Issue 8

Contributors

Robert Bly is one of the best-known poets in America. He has won the National Book Award for his collection The Light Around the Body , and is an influential commentator on men's roles, the power of myth, and other topics. His recent book of prose, Iron John: A Book About Men , became a best-seller and has been translated into many languages. His new book of poems , Meditations on the Insatiable Soul , was published in late 1994.

Bo Caldwell , a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, is currently a lecturer in creative writing at Stanford. Her stories have appeared in Epoch, Story, and other literary journals, and they received the San Francisco Foundation's Jackson Award. She is working on a collection of stories tentatively titled When Children Are Present .

Annie Dillard , winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, is one of America's most distinguished writers. She has written books in a variety of genres, including poetry (Tickets for a Prayer Wheel), criticism (Living by Fiction), autobiography (An American Childhood), and fiction ( The Living). She was awarded the first annual 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.

Robert Drake has published five books of short stories, the most recent of which is My Sweetheart's House . He has also published a book of family memoirs, The Home Place, and more than 100 articles and reviews. Drake is a professor of English at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

David Fetcho is artistic co-director and resident composer with New Performance Consort, an intermedia performance ensemble in the San Francisco Bay area. He has published many articles relating artistic vision to Christian faith, and composes electronic music scores for dance, theater, broadcast, and liturgy. He and his wife Susan English Fetcho are currently visiting professors of the arts and worship at New College Berkeley, and were liturgists for Image 's first two national conferences in 1992 and 1993.

Gordon Fuglie directs the Laband Art Gallery of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He is the organizer of the 1994-95 traveling exhibition Burning Lights: Spirituality, Tradition and Craft in Recent Art from the City of Angels . His current research interest focuses on the impact of modernity on religious art production.

Jeff Gundy has published a collection of poems, Inquiries; a second collection, Flatlands, will be published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 1995. He is a professor of English at Bluffton College in Bluffton, Ohio.

A.G. Harmon is a 1994-95 Milton Center Post-Graduate Fellow. He received his M.A. in creative writing at the University of New Hampshire. As part of the Milton Center Fellowship, he is completing a novel entitled In Mute Appeal .

Martha Whitmore Hickman has published twenty-five books for children and adults. Her latest book of fiction was a collection of short stories, Fullness of Time: Short Stories of Women and Aging . One of these stories, “The Last Hour,” won the Associated Church Press Fiction Award in 1990.

Emily Hiestand has published a collection of poetry, Green the Witch-Hazel Wood and a collection of travel literature, The Very Rich Hours. She won the National Poetry Series Award in 1989. An essayist and visual artist as well as a poet, Hiestand serves as literary and poetry editor for Orion, a literary nature quarterly. Her forthcoming books are Alluvial (in which the poems in this issue of Image will appear) and Travels at Home, a book of essays.

Jean Janzen teaches poetry writing at Fresno Pacific College in California and Eastern Mennonite College in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. Janzen's latest collection is The Upside-Down Tree, published by Windflower Communications in Winnipeg, Canada.

William Kennedy 's 1983 novel Ironweed won the Pulitzer Prize and earned him a prestigious MacArthur Foundation grant. One of America's leading novelists, Kennedy has published four other novels in a continuing cycle of books set in Albany, New York.

Rudy Nelson, who interviewed novelist William Kennedy for this issue, is a recently retired professor of English at the University at Albany in New York state. A writer in the field of literature and religion, his 1988 book is entitled The Making and Unmaking of an Evangelical Mind: The Case of Edward Carnell.

Eric Pankey has published three collections of poems: For the New Year (Atheneum, 1984), Heartwood (Atheneum, 1988), and Apocrypha (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991). He teaches in the writing program at Washington University in St. Louis.

J. Francis Stafford is the Roman Catholic archbishop of Denver, and formerly was the bishop of Memphis, Tennessee. Active throughout his priesthood in the area of ecumenical dialogue, Archbishop Stafford is the only American member in the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. He was a co-author of the 1994 Catholic/Protestant declaration, “Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium.”

Daniel Tobin's poetry manuscript, Where the World Is Made , was a finalist for the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, the Marianne Moore Award, and the Intro Award in Poetry. An assistant professor of English at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Tobin has published poems in Poetry, American Scholar, Prism International, and many other journals.