Contributors: Fall 2010

Prairie Schooner, Vol. 84, No. 3 (Fall 2010)

Cover

“London, rain, 2007.” Photo © Dika Eckersley

Prose

Rosellen Brown‘s five novels include Before and After and Half a Heart, and her stories have appeared in half a dozen O. Henry, Best American Stories, and Pushcart Prize collections. She hopes to include “The Shaggiest Dog” in a collection to be called “Late Loves.” She teaches in the mfa program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Janet Burroway is the author of eight novels, including Bridge of Sand (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Her novel, Raw Silk, was the runner-up for the National Book Award, and Buzzards was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Recent works include the play Medea with Child, which was produced by Sideshow Theatre in Chicago.

Kara Candito is the author of Taste of Cherry (U of Nebraska P), winner of the 2008 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Her poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as Blackbird, AGNI, the Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, and others. She has appeared in Best New Poets and has received an Academy of American Poets Prize as well as scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

James Engelhardt‘s poems have appeared in Lilies and Cannonballs Review, Hawk and Handsaw, Alligator Juniper, Saranac Review, and Painted Bride Quarterly. Work is forthcoming in the Fourth River and other journals. His ecopoetry manifesto is at octopusmagazine.com. He is the managing editor of Prairie Schooner.

Kate Flaherty‘s essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, Rosebud, and elsewhere. She is a former managing editor for Prairie Schooner and is currently a senior editor at Ploughshares.

Erin Flanagan is the author of the short-story collection The Usual Mistakes (U of Nebraska P). Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Connecticut Review, Florida Review, Crazyhorse, the Best New American Voices anthology series, and elsewhere. She is a former managing editor of Prairie Schooner.

Goldie Goldbloom‘s short fiction has appeared in StoryQuarterly, Narrative Magazine, and the anthology, Keep Your Wives Away from Them: Orthodox Women, Unorthodox Desires. Her novel Toads’ Museum of Freaks and Wonders won the 2008 AWP Novel Award and is in its second printing in Australia (as The Paperbark Shoe). She has a story in a forthcoming anthology of emerging Australian writers. She also won the Jerusalem Post International Fiction Prize. Goldbloom lives with her eight children in Chicago.

Kelly Grey Carlisle‘s essays have appeared in River Teeth, Tampa Review, and Subtropics. Two of these essays were selected as notable essays in Best American Essays 2006 and one was reprinted in The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction, edited by Michael Martone and Lex Williford. Recently she won second place in nonfiction in the Atlantic Monthly Student Writing Contest.

Sarah Kennedy is the author of six books of poems, including Home Remedies (LSU), A Witch’s Dictionary (Elixir), Consider the Lilies (David Robert), Double Exposure (Cleveland State University Press), and Flow Blue (Elixir). She has received grants from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts and is currently a contributing editor for West Branch and Shenandoah.

Karma Larsen worked for Prairie Schooner from 1981 to 1986.

Mari L’Esperance‘s collection The Darkened Temple was awarded the 2007 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. She lives and writes in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Aaron Raz Link is a writer and teacher. By training, he is a historian and philosopher of science; he is also a graduate of the Dell’ Arte School of Physical Theatre. He is the author, with Hilda Raz, of What Becomes You, a 2008 Lambda Literary Award finalist. Currently, he is working on a book about performance with the theatre artist and teacher Daniel Stein.

Glenna Luschei is the founder and publisher of Solo Press and the author of many chapbooks, special editions, and trade books, the latest being Salt Lick (West End P) and Witch Dance (Presa P). She was named Poet Laureate of San Luis Obispo City and County for the year 2000. Luschei has also published an artist’s book of her translation of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Enigmas. She has received the D.H. Lawrence and the National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. She is an Admiral in the Nebraska Navy.

Lee Martin is the author of the novels The Bright Forever, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction; River of Heaven; and Quakertown. He has also published two memoirs, From Our House and Turning Bones, and a short-story collection, The Least You Need to Know.

Biljana D. Obradovic is the author of two collections of poetry, including Frozen Embraces and Le Riche Monde. Her work has been anthologized in Like Thunder: Poets Respond to Violence in America and Key West: A Collection. Her work has appeared in Bloomsbury Review and Plum Review. She also translates Serbian and American poetry.

Carole Simmons Oles is the author of eight books of poems, most recently Waking Stone: Inventions on the Life of Harriet Hosmer. She returned to Bread Loaf for many summers on the faculty of the Writers’ Conference and the School of English.

Alicia Ostriker is the author of Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America. Her twelfth poetry collection, The Book of Seventy, received the 2009 National Jewish Book Award for Poetry.

Robert Pack is the author of numerous books of poetry and criticism. His most recent collection of poems is Still Here, Still Now (U of Chicago P). He teaches in the Honors College of the University of Montana.

Anna Nessy Perlberg lives in Chicago with her fox terrier, Brady. Her commitment to human rights probably grew out of the experiences described in her essay in this issue of Prairie Schooner.

Ladette Randolph is the author of the novel A Sandhills Ballad and a short-story collection, This Is Not the Tropics, as well as the editor of two anthologies: The Big Empty and A Different Plain. She was formerly the managing editor at Prairie Schooner and is currently editor-in-chief of the journal Ploughshares.

Tim Skeen is a member of the MFA faculty at California State University, Fresno. He earned a PhD in English from the University of Nebraska in 1993.

Floyd Skloot will have two new books published by Tupelo Press in 2011: Close Reading, his seventh collection of poetry, and Cream of Kohlrabi, his first volume of short stories. The short-story collection gathers his best work in that genre from thirty-five years of publication.

R. T. Smith is writer-in-residence at Washington and Lee University, where he edits Shenandoah. His most recent book of stories is The Calaboose Epistles (Iris), and his next collection, Sherburne, is forthcoming from Stephen F. Austin University Press. He has twice received the Library of Virginia Poetry Book of the Year Award.

Pam Weiner was business manager at Prairie Schooner from 1986 to 1993. She now is a transfer evaluator at California State University, Fresno and lives in Fresno with her poet husband, Tim Skeen, and daughter, Iris.

Nancy Welch is a professor of English at the University of Vermont. Her story “Mental” won a Prairie Schooner Readers’ Choice award and her collection The Road from Prosperity was published by Southern Methodist University Press.

Andrew Wingfield‘s just-released story collection Right of Way, which includes “Air Space,” won the Washington Writers’ Publishing House fiction prize for 2010. Stories in the collection have also appeared in the Antioch Review, Potomac Review, and other journals. Wingfield’s novel, Hear Him Roar, was published in 2005.

Poetry

Marvin Bell‘s nineteenth book was the wartime collection Mars Being Red (Copper Canyon). His twentieth is 7 Poets, 4 Days, 1 Book, a collaboration of seven poets from five countries (Trinity UP). Formerly at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he teaches for the brief-residency MFA program at Pacific University. A song cycle, “The Animals,” commissioned by the composer David Gompper, premiered in 2009. He has compiled a collection of new poems tentatively titled Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems to be published by Copper Canyon, and has collaborated with the photographer Nathan Lyons on a book to be published by Lodima Press tentatively titled Whiteout.

Bruce Bond‘s most recent books of poetry include Peal (Etruscan P), Blind Rain (LSU P), Cinder (Etruscan P), and The Throats of Narcissus (U of Arkansas P).

James Cihlar is the author of Undoing (Little Pear P).

Claudia Emerson‘s poems have appeared in Poetry, Southern Review, Shenandoah, and New England Review. She is the author of several books including Pharaoh, Pharaoh; Pinion, An Elegy; and Late Wife, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She is currently the poet laureate of Virginia.

Robert Gibb is the author of seven books of poetry, The Names of the Earth in Summer (Stone Country’s 10th Anniversary Award Volume), The Winter House (Devin’s Award finalist), Momentary Days (Camden Poetry Award), The Origins of Evening (National Poetry Series winner), and others. He has received two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, seven Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grants, the Wildwood Poetry Prize, and the Devil’s Millhopper Chapbook Prize. He lives on New Homestead hill above the Monongahela River.

Marilyn Kallet is the author of fourteen books, including Packing Light: New and Selected Poems (Black Widow P). She is Lindsay Young Professor of English at the University of Tennessee and also teaches poetry workshops for the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Auvillar, France.

Maxine Kumin‘s most recent books include her seventeenth collection of poetry, Where I Live: New and Selected Poems, 1990–2010, her new children’s book, What Color Is Caesar? , and The Roots of Things: Essays. She is a former U.S. poet laureate and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Poets’ Prize, the Harvard Arts, and Robert Frost Medals.

Steve Lautermilch had new work in Atlanta Review, Carpe Articulum, and International Poetry Review. A poet and fine art photographer, for the last ten years he has traveled the far western United States exploring the sites of ancient cultures. He has published an artist’s book of photographs and poems titled Spirit Writer. Fire Seed & Rain, a chapbook, won the Longleaf Press competition in 2008. Lautermilch lives on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where he offers workshops in writing, meditation, and dream study.

George Looney‘s books include The Precarious Rhetoric of Angels, Attendant Ghosts, Animals Housed in the Pleasure of Flesh, and the novella Hymn of Ash. In addition, Open Between Us, a new book of poetry, is now out from the Turning Point imprint of WordTech Communications. He chairs the BFA in Creative Writing Program at Penn State Erie. He is editor in chief of the international literary journal Lake Effect, translation editor of Mid-American Review, and co-director of the Chautauqua Writers’ Festival.

Sandra Meek is the author of three books of poems, Nomadic Foundations, Burn, and Biogeography (Tupelo P), winner of the Dorset Prize. She is the editor of Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad, winner of a 2008 Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal. She has published poems in journals such as Agni, the Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, and the Iowa Review. Meek is the cofounding editor of Ninebark Press and editor of the Phi Kappa Phi Forum. She has twice been awarded Georgia Author of the Year.

Mihaela Moscaliuc‘s poetry collection Father Dirt won the Kinereth Gensler Award and will be published by Alice James in 2010. Her translations, reviews, and articles appear in the Georgia Review, Poetry International, Pleiades, and others.

Lawrence Revard is a previous contributor to Prairie Schooner. He has published translations of John Milton’s Neo-Latin and Italian verse for Wiley-Blackwell’s edition of Milton’s shorter poems. His poetry has appeared recently in Hayden’s Ferry Review, New Orleans Review, Agni, and elsewhere. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

Jay Rogoff ‘s new chapbook, Twenty Dances Macabres, won the Robert Watson Poetry Award and has appeared in a letterpress edition from Spring Garden Press. His book of dance-inspired poems, The Code of Terpsichore, is due in 2011 from Louisiana State University Press. His three poems in this issue come from his book-length sequence “Enamel Eyes: A Fantasia on Paris 1870.” He also serves as dance critic for the Hopkins Review.

Peggy Shumaker‘s admiration for Hilda Raz—her life, her work, her spirit—knows no bounds.

Judith Skillman‘s twelfth book, The Never, is just out from Dream Horse Press. The recipient of an award from the Academy of American Poets for her book Storm (Blue Begonia P), Skillman’s work has appeared in Poetry, FIELD, Southern Review, Midwest Quarterly, Seneca Review, and numerous other journals and anthologies. She is the author of Heat Lightning: New and Selected Poems 1986–2006 from Silverfish Review Press.

Brian Swann has published many books in various fields. His forthcoming book from the University of Nebraska Press is Born in the Blood: Translating Native American Literature.

Philip Terman‘s most recent collection of poems is Rabbis of the Air (Autumn House P). New poems appear in the Laurel Review, Tar River Poetry, and Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust. He is a co-director of the Chautauqua Writers Festival.