Issue 10

Contributors

Robert Atwan is the founder and editor of The Best American Essays, an annual compilation now in its tenth year. He co-edited Chapters into Verse: Poetry in English Inspired by the Bible, as well as the forthcoming Divine Inspiration: The Life of Christ in World Poetry, both published by Oxford University Press. Mr. Atwan's essays and poetry reviews appear in many national periodicals.

Madison Smartt Bell is the author of eight novels, including Doctor Sleep; Save Me, Joe Louis; and Soldier's Joy, which received the Lillian Smith Award in 1989. His new novel, All Souls' Rising, will be published by Pantheon in 1995. Mr. Bell is currently writer in residence, along with his wife Elizabeth Spires, at Goucher College , in Towson , Maryland.

Fred Chappell has published eleven collections of poetry, seven novels, and a collection of short stories. His writing has won a Rockefeller grant, a T.S. Eliot Prize from the Ingersoll Foundation, and the Prix de Meilleur des Livres Éstrangers (from the Academie Française). His selected works have been collected in The Fred Chappell Reader and Plow Naked: Selected Writings on Poetry. He is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina , Greensboro .

Frederick Franck is the author of a score of books, including his classic The Zen of Seeing. A physician as well as an artist, his drawings and sculptures are in the collections of some twenty museums in the United States , Europe, and Japan . Dr. Franck was recently knighted by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands .

John Mason Hodges is Artistic Director of Ars Nova, Inc., an organization in which he produces lectures/concerts with a chamber orchestra, edits a quarterly publication (Crossroads) on Christianity and the arts, and leads the Memphis Arts Group, a fellowship of Christians called to artistic professions. Mr. Hodges studied conducting under Leonard Bernstein, and has just returned from a guest conducting tour in the Ukraine .

Michael Larson has published poems and short stories in Yankee, Exquisite Corpse, North Dakota Quarterly, and other journals. He won a National Endowment for the Arts grant for 1995. His chapbook, which won a contest sponsored by New Spirit Press, has recently been published.

Rupert Martin is a free-lance writer and Anglican minister living in West Yorkshire, England. Before ordination, he was director of the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol, and in 1989 organized a touring exhibition of visual art on Christian themes. The exhibition was entitled “New Icons.”

Michael McGirr, S.J. , who conducted our interview with Tim Winton, is the editor of Australian Catholics magazine and consulting editor of Eureka Street magazine. He works for Jesuit Publications in Melbourne, Australia .

Theodore Prescott is a sculptor who is chairman of the visual and theatrical arts department at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania. He edits the newsletter of Christians in the Visual Arts, and serves as an editorial advisor to Image.

Lynda Sexson has published a collection of stories, Margaret of the Imperfections, and a book on spirituality, Ordinarily Sacred. She is a professor of humanities at Montana State University in Bozeman. Her work appears in recent issues of the Kenyon Review and Left Bank.

Elizabeth Spires 's fourth book of poems, Worldling, is scheduled for publication by W.W. Norton in November 1995. Her other books are Globe, Swan's Island, and Annonciade. She teaches at Goucher College (along with her husband Madison Smartt Bell) and at Johns Hopkins University .

William Wenthe teaches poetry and creative writing at Texas Tech University . He has published poems in Poetry, the Georgia Review, TriQuarterly, and the Southern Review. His first collection of poetry, Birds of Hoboken, has just been published by Orchises Press, Alexandria, Virginia .

Paul Willis has published two fantasy novels, No Clock in the Forest and The Stolen River, now in Avon Books editions. The latter novel received a Christianity Today Critic's Choice Award in 1993. Mr. Willis is an associate professor of English at Westmont College in Santa Barbara , California .

Tim Winton is one of Australia 's most popular and critically acclaimed novelists. His novels—which have twice won his country's most prestigious literary distinction, the Miles Franklin Award—include Cloudstreet, and That Eye the Sky (recently made into a film starring Peter Coyote). He also publishes essays, short stories, and fiction for children.