Issue 14

Contributors

Ray Cassin lives in Melbourne , Australia , and frequently writes about films for the Australian Jesuit journal, Eureka Street . He is a contributor to Movies and Meaning , an anthology to be published by Basil Blackwells in 1997.

John Drexel , who has published poetry in the Paris Review , New Criterion , Hudson Review and other journals, received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship in 1993 and a Hawthornden Fellowship in 1996. A former editor for the Oxford University Press and other publishers, he has two poetry collections awaiting publication: An Englishman in Moscow and The Natural News.

Stephen Haven is an assistant professor of English and creative writing at Ashland University in Ohio , where he is also associate editor of the Ashland University Poetry Press. His poetry, translations, and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review , Missouri Review , Salmagundi , and other journals. He is the recipient of two individual artist grants in poetry from the Ohio Arts Council.

Max Heine is a business writer for the Tuscaloosa News in Alabama . He is the author of the books Children: Blessing or Burden? and Equipping Men for Spiritual Battle . He has published articles in the Rockford Institute's Family in America newsletter, Charisma magazine, and other periodicals.

David Kranes 's story in this issue is part of a not-yet-published episodic novel entitled The Hunting Party . An earlier novel, The Hunting Years , focused on the same artist character and was published a decade ago to strong reviews. Mr. Kranes's fiction has appeared in such magazines as Esquire , Transatlantic Review , North American Review , Quarterly West , Manoa , and Story .

Jan Krist is a singer/songwriter whose recording Decapitated Society (R.E.X. Music) was selected by Billboard magazine as 1993's best album in a broadly defined gospel genre. In an earlier review, Billboard referred to Krist's record as “an incredibly powerful debut...unreservedly recommended.” Two songs from that record earned her a place as a semifinalist in the 1991 Kerrville Songwriting Competition in Kerrville , Texas . Her most recent CD is Wing & a Prayer. Her autumn-release CD, Curious , will feature the Vigilantes of Love as backing band.

Philip Levine is one of the leading poets of America . His poetry has earned two National Book Awards (for Ashes and What Work Is ), the Pulitzer Prize (for The Simple Truth ), and the National Book Critics Circle Prize.

James J. McAuley directs the Eastern Washington University Press in Spokane . The three poems by him in this issue are from a sequence of poems entitled “God's Pattern.” His eighth published collection of poetry, Coming & Going , was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 1989.

Walter McDonald 's books of poems and stories include After the Noise of Saigon , The Flying Dutchman , Night Landings , and Counting Survivors . Three others won Western Heritage Awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame: Rafting the Brazos , The Digs in Escondido Canyon , and All That Matters: The Texas Plains in Photographs and Poems . His poems have recently appeared in The Atlantic , The Nation , Poetry , and the New York Review of Books . He is an English professor and director of creative writing at Texas Tech University .

Paul Mariani, who interviewed Philip Levine for this issue, is one of America 's leading poets and literary biographers. He has written biographies of poets William Carlos Williams (which was nominated for the National Book Award), John Berryman, and most recently, Robert Lowell (a New York Times notable book for 1994). His fifth book of poems, The Great Wheel , was published by W.W. Norton in 1996. Mr. Mariani served as the dean of both the 1995 and 1996 Glen Writers Conferences co-sponsored by The Milton Center and Image.

Robert Pack has published more than a dozen collections of poetry, most recently Fathering the Map: New and Selected Later Poems and Minding the Sun . He has taught at Middlebury College since 1964 and was the director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference from 1973 to 1994. He has also published children's books, published collections of essays (most recently The Long View: Essays on the Discipline of Hope and Poetic Craft ), edited many books and literary anthologies, and published his translations of Mozart's librettos. Mr. Pack's poetry has won awards from the National Council for the Arts and other organizations.

Gerald Reilly 's first short-story publications appeared in Prairie Schooner and the High Plains Literary Review during 1995. A graduate of Brown University 's Graduate Writing Program where he won a Transatlantic Review Award from the Henfield Foundation, he is currently working on a novel, poetry, and short stories.

Peter Selz is a professor emeritus of art history at the University of California in Berkeley . The former curator of the department of painting and sculpture at New York's Museum of Modern Art and director and founder of Berkeley's University Art Museum, he has written many books, including German Expressionist Painting , Art in Our Times (a history of the art of the last hundred years), and monographs on Hodler, Nolde, Beckmann, Giacometti, Rothko, Chillida, Dubuffet, and Sam Francis.

Luci Shaw has written nonfiction books (including God in the Dark ) and several volumes of poetry. The latter include Listen to the Green , Horizons , Polishing the Petoskey Stone , and the most recent Writing the River. A teacher and editor, she is writer-in-residence at Regent College in Vancouver , Canada.

Dan Wakefield 's books include Returning: A Spiritual Journey, New York in the Fifties, and Expect a Miracle: The Miraculous Things that Happen to Ordinary People. His essay in this issue is excerpted from his just-published book, Creating from the Spirit: Living Each Day as a Creative Act .

Tracy Alig Dowling is a Washington , DC resident, and has published poetry, fiction, and articles in America , The Critic , and the Washington Post , among other publications.

The most recently published of James Calvin Schaap 's books are the novel In the Silence There Are Ghosts , a book of short stories entitled Still Life , and the biography Things We Couldn't Say .