Issue 47

Contributors

Christina Askounis is the author of the fantasy novel The Dream of the Stone (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), which will be re-published by Simon and Schuster in 2007. Her screenplay, Enchantment, was a finalist in the 2000 Moondance Film Festival’s screenwriting competition, and her short fiction has appeared in Redbook and First. A former newspaper reporter and scriptwriter for public television, since 1987 she has taught writing at Duke, and in 2004 received a Trinity College Distinguished Teaching Award.

Scott Cairns is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Philokalia: New & Selected Poems from Zoo Press. His spiritual memoir, Slow Pilgrim, will appear from HarperSanFrancisco in 2006. Current work also appears in Poetry, Spiritus, Paris Review, Books & Culture, and Best American Spiritual Writing 2005.

Susanna Childress is a recipient of a first-place award in poetry from the National Society of Arts and Letters, an AWP Intro Award, and the Foley Poetry Award. Her work has appeared in Missouri Review, Bellingham Review, Crab Orchard Review, and the anthology And Know This Place: Poems of Indiana. Her first volume of poems, Jagged with Love, was chosen by Billy Collins for the 2005 Brittingham Poetry Prize and will be published by the University of Wisconsin Press this year. She is a doctoral candidate in English at Florida State University.

Terrence E. Dempsey, SJ, is the founding director of the Museum of Contemporary Religious Art at Saint Louis University, where he holds the May O’Rourke Jay Endowed Teaching Chair in Art History and Theology. He has written numerous articles and lectured internationally, including recently at Oxford University and the Irish Theological Society in Dublin.

Ginger Henry Geyer’s sculpture has been exhibited at the Center for the Arts and Religion in Washington, DC, and throughout the Southwest. She lives with her family in Austin, Texas, where she is an adjunct professor at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest. She is also an art consultant for the H.E. Butt Foundation’s Laity Lodge.

David A. Griffith received his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and currently teaches at the University of Notre Dame and Saint Mary’s College. His book A Good War Is Hard to Find, of which “Prime Directive” is an excerpt, is forthcoming in February from Soft Skull Press. He lives in South Bend, Indiana, with his wife, Jessica Mesman.

Christopher M. Maier’s fiction has appeared in Sou’wester and Pretext. He is currently a lecturer at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he teaches creative writing and composition.

Paul Mariani is one of America’s leading literary biographers and poets. His books include the poetry collections Salvage Operations and The Great Wheel (both from Norton), as well as biographies of William Carlos Williams (nominated for a National Book Award), John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and most recently Hart Crane. A new book of poetry, Deaths and Transfigurations: Poems, was recently published by Paraclete Press, designed and with engravings by Barry Moser.

David Norman is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and New York University. He teaches in the English department at Florida International University. “Wrestling Proteus” is his first published story.

John Poch’s first book, Poems, was published by Orchises Press in 2004. He teaches in the creative writing program at Texas Tech and is the editor of 32 Poems Magazine. He has recent and forthcoming poems in Sewanee Theological Review, The Nation, and Paris Review.

Peggy Rosenthal is director of Poetry Retreats, an arts ministry offered in seminars and retreats around the country, and writes widely on poetry as a spiritual resource. Her books include Praying through Poetry: Hope for Violent Times (Saint Anthony Messenger) and The Poets’ Jesus (Oxford). She serves on the advisory board of Imago Dei, an organization dedicated to cultivating relations between Christianity and the arts. “A Man in His Life” is reprinted with the permission of the publisher from The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, edited and translated from the Hebrew by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell, copyright 1996 of the Regents of the University of California.

Thom Satterlee received a grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation to support his research of the fourteenth-century theologian John Wyclif. Poems resulting from his studies have recently appeared in West Branch, Southwest Review, Roanoke Review, and Crazyhorse. He teaches creative writing at Taylor University in Upland, Indiana.

Sandra Scofield’s most recent book is a memoir, Occasions of Sin (Norton). She has also written seven critically praised novels; Beyond Deserving (Permanent Press) was a finalist for the National Book Award. “Anger” is taken from a book in progress, “Frieda.”

Patty Seyburn’s books of poems are Diasporadic (Helicon Nine) and Mechanical Cluster (Ohio State). She recently completed a third collection, The Emergence of Hilarity, and the lyrics for a musical based on J.B. Priestly’s Lost Empires. She lives in Newport Beach with her husband, Eric Little, and children, Sydney and William. She teaches at the University of Southern California.

John Terpstra has published seven books of poetry. The most recent, Disarmament (Gaspereau), was nominated for Canada’s Governor General’s Award. The Boys, a book-length version of the essay printed here, will appear this fall from Gaspereau Press. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario, where he will be McMaster University’s writer-in-residence for the fall term.

Daniel Tobin is the author of three books of poems, Where the World Is Made (Middlebury), co-winner of the 1998 Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, Double Life (Louisiana State), nominated for both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and The Narrows (Four Way). His awards include the Robert Penn Warren Award, Greensboro Review Prize, and a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He presently chairs the department of writing, literature, and publishing at Emerson College in Boston.