Issue 24

Contributors

Doris Betts, Alumni Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has published nine books of fiction, most recently The Sharp Teeth of Love (Knopf).

Kelly Cherry 's most recent books are The Society of Friends: Stories (University of Missouri Press), The Poem: An Essay (Sandhills Press), and a translation of Antigone in Sophocles, 2 (University of Pennsylvania Press). She is Eminent Scholar at the Humanities Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Maude Schuyler Clay lives in Sumner, Mississippi. She is a photographer and serves as the photography editor of The Oxford American. Her new book, Delta Land, was published in October by The University Press of Mississippi.

Carol Crown is a professor of art history at The University of Memphis. She received her Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis, where she trained in Early Christian and Medieval Art. Her research interests now focus on self-taught religious art of the South. She is the editor of the forthcoming book Wonders to Behold! The Visionary Paintings of Myrtice West.

Clyde Edgerton teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He is the author of The Floatplane Notebooks, Redeye, and five other novels, all published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill and Ballantine Books. He lives in Orange County, North Carolina, with his wife, writer and musician Susan Ketchin, and their daughter.

Tim Gautreaux is the author of two collections of stories, Welding with Children and Same Place, Same Things, and a novel, The Next Step in the Dance, all by St. Martin 's/Picador. His stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Harper's, GQ, Story, Zoetrope, and others. He is writer-in-residence at Southeastern Louisiana University.

Emilie Griffin, a native of New Orleans, has lived and worked both in New Orleans and New York City. She is the author of six books on spiritual life, including Turning (about conversion), Clinging (about prayer), and Homeward Voyage (about getting older). Her first full-length play, The Only Begotten Son, won the First Playwrights Award from the Louisiana Council of Music and Perfoming Arts.

John Holman is from Durham, North Carolina. He currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where he teaches writing and literature and also directs the creative writing program at Georgia State University. His books are Squabble and Other Stories (Ticknor and Fields), and Luminous Mysteries, (Harcourt Brace). His fiction has appeared in The Oxford American, The New Yorker, Mississippi Review, and other publications.

Andrew Hudgins 's five books of poetry, all with Houghton Mifflin, include The Glass Hammer: A Southern Childhood and Babylon in a Jar. His collection of essays, The Glass Anvil, was published by The University of Michigan Press. Recent essays have appeared in The American Scholar, The Hudson Review, and others.

Caroline Langston 's story “The Second Day of Exaltation” appeared in the Summer 1999 edition of The Women's Review of Books and her story “What White is Like” appeared in the Spring 1999 Arts and Letters. Her fiction has been included in The 1997 Pushcart Prize XXI, and in New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 1995. A native of Yazoo City , Mississippi, she works for National Public Radio in Washington, DC.

David Middleton is poet-in-residence at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana. His collections of verse include The Burning Fields (LSU Press), As Far as Light Remains (The Cummington Press), Bonfires on the Levee (Blue Heron Press), and Beyond the Chandeleurs (LSU Press). He serves as poetry editor for The Anglican Theological Review, The Classical Outlook, and The Louisiana English Journal.

Robert Morgan has published ten books of poetry, including Sigodlin (Wesleyan University Press), Green River: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press), and the forthcoming Topsoil Road (LSU Press). A new novel, Gap Creek, will be published in the fall of 1999. A native of western North Carolina, he has taught at Cornell University since 1971.

Tom Rankin is Director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, where he teaches courses in documentary studies and photography. A photographer, filmmaker, and folklorist, he served as a curator for the Mississippi Delta program at the Smithsonian's 1997 Festival of American Folklife. He is currently writing a book about contemporary life in the Mississippi Delta.

Patrick Samway, S.J., the Will and Ariel Durant Professor of Humanities at Saint Peter's College, Jersey City, N.J., is the author of Walker Percy: A Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and editor of a volume of Percy's essays and speeches, Signposts in a Strange Land (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) , as well as A Thief of Peirce: The Letters of Kenneth Laine Ketner and Walker Percy (University Press of Mississippi). He is also the author of a book on William Faulkner and co-editor with Ben Forkner of four anthologies of southern literature.

Miller Williams is one of America 's most distinguished poets. For many years he served as Director of the University of Arkansas Press. He is the author, editor, or translator of thirty books, including How Does A Poem Mean? (with John Ciardi) and many volumes of poetry, the most recent of which is Some Jazz A While: Collected Poems.

Roger Williams is a native West Virginian. His work has appeared in Shenandoah, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Literature and Belief, and The Gettysburg Review.

Charles Reagan Wilson studies the cultural history of the American South, with special interest in religion. He is Director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and Professor of History at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of Judgement and Grace in Dixie: Southern Faiths from Faulkner to Elvis (University of Georgia Press ) and co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (University of North Carolina Press).