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Contributors: Spring 2010

Prairie Schooner, Vol. 84, No. 1 (Spring 2010)
Cover 

Front: Once We Were, Ying Zhu. Back: Is A?. Ying Zhu. Photos by Miao Liu.

Ying Zhu moved to the United States from China ten years ago. She creates objects and situations that examine what it means to be bi-national in the complex environment of American art and culture while revealing her personal transformation and assimilation. She is an MFA candidate in Art and Art History at UNL.

Prose 

Susan M. Gilbert-Collins was born and raised in South Dakota and loves to return there as often as possible. Her short stories have appeared in the Alabama Literary Review and Kansas Quarterly/Arkansas Review, and her first novel, Starting from Scratch, will be published in 2010. She lives in Rochester, New York, with her husband and son.

Judith Kitchen is the author of two collections of essays, a novel, and a book of criticism. In addition, she has edited three collections of short nonfiction pieces (In Short, In Brief, and Short Takes) for W. W. Norton. She lives in Port Townsend, Washington, where she serves on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop Low-Residency MFA at Pacific Lutheran University.

Josip Novakovich teaches in the MFA program at Penn State University. He has published eight books and received a Whiting Award, American Book Award, and a Fulbright Fellowship to Russia, which financed adopting, nursing, and emigrating the unfortunate cat to our gun-toting land of liberty.

R. T. Smith is Writer in Residence at Washington and Lee University, where he edits Shenandoah. His books of stories include Faith, Uke Rivers Delivers, and The Calaboose Epistles, just published by Iris Press. His work has received Pushcart Prizes, NEA Fellowships, state arts grants, two Library of Virginia Awards, and Governor's Awards in the Arts from both Alabama and the Commonwealth of Virginia. He lives in Rockbridge County, Virginia, with his wife, the writer Sarah Kennedy.

Steve Stern is the author of several novels and short story collections, including Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven, which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish American Fiction, and The Wedding Jester, which won the National Jewish Book Award. His latest books are the novel The Angel of Forgetfulness and The North of God, a novella.

S. L. Wisenberg is the author of an essay collection, Holocaust Girls: History, Memory, & Other Obsessions, and a short collection, The Sweetheart Is In. She turned her blog into a book: The Adventures of Cancer Bitch (U of Iowa P).

Poetry 

Kara Candito is author of Taste of Cherry, forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press and winner of the 2008 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. Her poems and critical prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Best New Poets 2007, Poet Lore, Florida Review, and Pedestal Review. She has received an Academy of American Poets prize and a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She has worked in the publishing industry in New York City, taught English as a second language in Rome, and earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland, College Park. She is currently a PhD candidate in English at Florida State University, where she specializes in poetry and literary theory.

Natalie Diaz was born and raised on the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She is Mojave, and a member of the O'odham/Pima tribe. After playing professional basketball in Europe and Asia, she returned to complete her MFA in 2007. She has poetry and fiction published or forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Iowa Review, North American Review, and others. She lives in Surprise! Arizona.

Patrick Durgin is a poet-critic whose most recent publications include The Route, a collaboration with Jen Hofer (Atelos), and contributions to Contemporary Women's Writing, Denver Quarterly, Journal of Modern Literature, Textsound, and XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics. New poems are forthcoming in the "A Tonalist" feature in the literary journal Aufgabe, and a new essay on the work of Lyn Hejinian is slated for Aerial: Contemporary Poetics as Critical Theory. Durgin teaches literature and writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Jenny Factor is core faculty in poetry at the Antioch University Los Angeles MFA program. Her first book, Unraveling at the Name (Copper Canyon P) received the Hayden Carruth Award and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award.

Jan Freeman is the author of Simon Says, Hyena, and the chapbook Autumn Sequence. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies and journals. She is the founder and director of Paris Press and has been a contrib-uting editor to the American Poetry Review since 1986. She is a MacDowell fellow and recently completed a new collection of poems, "Blue Structure."

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is the founder and executive director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, New Jersey. She is also the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor of poetry at Binghamton University–State University of New York. She has published eleven books of poetry, including The Weather of Old Seasons (Cross-Cultural Communications), Where I Come From, Things My Mother Told Me, and Italian Women in Black Dresses (Guernica Editions). She is coeditor with her daughter Jennifer of four anthologies. She is the editor of Paterson Literary Review. Her newest book is All That Lies Between Us (Guernica Editions), winner of the American Book Award.

Jean Janzen's seventh collection of poems, Paper House, was published in 2008 by Good Books. She has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, and has a book of lectures, Elements of Faithful Writing (Pandora P).

Patricia Kirkpatrick is the author of Century's Road (Holy Cow! P) and two letterpress chapbooks, one of which is Orioles (Accordion Productions). Her awards include fellowships from the NEA, the Bush Foundation, and the McKnight Fellowship Loft Award in Poetry. Poetry editor for Water-Stone Review, she teaches in the mfa program at Hamline University.

Dale M. Kushner is the founder of The Writer's Place, a literary center in Madison, Wisconsin. Her newest poetry manuscript, "More Alive Than Lions Roaring," was a finalist for the May Swenson Poetry Award at Utah State Press and the Dorsett Prize for Poetry. She is currently in the process of selling her debut novel, "The Conditions of Love."

Carole Simmons Oles is the author of eight books of poems, most recently Waking Stone: Inventions on the Life of Harriet Hosmer. Her poems will also appear in Consequence, a new literary magazine focusing on war in the twenty-first century. "A Selected History of Her Heart" is a manuscript in progress.

David Ray's recent books include When (Howling Dog P) and After Tagore: Poems Inspired by Rabindranath Tagore (Nirala Editions). Music of Time: Selected & New Poems (Backwaters P) offers work from fifteen previous volumes. Other titles include The Death of Sardanapalus and Other Poems of the Iraq Wars and a memoir, The Endless Search. He lives in Tucson, Arizona, with his wife, the poet and essayist Judy Ray.

Dian Duchin Reed has won awards for poetry and literary criticism, and her poems and essays have appeared in such magazines as North American Review and Salamander. Her book of poems is Medusa Discovers Styling Gel (Finishing Line Press).

William Reichard is the author of four collections of poetry, including Sin Eater and This Brightness (both with Mid-List Press). Reichard is a program director for the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs and lives with his partner, James Cihlar, in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Mark Rudman's books of poetry include the five volumes of The Rider Quintet, beginning with Rider, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, all published by Wesleyan. The Motel En Route to Life Out There: Selections from the Rider Quintet (SALT) and The Book of Samuel: Essays on Poetry and Imagination (Northwestern/FSG) came out in 2008. The Millennium Hotel was chosen as one of the best twenty-five books of 1996. His translation of Boris Pasternak's My Sister—Life received the Max Hayward Award, and his book Robert Lowell and the Poetic Act (a revision of an earlier work available only in hardcover) will be published in paper-back by Parlor Press. His poems have appeared in hundreds of anthologies and journals, including the Atlantic Monthly, London Review, Nation, New Yorker, Paris Review, and Partisan Review. He lives in New York City with his wife and son, teaches poetry at New York University, and edits the international literary journal Pequod.

Martha Silano is the author of Blue Positive (Steel Toe Books) and What the Truth Tastes Like (Nightshade Press). Her poems have recently appeared in TriQuarterly, Green Mountains Review, and the anthology Not for Mothers Only: On Child-Getting and Child-Rearing (Fence Books). In 2007 she was awarded a grant from the Washington State Artist Trust. She has a poem forthcoming in The Best American Poetry 2009. A four-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize, Silano lives in Seattle, Washington, where she teaches at Edmonds and Bellevue Community College.

James Malone Smith has published poems in Agni (online), Atlanta Review, Connecticut Review, Nebraska Review, Passages North, Quarterly West, Shenandoah, and Tar River Poetry. His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction. He is associate editor of Southern Poetry Review and professor of English at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, Georgia.

Marcia Southwick's third book, A Saturday Night at the Flying Dog, won the Field Poetry Prize and was published by Oberlin Press. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Reviews 

Sarah Salter is a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University, where she is studying American literature. She has a book review published online in Rain Taxi Review of Books as well as a review of Hilda Raz's All Odd and Splendid forthcoming in Paterson Literary Review.

Carrie Shipers's poems have appeared in Connecticut Review, Crab Orchard Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, North American Review, and other journals. She is the author of two chapbooks, Ghost-Writing (Pudding House) and Rescue Conditions (Slipstream P). Her first full-length collection, Ordinary Mourning, is forthcoming from ABZ Press. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

Anis Shivani's short fiction collection, Anatolia and Other Stories, appeared from Black Lawrence Press/Dzanc Books in October 2009. His poetry collection, "My Tranquil War and Other Poems," seeks a publisher.