Contributors: Fall 2011
Prairie Schooner, Vol. 85, No. 3 (Fall 2011)
Cover
“Le Gocce (The Drops).” Lithography and woodcut, 35 x 26 cm. 2011 Naomi Hashimoto.
Naomi Hashimoto is a printmaker and illustrator working in Tokyo, Japan. She describes her illustration process as fantafonte, an invented word combining fanta, from the Italian word for fantasy, and fonte, which means fountain or spring. She is a graduate of Tama Art University in Japan, where she studied graphic design and lithography and earned her BA in graphic design.
Prose
Bethany Maile lives with her husband in Tucson, Arizona, where she is an mfa candidate at the University of Arizona.
Nancy McCabe’s creative nonfiction has appeared in many magazines, including Fourth Genre, Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, andNewsweek. She has won a Pushcart Prize and four of her pieces have made the Best American Essays notable list. Her books include After the Flashlight Man: A Memoir of Awakening (Purdue) and Meeting Sophie: A Memoir of Adoption (Missouri). Her memoir Crossing the Blue Willow Bridge: A Journey to My Daughter’s Birthplace in China is forthcoming.
Nancy Zafris lives in Columbus, Ohio, and is the series editor of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.
Poetry
Lavonne J. Adams is the author of Through the Glorieta Pass (Pearl Editions). She has published in more than fifty venues, including the Missouri Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Poet Lore.
Desirée Alvarez has published poems in Poetry, Boston Review, and Denver Quarterly, from which her nonfiction won an award. Also a painter, printmaker, and fabric artist who exhibits internationally, she received the Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in New York City.
John Bargowski has received a NEA Literature Fellowship, a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Distinguished Artist Fellowship, the Rose Lefcowitz Prize from Poet Lore, and the Theodore Roethke Prize at Poetry Northwest. He has new work scheduled to appear in Ploughshares, The Sun, Natural Bridge, and Poetry Northwest.
Ladd Bausch, a Nebraska native and a graduate of Nebraska Wesleyan University and the University of Arizona, spent forty years as a music and technology educator in Nebraska and Arizona. He is retired and resides in Arizona with his family.
John Brehm is the author of Sea of Faith, which won the Brittingham Prize from the University of Wisconsin Press. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Southern Review, Boulevard, and many other journals. He works as a freelance writer in Boulder, Colorado.
Mark Jay Brewin Jr. has published poems in numerous journals, including Southern Poetry Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Packingtown Review. He won the Yellowwood Poetry Contest at Yalobusha Review.
Andrew Brogdon is a computer programmer living in Columbus, Ohio. His poems have recently appeared in Diagram, Sycamore Review, and Pleiades.
Roger Callen studied geology and anthropology in Adelaide and worked in the deserts of central Australia as geologist and archaeological assistant. He now lives in the Sunshine Coast District, Queensland, writes mainly poems and produces artworks on paper. His poems are published in Famous Reporter, Polestar, and Cordite. He recently won the Bauhinia Literary Awards Open Poetry Section.
Martin Cockroft’s recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Anon, Beloit Poetry Journal and Connotation Press. He teaches at Waynesburg University.
Martha Collins is the author of the book-length poem Blue Front (Graywolf) as well as four earlier collections of poems and two cotranslated volumes of Vietnamese poetry. Two collections are forthcoming: White Papers (Pittsburgh) and Day Unto Day (Milkweed).
Pamela Davis has poems appearing in Atlanta Review, New Ohio Review, Nimrod, Southern Poetry Review, and Quiddity, among others. She recently completed her first book of poems.
Susan Elbe is the author of Eden in the Rearview Mirror (Word Press) and has poems appearing in Blackbird, diode, North American Review, and Salt Hill. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
Rebecca Ellis lives in southern Illinois. Her poems have appeared in Contemporary Verse 2, So to Speak, Natural Bridge, Quiddity, and other venues, including a bus for the St. Louis Metro Arts in Transit Poetry in Motion Project. She edits at Cherry Pie Press, publishing a series of poetry chapbooks by Midwestern women poets.
Kerry James Evans has poetry forthcoming in AGNI, Beloit Poetry Journal, New Letters, North American Review, and elsewhere. His manuscript Soldier’s Apology has been a National Poetry Series finalist and was recently named a runner-up in boa Editions’ A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize.
Alice Friman’s new collection, Vinculum, is available from Louisiana State University Press. Her last two books are The Book of the Rotten Daughter and Zoo, winner of the Ezra Pound Prize for Poetry from Truman State University. Her work appears in the Southern Review, Shenandoah, Gettysburg Review, and Best American Poetry 2009. She is the poet-in-residence at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, Georgia.
Lisa Furmanski lives in New Hampshire. Her poetry has been published in Poetry, Antioch Review, Third Coast, and others.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan won the American Book Award and the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers. She has published twelve books of poetry, her latest being What We Pass On: Collected Poems 1980–2009, and is coeditor of four anthologies, including Growing Up Ethnic in America (Penguin/Putnam) and Italian-American Writers on New Jersey (Rutgers). She is the editor of the Paterson Literary Review and the founder/director of the Poetry Center at Passaic Country Community College in Paterson, New Jersey and Professor/Director of the Creative Writing Program at Binghamton University–SUNY.
Jesse Graves is the editor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume III: Contemporary Appalachia. His first poetry collection, Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine, is forthcoming from Texas Review Press.
Jamie Lynn Heller’s poetry has appeared in the Flint Hills Review, Little Balkans Review, Avocat, and others. She is a devoted high school counselor in Lenexa, Kansas.
Eric Higgins has flash fiction and poetry appearing in Conjunctions, Zone 3, Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. He works as an assistant nonfiction editor for Gulf Coast.
Rob Jacques grew up in northern New England and enjoyed a thirty-year career as a technical writer. He now lives on a rural island in the state of Washington’s Puget Sound. His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals.
Peter Ludwin is the recipient of a literary fellowship from Artist Trust. His first book, A Guest in All Your Houses, was published by Word Walker Press. His work has been published in many journals, including Bitter Oleander, Comstock Review, Prague Revue, and Wisconsin Review. For the past ten years he has been a participant in the San Miguel Poetry Week in central Mexico.
Alison Luterman’s two books of poems are The Largest Possible Life (Cleveland State U P) and See How We Almost Fly (Pearl Editions). Her work has been published in the Sun, Poetry East, Kalliope, and Oberon; in the anthology Poetry 180; and on subway trains and buses in San Francisco and Portland.
Michael S. Morris has poems published in Plainsong, Bayou, Cold Mountain Review, and other journals. He is also the author of three novels and a book of short stories.
Linda Pastan’s new book of poems is Traveling Light, which was published in January of this year. She received the Ruth Lilly Prize in 2003 and from 1991 to 1995 was poet laureate of Maryland.
Todd James Pierce is the author of five books and anthologies, including Newsworld (U of Pittsburgh P), which won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize (selected by Joan Didion). His work has been published in the Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, and other journals. He lives in the wine country of Santa Barbara County, California.
Lynne Potts is currently poetry editor of AGNI and former poetry editor of the Columbia Journal of Literature and Art. Her work has appeared in Paris Review, American Literary Review, and Meridian, among others, and she has won the Backwards City Review prize for poetry and the Bowery Poetry Club HD Prize. She lives in Boston and New York.
Dannye Romine Powell is the author of three collections from the University of Arkansas Press, two of which have won the Brockman Campbell Award for the best book of poetry by a North Carolinian published in the preceding year. She has won fellowships from the NEA and the North Carolina Arts Council. Powell is a reporter for the Charlotte Observer newspaper.
Doris Radin lives in Livingston, New Jersey. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Nation, New Letters, Massachusetts Review, and other publications. Her book is There Are Talismans (Saturday P).
Laura Read won the Floating Bridge Chapbook Award and has poems appearing in the Spoon River Poetry Review, New Ohio Review, Pank, and others. She lives in Spokane, Washington, with her husband and two sons.
Lucinda Roy is an Alumni Distinguished Professor in English at Virginia Tech, where she teaches fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. She is the author of the poetry collections Wailing the Dead to Sleep and The Humming Birds; the novels Lady Moses and The Hotel Alleluia; and a memoir-critique titled No Right to Remain Silent: What We’ve Learned from the Tragedy at Virginia Tech. Her work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Cimarron Review, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice, Measure, Poet Lore, and USA Today.
Maxine Scates is the author of Undone (New Issues) and two other books of poetry, Black Loam and Toluca Street. She is also coeditor, with David Trinidad, of Holding Our Own: The Selected Poems of Ann Stanford.
J. D. Schraffenberger is the author of a book of poems, St. Joe’s Passion (Etruscan). His work has been published in Best Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, Diagram, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. He is the associate editor of the North American Review.
Eric Schwerer is an associate professor in the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown. He has written two books of poetry, and his work has appeared in Northwest Review, NOR, Laurel Review, Fence, and others. He has worked as a carpenter and taught poetry to people recovering from mental illness.
Jane Seitel is an Expressive Arts Therapist and recently received her MFA in Poetry from Drew University. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Bridges, Midstream, Poetica, and Lilith. She is the 2010 recipient of the Charlotte Newberger Prize.
Floyd Skloot’s seventh collection of poems, Close Reading, will be pub-lished by Tupelo Press. He has won three Pushcart Prizes, a pen USA Literary Award, and two Pacific Northwest Book Awards. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Wanling Su received a MFA from the University of Virginia, where she was the poetry editor of Meridian and a Poe-Faulkner Fellow. Her poems have appeared in Harpur Palate and The Bitter Oleander Press.
Tim Suermondt is the author of Trying to Help the Elephant Man Dance (Backwaters Press) and Just Beautiful (New York Quarterly Books). He lives in Brooklyn.
Kelly Terwilliger, writer-in-residence and professional storyteller in public schools, has poems published in the Comstock Review, South Carolina Review, and Talking River Review.
David Wagoner has published eighteen books of poems, most recently A Map of the Night (U of Illinois P), and Copper Canyon Press will publish his nineteenth, After the Point of No Return. He has also published ten novels, one of which, The Escape Artist, was made into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola. He has won the Lilly Prize, six yearly prizes from Poetry, and the Arthur Rense Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets for twenty-three years. He edited Poetry Northwest from 1966 to 2002 and is professor emeritus of English at the University of Washington. He teaches at the low-residency MFA program of the Northwest Institute of the Literary Arts on Whidbey Island.
Tana Jean Welch was born and raised in Fresno, California, but now lives in Tallahassee, Florida, where she is pursuing a doctorate in literature. Her poetry has appeared in the Southern Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Gettysburg Review.
Mark Wisniewski’s second novel, Show Up, Look Good, is slated for pub-lication this fall from Gival Press. His previous short fiction won a Pushcart Prize. Mark’s work has appeared in Poetry, Southern Review, Antioch Review, New York Quarterly, and Best American Short Stories 2008.
Sybil Baker is the author of Talismans (C&R Press) and The Life Plan (Casperian Books). Her short stories and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including upstreet and the Writer’s Chronicle. After living in South Korea for twelve years, she moved to Tennessee, where she is an Assistant Professor of English at UT Chattanooga.
Rebecca Foust’s books include God, Seed (Tebot Bach) and All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song (Many Mountains Moving Book Prize). The latter was a finalist for the 2011 Paterson Poetry Award, and both books are finalists for the 2010 Foreword Book of the Year Award. Foust’s recent poems are in current or future issues of Arts & Letters, Hudson Review, North American Review, Poetry Daily, Sewanee Review, and other journals.
Marianne Kunkel is a PhD student in poetry, with a specialization in women’s and gender studies, at the University of Nebraska. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, Columbia Poetry Review, Passages North, Poet Lore, Rattle, and elsewhere. She is the Interim Managing Editor of Prairie Schooner.
Madeleine Mysko teaches creative writing at the Johns Hopkins University. A registered nurse, she also coordinates the “Reflections” column for the American Journal of Nursing. Her poems, stories, and essays appear regularly in literary journals. Her first novel, Bringing Vincent Home (Plain View), is based on her experiences as an army nurse in 1969.
Doug Ramspeck is the author of four poetry collections. His first book, Black Tupelo Country (BkMk Press), received the John Ciardi Prize. His most recent book, Mechanical Fireflies, received the Barrow Street Press Book Prize. His poems have been published by journals that include the Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and EPOCH. He is a recent recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. He directs the Writing Center and teaches creative writing at The Ohio State University at Lima.
Susanna Roxman has poems in Prairie Schooner, Spoon River Poetry Re-view, Crab Orchard Review, Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. Her criticism has appeared in many journals. She is the author of three poetry collections with Dionysia Press in Edinburgh: Broken Angels, Imagining Seals, and Crossing the North Sea (forthcoming), as well as Guilt and Glory: Studies in Margaret Drabble’s Novels 1963–80 (Almqvist & Wiksell International).
Susan Shaw Sailer completed an MFA in the low-residency Program in Poetry at New England College after retiring from the Department of English at West Virginia University, where she taught twentieth-century Irish and British literature. Her poems have appeared in Poetry International, Kestrel, 5 A.M., and U.S. 1 Worksheets. Her reviews and articles have appeared in Indiana Review and Alehouse Review. Her chapbook, Coal, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. She lives in Morgantown, West Virginia.
Beth Sutton-Ramspeck teaches nineteenth-century British literature at The Ohio State University at Lima. She is the author of Raising the Dust: The Literary Housekeeping of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Ohio UP).