YAHYA FREDERICKSON holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of North Dakota and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana. He taught writing and English as a Foreign Language in Sana’a, Yemen, for six years. Currently he teaches at Morehead State University. His poems and book reviews have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Green Mountains Review, The Laurel Review, The Middle East Studies Association Bulletin, North Dakota Quarterly, The Ohio Review, River Styx, and other journals.
TODD FULLER recently received his Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Native American Literatures from Oklahoma State University. His work has been published or is forthcoming in such journals as Hawai’i Review, Puerto del Sol, South Dakota Review, Third Coast, and Weber Studies. "An Open Letter..." is part of a creative biography titled 60 Feet 6 Inches and Other Distances from Home, which deals with the life of Pawnee baseball pitcher Mose YellowHorse, who played two years (1921 and 1922) with the Pittsburgh Pirates.
JOSé GARCÍA and ADAMANTIA GARCÍA-BALTATZI divide their time between Huntington Beach, California, and Athens, Greece. Their translations from the work of Yannis Ritsos have appeared in The Literary Review, ONTHEBUS, Visions International, Painted Hills Review, and Luna.
FRANK X. GASPAR has published three collections of poetry. His latest, A Field Guide to the Heavens (Wisconsin), is the 1999 winner of the Brittingham Prize for Poetry. His novel, Leaving Pico (Hardscrabble Books, University Press of New England, 1999), is a recipient of a Barnes & Noble Discover Award. New work appears in Best American Poetry 2000, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Bellingham Review, and others.
ALBERT GOLDBARTH’s most recent books of poetry are Troubled Lovers in History (Ohio State University Press, 1999) and Beyond (David R. Godine, 1998). In August of 1999, Dark Waves and Light Matter: Essays was published by the University of Georgia Press. A recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, he currently lives in Wichita, Kansas.
MATTHEW GUENETTE teaches English as the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville. He has published recently in Interim, Rattle, and Mind Purge.
MARK HALLIDAY directs the Creative Writing Program at Ohio University. His third book of poems, Selfwolf, was published by The University of Chicago Press in 1999.
BRIAN HENRY’s first book of poetry, Astronaut, appeared recently in the UK from Arc and in Slovenia in translation from Mondena Publishing. New poems are forthcoming in APR, The New Republic, New American Writing, The Antioch Review, and other magazines.
CATHERINE RYAN HYDE is the author of Funerals for Horses (Russian Hill Press, 1997), Earthquake Weather (Russian Hill Press, 1998), and Pay it Forward (Simon & Schuster, 2000). Pay it Forward is also in development as a feature film from Warner Brothers. She has three more books forthcoming from Simon & Schuster, Electric God, Walter’s Purple Heart, and Subway Dancer and Other Stories.
BENJAMIN IVRY’s first collection, Paradise for the Portuguese Queen (Orchises), appeared in 1998. He has also published biographies of Poulenc (Phoidon), Rimbaud (Absolute/Stewart Tabori & Chang), and Ravel (Welcome Rain, in press for Spring 2000 publication). Ivry’s translation of Zagajewski’s "Canvas," in collaboration with Renata Gorczynski, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and Faber & Faber, and his translation of Todd’s "Camus: A Life," appeared from Knopf.
KIMBERLY JOHNSON is from Utah. She earned an MA at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, and an MFA at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and New England Review, among other publications. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in English at Berkeley.
ALICE JONES’s books include The Knot, winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award, and Anatomy. She has been awarded fellowships in Poetry by the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and by the NEA. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Chelsea, Denver Quarterly, and Best American Poetry.
GEORGE KALAMARAS’s poems appear in many places, including Best American Poetry 1997, Boulevard, Epoch, The Iowa Review, New Letters, Sulfur, and previously in Quarterly West. His collection, The Theory and Function of Mangoes, won the Four Way Books Intro Series in Poetry Award and will be published in Spring 2000. He is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne.
STEVE KISTULENTZ was educated at the College of William and Mary and the Johns Hopkins University. His work in poetry and fiction has appeared in such magazines as Antioch Review, Crescent Review, Press, The Metropolitan Review, and elsewhere. The poems in this issue are part of a completed manuscript entitled The Luckless Age.
CHRISTINE BOYKA KLUGE is the winner of the 1999 Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award from The Bitter Oleander and co-winner of The MacGuffin’s 1998 "Short Shorts" competition. Her poetry has been published by or is forthcoming in Poet Lore, New Millennium Writings, Arts & Letters, West Branch, Fine Madness, and other journals. She also works as an artist.
SHARON KRAUS’s book of poems, Generation, was published by Alice James Books in 1997. Individual poems have appeared in TriQuarterly, Agni, Barrow Street, The Massachusetts Review, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, and elsewhere.
ADRIE KUSSEROW is a writer living in Vermont.
GERRY LaFEMINA is the author of several collections of poems including 23 Below and Shattered Hours: Poems 1988-94. The editor of Controlled Burn, his recent work appears in Many Mountains Moving, Mid-American Review, and Seneca Review. He lives in Northern Michigan with his wife, the poet Mary Ann Samyn.
ROBERT LEE works and lives in Austin, Texas, where he recently completed his MFA as a James A. Michener Fellow. His poetry has also found its way this year into the pages of Field, The Florida Review, and New Orleans Review. Also an actor, he most recently performed multiple roles in the world premiere stage adaptation of Donald Barthelme’s Snow White.
ANN CLAREMONT LeZOTTE’s Sign-English translations have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The New Republic and The Threepenny Review. She is the recipient of a 1996-97 Isabella Gardner Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony and a 1999 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award.
AMY LINGAFELTER is an MFA student in Poetry at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. She is originally from Joliet, Illinois.
JOHN LUNDBERG holds a BA from The College of William and Mary and is a candidate for an MA in Creative Writing at Florida State University. His current and upcoming publications include Sycamore Review, Iconoclast, and two anthologies: American Diaspora: Poetry of Exile and 9mm: Poets Respond to Violence in America.
RANDALL MANN lives in San Francisco. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Antioch Review, The New Republic, Paris Review, Salmagundi, and elsewhere. He frequently reviews poetry for Quarterly West.
DIONISIO D. MARTÍNEZ is the author of Climbing Back (Norton, 2000), selected for the National Poetry Series by Jorie Graham; Bad Alchemy (Norton, 1995); and History as a Second Language (Ohio State, 1993). He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Whiting Foundation. In the summer of 2000, he’ll teach a week-long poetry workshop at the annual Writers at Work Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah.
HECTOR A. MARTINEZ was born in Los Angeles, and reared in El Monte, California. He is a recent graduate of the MFA Program at San Diego State University and currently resides in San Diego. His work is forthcoming in Puerto del Sol.
DEREK McKOWN is a lecturer in the Creative Writing Department at the University of California, Riverside. A poet and playwright, he has published poems in Defined Providence, The Pacific Review, and Mosaic, and reviews in previous issues of Quarterly West. He is currently finishing his first book, and at work on several plays.
CASS McNALLY earned a BA in English from Stanford University in 1985 and is currently enrolled in the MFA program in Fiction at the University of Utah. She lives in Salt Lake City with her husband and four children.
ROBERT McNAMARA’s first collection of poetry, Second Messengers, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 1990. His poems and translations from the Bengali have recently appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Notre Dame Review, Willow Springs, and The Journal of South Asian Literature. He teaches in the Interdisciplinary Writing Program at the University of Washington.
ELISABETH MURAWSKI is the author of Moon and Mercury (Washington Writers Publishing House, 1990) and a chapbook, Troubled by an Angel (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1997). Her publications include Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, Puerto del Sol, The Literary Review, The New Republic and Grand Street. She is the recipient of four grants from The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation.
MICHAEL NEFF has been published in numerous magazines, including North American Review and American Way, and online at Poetry Cafe, Octavo, and Hallux. He is the editor of Web Del Sol, a literary arts website at http://webdelsol.com.
DEBRA NYSTROM’s poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review and other magazines. Her first book, A Quarter Turn, was published by Sheep Meadow Press. "Thieves" is from a recently completed collection called The Cliff Swallows.
ADRIAN OKTENBERG’s poems and essays have appeared in Prairie Schooner, New Letters, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The American Voice and The Women’s Review of Books. The recipient of many grants and awards, her first collection, The Bosnia Elegies, was published by Paris Press in 1997. She also has a chapbook, Drawing in the Dirt (Malachite & Agate, 1997).
ETHAN PAQUIN’s poems and reviews are forthcoming in Verse and Overland, among other journals. He teaches in the writing program at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
GLEN POURCIAU’s stories have been published in Epoch, New England Review, New Letters, Ontario Review, Western Humanities Review, and other journals.
BEVERLY RAINBOLT, an MFA candidate at the University of New Orleans, has shared the last 14 years in New Orleans with a fiction-writing partner, two daughters, a son, an ever-increasing number of grandchildren, pets and some incredible women artists.
YANNIS RITSOS (1909-1990) was born in Monovasia, Laconia, Greece, and was the author of more than 120 published works of poetry, translation, criticism, dramatic works, and fiction. Ritsos has been modern Greece’s most prolific modern poet. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize and won numerous international poetry prizes. These poems are from his book 3 X 111 Tristychs (Kedhros Publishers, Athens, Greece, 1982). The word "tristychs" means "verses of three lines."
JAY ROGOFF is author of The Cutoff (Word Works, 1995), a book-length poetic sequence, and the chapbook First Hand (Mica Press, 1997), a dairy-farming epithalamion. His recent work appears in Chelsea, Crazyhorse, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere, and critical prose in The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, and Salmagundi. He lives in Saratoga Springs, NY, where he watches ballet in summer and teaches in Skidmore College’s Liberal Studies Program at other times.
AHILA SAMBAMOORTHY teaches English Literature at the National University of Malaysia. She is Indian by birth and was born in Singapore. Her poetry is Dravidian in tradition and draws largely on the landscapes, philosophies, religion, and customs of South India. She lives with her husband and their cat, Sheba.
JEANNINE SAVARD has recently completed a manuscript of poems entitled A Portion for the Foxes. She teaches poetry workshops at Arizona State University.
PAUL SHORE has had solo exhibitions of his work in New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia. He has taught at Williams College, Hartford Art School, and Marlboro College. He has been a resident at The MacDowell Colony, Ragdale Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Currently he lives and works in New York City.
GLORI SIMMONS teaches and manages arts spaces at the University of San Francisco. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Salt Hill, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cutbank, and Black Warrior Review, among others.
HEIDI SKURAT has just completed an MA in Rhetoric and Composition at Southwest Missouri State University. "Water Hazards" was originally written for a class on fishing, but since she is angler-challenged, she wrote it about golfing instead.
DEBORAH SOBELOFF has a 1999 MFA in Creative Writing from the Ohio State University, where she held a University Fellowship. She was the 1999 winner of the William Redding Memorial Poetry Prize. She recently was in Indonesia studying traditional Balinese arts and now lives in Bethesda, Maryland.
LAURA STOTT lives in Draper, Utah. She is working toward her BA in English at Utah Valley State College with an emphasis in Creative Writing and a minor in Visual Art.
JUDITH STRASSER is a producer and interviewer for To The Best of Our Knowledge, a nationally syndicated public radio program. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, The Kenyon Review, and other publications.
MARK SULLIVAN has recently published poems in Fine Madness, Passages North, and Willow Springs. He received a "Discovery"/The Nation Prize in 1997 and lives in New York City.
VIRGINIA CHASE SUTTON’s poems have appeared in a number of literary publications including Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Boulevard, and Antioch Review. Her poetry manuscript, Netting the Gaudy Pearls, has been a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Walt Whitman Award, and several other national literary competitions. She lives in Tempe, Arizona.
BRIAN TEARE is completing his final year as an MFA candidate at Indiana University, where he held the 1997-98 Lilly Fellowship in Poetry. Currently, he works as poetry editor for Indiana Review and as Assistant Director of the IU Writer’s Conference. Interviews, reviews and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in IR, Black Warrior Review and Quarterly West (#47). Poetry has appeared in Poet Lore and Spoon River Poetry Review’s 1999 Editor’s Prizes, and is forthcoming in Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Pleiades, Connecticut Review, and Crab Orchard Review.
ROBERT THOMAS grew up in Oakland, California, and has lived all his life in the San Francisco Bay Area. His poems have appeared in Agni, The Antioch Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, Shenandoah, and other journals. His manuscript, Plush Fire, has been a finalist in the National Poetry Series competition. A graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz, he works as a legal secretary and lives in South San Francisco. His e-mail address is rwt@landels.com.
JON THOMPSON is an Associate Professor in the English Department at North Carolina State University. "Vestigial" is part of a book-length manuscript of poems loosely based on an album of photographs of Japan during the American Occupation. The collection, soon-to-be-completed, is entitled Pictures of a Floating World. Other poems in the collection have appeared, or are forthcoming, in The Iowa Review, Prism International, and Visions International.
RUSSELL THORBURN received an MFA in Creative Writing from Western Michigan University. His first book of poetry, Approximate Desire, was published in 1999 by New Issues Press. He has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, and Michigan ArtServe.
KRISTEN TRACY lives in Montpelier, Vermont. She has an MFA in Writing from Vermont College and an MA in American Literature from Brigham Young University.
RYAN G. VAN CLEAVE is a freelance photographer originally from Chicago. His poetry has appeared in recent issues of Slant, Willow Review, Oxford Magazine, and New York Quarterly; new poems are forthcoming in Maryland Review, Notre Dame Review, Mid-American Review, and Southern Humanities Review. He is the poetry editor for Sundog: The Southeast Review and also serves as coordinator for the annual "World’s Best Short Short Story" competition.
LIZ WALDNER is the author of Homing Devices (O Books, 1998) and A Point Is That Which Has No Part, a winner of the 1999 Iowa Prize for Poetry (University of Iowa Press). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New American Writing, The Colorado Review, VOLT, and The Iowa Review.
THOM WARD is Editor for BOA Editions, Ltd. His poetry collection, Small Boat with Oars of Different Size, was published last year by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Ward also teaches writing workshops at Roberts Wesleyan College and through the Writers & Books Literary Center in Rochester, New York.
CHARLES HARPER WEBB uses three names because there are so many Charles Webbs in the world. His book, Reading the Water (Northeastern University Press) won the 1997 Morse Poetry Prize, and the 1998 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His latest book, Liver, won the Felix Pollak Prize and was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 1999. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award.
LEONORE WILSON teaches Creative Writing at Napa Valley College. She lives on a cattle ranch in the eastern hills. Her work has been in Five Fingers Review, California Quarterly, and Laurel Review. She has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes.
AMANDA YSKAMP’s work has appeared in such magazines as Threepenny Review, Caliban, and The Georgia Review. She lives on the Russian River and works as a freelance writer, correspondence course teacher, and rock lyric coach.
MARTHA ZWEIG’s first full-length collection, Vinegar Bone, is available from Wesleyan University Press. Her chapbook, Powers, won a statewide competition and was published by the Vermont Council on the Arts. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, The Progressive, Northwest Review, Crazyhorse, The Journal, Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, and many other journals. She has just been awarded a 1999 Whiting Writer’s Award.