Editorial Statement

Gregory Wolfe, Poetic Justice

Fiction

Tony Woodlief, Elective
Charles Turner, A Fairly Decent Man

Poetry

Allison Funk, Into the Chambres of Dora Maar

Katharine Coles, Faith
Habits of Invention

Ronny Someck, Abraham on the Way to the Sacrifice
 Ararat Express

Patricia Fargnoli, Glosa
When I Meet You

Alice Friman, Making Cents
Enormous Holdings
The Key

Margaret Gibson, A Good Death
Blessing
Broken Cup

Melanie Rae Thon, The Good Samaritan Speaks
The Window

Stephen Cushman, Atheism’s Easier
Fourth Week, First Contemplation, Second Prelude
No Counting Sheep without Feeding Them, Too

Brian Doyle, Paper Route

Patty Seyburn, Sigh in Silence
A Request

Interview

A Conversation with Marilynne Robinson

The Visual Arts

John A. Kohan, Profound Faith, Profound Beauty:
The Life and Art of Sadao Watanabe

Web Exclusive: Ask John A. Kohan

Matthew Milliner, Seven Years in Chelsea:
From Barricades to Beauty in New York’s Gallery Scene

Essay

Rochelle Hurt, A Disbeliever in Limbo

Confessions

Dennis Covington, Desire

Book Review

Amy Newman on Susanna Childress’s Entering the House of Awe 
Anya Krugovoy Silver’s The Ninety-Third Name of God
and Dana Levin’s Sky Burial

Katharine Coles’s fifth and sixth poetry collections, Flight and Cold Heart, are forthcoming from Red Hen Press. Recent poems have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Southwest Review, upstreet, Diagram, Crazy Horse, and Best Spiritual Writing 2011. She teaches at the University of Utah and co-directs the Utah Symposium in Science and Literature. In 2010, she traveled to Antarctica on a grant from the NSF’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program.

Dennis Covington’s books include the memoir Salvation on Sand Mountain (Perseus), a finalist for the National Book Award. His current project involves a search for “the substance of things hoped for” in what some commentators refer to as a post-Christian world.

Stephen Cushman is Robert C. Taylor Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He has published four collections of poetry: Heart Island (David Robert), Riffraff, Cussing Lesson, and Blue Pajamas (all three from Louisiana State). He is general editor of the fourth edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, forthcoming in 2012.

Brian Doyle is editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland. His most recent books are a novel, Mink River (Oregon State), and a story collection, Bin Laden’s Bald Spot(Red Hen).

Patricia Fargnoli’s latest book, Then, Something (Tupelo), won the Shelia Mooton Award andForeWord Magazine’s Silver Poetry Book Award. She is former poet laureate of New Hampshire, and her poems have recently appeared in Harvard Review, Green Mountains Review, and Nimrod. “In Memory of the Spanish Poet Federico Garcia Lorca” from The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton (©1944 by Our Lady of Gethsemani Monastery) is reprinted by permission of New Directions.

Alice Friman’s new collection is Vinculum (Louisiana State). Her last two books are The Book of the Rotten Daughter (BkMk) and Zoo (Arkansas). New work appears in Georgia Review, Boulevard, New Letters, and the 2012 Pushcart Prize anthology. She is poet-in-residence at Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville. Her podcasts, Ask Alice, can be seen at Alice Friman at Georgia College.

Allison Funk is the author of four books of poems, most recently The Tumbling Box (C&R). Her work has appeared in When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women, Best American Poetry, and literary journals including Image, Poetry, Paris Review, and Shenandoah. She is a professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

Margaret Gibson is the author of ten books of poems from Louisiana State University Press, most recently One Body, winner of the 2008 Connecticut Book Award in Poetry, and Second Nature. A memoir, The Prodigal Daughter, was published in 2008 by University of Missouri Press. The poems in the current issue are from “Broken Cup,” a book in progress of poems about memory loss.

Jennifer L. Holberg has taught English at Calvin College since 1998. She is editor of Shouts and Whispers: Twenty-one Writers Speak about their Writing and their Faith (Eerdmans) and founding coeditor of Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture. She thanks Alexander Westenbroek for his assistance in preparing the Marilynne Robinson interview.

Rochelle Hurt lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She is the recipient of awards from Poetry International, Arts & Letters, and Hunger Mountain. Her poetry and prose can be found in recent issues of the Cincinnati Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Meridian, and KROnline.

Hana Inbar is a native Israeli and the daughter of Yossl Birstein, a noted Israeli writer. She and her co-translator Robert Manaster have published translations of poetry in journals including Virginia Quarterly Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Zoland Poetry, and The Dirty Goat.

John A. Kohan worked at Time magazine for twenty-two years as an associate editor and correspondent. He settled in Cyprus in 1996, where he began collecting and writing about contemporary sacred art. He now lives in the US and owns the Sacred Art Pilgrim Collection and directs the Art in the Sanctuary program at Saint Peter’s Episcopal Church in Delaware, Ohio.

Robert Manaster has published his poetry in journals including Many Mountains Moving, International Poetry Review, and The Literary Review.

Matthew J. Milliner received his PhD from Princeton University and is an assistant professor of art history at Wheaton College. Passages from his essay first appeared, in slightly different form, at millinerd.com and On the Square, the blog of First Things.

Amy Newman’s fourth book of poetry, Dear Editor (Persea), was awarded the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Prize. She is founding editor of Ancora Imparo, the journal of “art, process, and remnant,” and is a Presidential Research Professor at Northern Illinois University.

Patty Seyburn has published three books of poems: Hilarity (New Issues), Mechanical Cluster (Ohio State), and Diasporadic (Helicon Nine). She is an associate professor at California State University, Long Beach, and coeditor of Pool: A Journal of Poetry(www.poolpoetry.com).

Ronny Someck was born in Baghdad in 1951 and came to Israel as a young child. He has published ten volumes of poetry, most recently Algeria and The Milk Underground, and a book for children, The Laughter Button, with his daughter Shirly. His work has been translated into thirty-nine languages, and his many awards include the Prime Minister’s Award and Yehuda Amichai Award.

Melanie Rae Thon’s books include the novel Sweet Hearts (Washington Square) and the story collection First, Body (Henry Holt). Her work has been included in Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and in O. Henry Prize Stories. Originally from Montana, she now teaches at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

Charles Turner has been publishing short stories and essays since 1965. His most recent novel is Sometimes It Causes Me to Tremble (Lion). He has also written a picture book, The Turtle and the Moon (Dutton), and co-authored a treatise on the spirituality of bread, The Feast(Harper). His plays have been produced in professional and community theaters.

Tony Woodlief’s short stories, two of which have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, have appeared in Ruminate and Image.

Read our interview with John A Kohan, only available online!