Editorial Statement

Gregory Wolfe, The Wound of Beauty

Fiction

Sandra Scofield, Charity

Alison Gresik, Understanding Fiction

Lynda Sexson, Sally, Lucky, Ghost, and Spot

Poetry

B.H. Fairchild, Trilogy

Rachel Dacus, Flying Letters
For a Day of Silence

Judith Ortiz Cofer, We Become the Monkey Girl
The Aging Maria

Murray Bodo, OFM, Sewing Box

Robert A. Fink, Sandalwood

Robert Cording, Four Prayers

Visual Arts

T.H. Miller, The Vessel and the Light: Ruth Weisberg Reads the Torah

E.K. Kresser, Zhi Lin: A New Old Master

Interview

Brennan O'Donnell, A Conversation with Mary Karr

Essay

Paul Mariani, Hopkins' Late Poetics: The Christ-saturated Thing Itself

Confessions

Laura Bramon Good, First Year

Murray Bodo is a Franciscan priest. His most recent book is Mystics: Ten Who Show Us the Ways of God (Saint Anthony Messenger). A new volume of his poems, Wounded Angels, will be published in the spring of 2008 by Bliss Fool Press of Windermere, England.

Judith Ortiz Cofer’s books include the poetry collection A Love Story Beginning in Spanish,the essay collection Woman in Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Writer (both from the University of Georgia), and the novel The Meaning of Consuelo (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). She is Regents’ and Franklin Professor of English and creative writing at the University of Georgia.

Robert Cording teaches English and creative writing at Holy Cross College. His poetry collections are Life-list (Ohio State), What Binds Us To This World (Copper Beech), Heavy Grace (Alice James), and Against Consolation (CavanKerry). He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Bread Loaf, and elsewhere. His poems have appeared in the Nation, New Yorker, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Poetry, DoubleTake, Orion, Paris Review, and elsewhere.

Rachel Dacus’s third poetry collection is Another Circle of Delight, a chapbook from Small Poetry Press’s Select Poets Series. Her poems are also available on two CDs, A God You Can Dance (CanDance) and Singing in the Pandaleshwar Caves (Alsop). Her poetry and prose have appeared widely in print and online, and in the anthologies Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English (Wesleyan) and Italy: A Love Story (Seal). More of her writing is at www.DacusHome.com.

B.H. Fairchild’s most recent books of poems are Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (Norton) and The Art of the Lathe (Alice James), a finalist for the National Book Award. He has also received Guggenheim and Rockefeller/Bellagio Fellowships. “Trilogy” will be included in a new poetry collection, Usher, out this fall from Norton, as well as in a special edition from Pennyroyal Press with engravings by Barry Moser.

Robert A. Fink is the W.D. and Hollis R. Bond Professor of English and director of creative writing at Hardin-Simmons University. He has published five books of poetry, the most recent being Tracking the Morning (Wings). His poems have appeared in Poetry, TriQuarterly, New England Review, and elsewhere, and are forthcoming in the Southern Review. He is also the author of a book of nonfiction, Twilight Innings: A West Texan on Grace and Survival (Texas Tech).

Laura Bramon Good lives in Washington, DC, where she works on human trafficking issues for the federal government. She received an MA from the Johns Hopkins University writing seminars and was the 2005 Milton Center fellow at Image. Her fiction is forthcoming from Featherproof Press, and she blogs about life in an urban family commune at www.Oakies.Wordpress.com.

Alison Gresik earned an MA in creative writing from the University of Calgary. Her linked story collection, Brick and Mortar, was published by Oberon Press and nominated for the Ottawa Book Award. Other work has appeared in Descant and Grain. Her website is www.Gresik.ca.

E.K. Kresser is an assistant professor of art history at Seattle Pacific University. She received her PhD from Harvard in 2006 and her BA from Indiana University in 1998. She is currently researching the aesthetic thought of the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain and its relationship to the work of early modern painters like Paul Cezanne and the American John La Farge.

Paul Mariani is one of America’s leading poets and literary biographers. His volumes on William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, and Hart Crane were all New York Times notable books. His six books of poetry include The Great Wheel (Norton) and Deaths & Transfigurations (Paraclete). His nonfiction works include Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of Saint Ignatius (Viking) and God and the Imagination (Georgia). He is the University Professor of English at Boston College and has taught in the low-residency MFA program at Seattle Pacific University.

T.H. Miller writes about contemporary art for various national and international publications.

Brennan O’Donnell is professor of English and dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill, Fordham University. He is the author of The Passion of Meter: A Study of Wordsworth’s Metrical Art (Kent State) and co-editor of a collection of essays, The Work of Andre Dubus (a special issue of Religion and the Arts), and has published numerous scholarly articles. He served for six years as editor of the national magazine Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education.

Sandra Scofield is the author of the memoir Occasions of Sin (Norton) and three novels:Gringa (Permanent), winner of the New American Writing Award; Beyond Deserving(Permanent), a finalist for a National Book Award; and A Chance to See Egypt (HarperCollins). She has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and participated in outreach programs for Oregon Literary Arts and the National Book Foundation. Her newest work is a book for writers, The Scene Book (Penguin).

Lynda Sexson is professor of humanities at Montana State University. Her books areOrdinarily Sacred (Virginia), Margaret of the Imperfections (Persea), and Hamlet’s Planets: Parables (Ohio State). Her fiction and essays have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Story Quarterly, Image, and elsewhere. Ordinarily Sacred has been translated into Dutch, and one of her stories was translated into Japanese by Haruki Murakami and appears in his collectionBirthday Stories (Vintage).