Issue 17

Contributors

Jill Palaez Baumgaertner is an English professor at Wheaton College and the poetry editor of The Christian Century magazine and the journal First Things. She is the author of Flannery O'Connor: A Proper Scaring, a college textbook/anthology entitled Poetry, and a poetry chapbook entitled Leaving Eden.

Frederick Buechner has been nominated for both the Pulitzer Prize (in 1980 for the novel Gadric) and the National Book Award (in 1971 for Lion Country, the first novel in his tetralogy The Book of Bebb). He has written more than a dozen novels and fifteen books of nonfiction including books of theology, autobiographies, and collections of meditations. An ordained Presbyterian minister, he is one of America's leading novelists.

Lawrence Dorr is the nom de plume of a Hungarian-born American. In 1988, his third short-story collection, A Slight Momentary Affliction, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. His earlier collections were A Slow, Soft River and The Immigrant. Mr. Dorr lives in Florida on a twenty-acre horse farm/family compound with his wife, children , and grandchildren.

Gordon Fuglie directs the Laband Art Gallery of Loyola Marymound University in Los Angeles. His reserach often focuses on the impact of modernity on contemporary religious art. With theologian and activist Ched Myers, he is working on a monograph on the Los Angeles painter and printmaker John August Swanson.

Wayne Harrel is a writer and actor in Portland, Oregon. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild, once toured with someone now famous, has scripted several award-winning videos, and just won the Christian in Theatre Arts playwriting award for his musical Like a Horse and Carriage.

Mark Helprin's critically acclaimed works of fiction include A Dove of the East and Other Stories, Ellis Island and Other Stories, Refiner's Fire, Winter's Tale, A Soldier of the Great War, Memoir from Antproof Case, and the children's books Swan Lake and A City in Winter.

Andrew Hudgins's first book, Saints and Strangers, was runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize; his second, After the Lost War, won the Poets' Prize; and his third, The Never-Ending , was a finalist for the National Book Award. His fourth book of poetry, published in 1994, is The Glass Hammer: A Southern Childhood . Also just published, by the University of Michigan Press, is his collection of essays entitled The Glass Anvil . He is a professor of English at the University of Cincinnati.

Tom Johnson , who interviewed Mark Helprin in this issue, was born in Bayfield, Wisconsin, and grew up in Superior, Wisconsin. After earning a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, he moved to New York City, where he has had many interesting experiences. His first novel, Rescuing Claire, was published in 1991. He has just completed his second novel.

Martin E. Marty is the author of forty-five books, including Righteous Empire, for which he won the National Book Award. He is Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, where he teaches on three faculties. He is also the director of the Public Religion Project. His most recent book is The One and the Many (Harvard University Press, 1997). The Promise of Winter, the third in a series of books that pair Marty's reflections with his son Micah's photographs, was also published by Eerdmans in 1997.

David Morgan is associate professor of art history and chair of the art department at Valparaiso University. He edited and contributed to the book Icons of American Protestantism: The Art of Warner Sallman (Yale Press) and is the author of Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images, which the University of California Press will publish later year. He contributed the essay “Secret Wisdom and Self-Effacement: The Spiritual in Art in the Modern Age” to the art book Negotiating Rapture: The Power of Art to Transform Lives, the exhibition catalogue for last summer's inaugural exhibition at the new Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

Otto Osip Ochs was born in East Germany and has lived in the United States for many years. A high school teacher of English, he has published poems in the Bloomsbury Review , Mississippi Mud, California Quarterly, Blue Unicorn, Persona, Sojourners, and other journals. His poems in this issue are part of his book-length manuscript The Season of the Sacred Fool .

Anne Delana Reeves is a Nashville poet/songwriter who recently won a scholarship to the Indiana Writers' Conference, as well as two Billboard Magazine songwriting awards. Her poems have appeared in the Antioch Review and other journals.

Harry Smart has published three books of poems—Pierrot , Shoah , and Fool's Pardon—all with the London publisher Faber and Faber. He has also published the book Criticism and Public Rationality. His first novel—Zaire—was published in spring 1997 by Dedalus. He lives in Montrose in northeast Scotland.

Beverly Taylor is assistant conductor of the Madison Symphony Orchestra and director of choral activities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she teaches graduate conducting students and conducts the 50-voice concert choir, a mixed-voice touring ensemble, and the 200-voice choral union, which performs major choral-orchestral works. For seventeen years she was associate director of choral activities at Harvard University, where she conducted the prize-winning Radcliffe Choral Society and Harvard-Radcliffe Chorus. She has guest conducted the Anton Rubenstein Orchestra in Poland, the Vermont Symphony, Harvard Chamber Orchestra, U.S. Air Force Band, and the Boston Pops Esplanade Chorus with John Williams.

Lionel Basney's reviews have appeared in the Sewanee Review and Georgia Review; he is a poet who teaches at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Virginia Stem Owens is the director of the Milton Center, a former senior editor of Image, and the author of a dozen books, including, most recently, the novel Generations (published in the United Kingdom). Ralph C. Wood is the author of The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists and is Distinguished Professor of Religion at Samford University; a collection of his Flannery O'Connor essays that concern race, religion, and manners will soon be published.