Issue 16

Contributors

Dick Allen is the author of four collections of poetry. His Ode to the Cold War: New and Selected Poems was published in March by Sarabande Books. His previous books include Overnight in the Guest House of the Mystic and Flight and Pursuit, both published by Louisiana State University Press. His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, as well as in the Best American Poetry annual anthologies. His poem in this issue will form part of an upcoming book entitled The Space Sonnets .

Doris Betts 's new novel The Sharp Teeth of Love, which is excerpted in this issue, is scheduled to be published to be published by Knopf in the spring of 1997. The New York Times chose her 1994 novel, Souls Raised from the Dead , for its list of best books of the year; the same novel, her fifth, won the Southern Book Award, presented by the Southern Book Critics Circle. She was a National Book Award finalist in 1974 for her Beasts of the Southern Wild and Other Stories . The musical Violet, based on her story “The Ugliest Pilgrim,” opened Off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons on March 11. She is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

J. Landy Dann , who carried out the interview with William Everson in this issue, has published writing in the Chicago Tribune Magazine, Westways, Woodstock Common, Century, and other periodicals. Like Everson, she spent more than a dozen years in a Catholic religious order. Ms. Dann hosted a regular poetry program on KUSP radio in Santa Cruz, California at the time that she interviewed Everson.

Annie Dillard won a Pulitzer Prize for her narrative Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She has written ten books including the memoir An American Childhood, two books of poems, and the novel The Living. In 1994 she won the first Milton Center Prize for her contribution to the tradition of Christian letters, a prize which she accepted during the 1994 Writing and Arts Festival sponsored by Image and The Milton Center.

William Everson died on June 3, 1994. An expert handset printer as well as a poet, he printed books that have become collector's items. Everson was both a Beat poet and, for many years, a Dominican monk. The incongruity of his image as “the Beat Friar” created interest, and Everson (Brother Antoninus) was invited to read his poetry all over the country. His book The Crooked Lines of God was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Sam Fentress is a commercial and fine-arts photographer living in St. Louis. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooks Museum of Art in Memphis, and the Suwa Art Museum in Suwa, Japan. His religious sign series has been reviewed in the New York Post, New York Press, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, National Catholic Register, and Nashville Tennesseean. His photographs have been included in solo and group exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the O.K. Harris Gallery in New York, and elsewhere.

Sally Fitzgerald made her first contribution to Flannery O'Connor studies as editor, with Robert Fitzgerald, of Mystery & Manners , a collection of O'Connor's essays published in 1969. In due course, Fitzgerald collected and introduced O'Connor's personal correspondence (and in a very real sense O'Connor herself) to previously somewhat mystified readers, in The Habit of Being , published in 1979. She edited the one-volume edition of O'Connor's complete works for the Library of America, published in 1988, and is now completing the writer's biography, to be entitled The Mansions of the South.

Diane Glancy 's first novel, Pushing the Bear, about the 1838 Trail of Tears, was published by Harcourt Brace in 1996. Boom Town, her collection of poems, has recently been published by Black Hat Press, Goodhue, Minnesota. Her third collection of short stories, Monkey Secret, was published in 1995 by TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press. Her collection of essays entitled Claiming Breath won the 1990 Native American Prose Award from the University of Nebraska Press, and a 1993 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. She teaches Native American literature and creative writing at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.

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.

Michael McFee has published five collections of poetry: Colander , To See, Sad Girl Sitting on a Running Board, Vanishing Acts, and Plain Air. He edited the anthology The Language They Speak Is Things to Eat: Poems by Fifteen Contemporary North Carolina Poets, and has published poems in Poetry, Hudson Review, and other journals. He teaches poetry writing and literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and is an assistant editor of DoubleTake magazine.

Sue Miller is the best-selling author of four novels—The Good Mother, Family Pictures, For Love, and The Distinguished Guest—as well as the collection Inventing the Abbotts and Other Stories. The Good Mother and Inventing the Abbotts have been made into major motion pictures.

Anna Moszynska is course leader and senior lecturer for the MA course in postwar and contemporary art at Sotheby's Institute for Fine and Decorative Art, a London affiliate of the University of Manchester. With a wide-ranging background in art history and art criticism, she has lectured at London's major art museums, coordinated gallery exhibitions, and serves as a trustee of the British organization Art & Christianity Enquiry.

Shirley Nelson , who conducted our interview with Sue Miller, has published a novel, The Last Year of the War, and a narrative history, Fair, Clear and Terrible: The Story of Shiloh, Maine . She contributes to anthologies and journals, and is at work on another novel.

Virgil Nemoianu is William J. Byron Distinguished Professor of Literature at the Catholic University of America and secretary-general of the International Comparative Literature Association.

Brian Louis Pearce, poet and fiction writer, is a Londoner whose books include Jack o' Lent, Gwen John Talking, his “City Whiskers” sequence in The Playing of the Easter Music, and the forthcoming book of fiction, The Tufnell Triptych, all published by Stride, Exeter, England. His corpus includes novels, stories, collections of selected poems, and Varieties of Fervour: Portraits of Victorian and Edwardian Poets, based on his lectures at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Walter Sullivan is professor of English and director of the program in creative writing at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of three novels, most recently A Time to Dance (1995), and several volumes of literary criticism including In Praise of Blood Sports (1990). His latest book is The War the Women Lived, an anthology of excerpts from the diaries of Confederate women.

Rowan Williams has written a number of books on theology and spirituality, including The Wound of Knowledge, Teresa of Avila , and A Ray of Darkness . His first books of poetry, After Silent Centuries , was published in 1994 by Perpetua Press, Oxford, England. Since 1992 Dr. Williams has served the Anglican Church in Wales as the bishop of Monmouth.

Kelly Cherry's two most recent books are Writing the World, essays about writing and the writing life, and Lovers and Agnostics, a collection of poems; she is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Mark Jarman, who teaches at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, has published two collections of poetry, including The Black Riviera, which won the 1991 Poets' Prize, and Questions for Ecclesiastes, published by Story Line Press in 1997.

Caroline Langston, a 1995-96 Milton Center Post-Graduate Fellow, is currently a tutor at Rose Hill College in Aiken, South Carolina; her story “The Dissolution of the World,” originally published in Ploughshares, was included in the 1997 Pushcart Prize anthology.