Editorial Statement

Gregory Wolfe, The Four Cultures

Fiction

Tony Woodlief, Name

Melanie Rae Thon, River's Edge

Geoff Wyss, Child of God

Poetry

Cintio Vitier, Good Friday
World

Sharon Cumberland, Prayer
Kyrie Pantokrator

Melissa Range, Scriptorium
The Amanuensis

Michael Chitwood, In Song the Words are Fruit, in Prayer Blight

Greg Miller, Common Ways

Bruce Bond, Elysium
The Human Share

Stuart Dybek, Absolution
Believer

Kelly Cherry, On Value
The Community of Minds

Margaret Rabb, Woman's Constancy
The Good-morrow
Break of Day
Love's Alchemy

Visual Arts

Gordon Fuglie, Jeffrey Mongrain: An Iconography of Eloquence

Bruce Herman, Host & Hunger: Recent Work of Jim Zingarelli

Interview

Heidi Hart, A Conversation with Terry Tempest Williams

Essay

A.G. Harmon, The Mass of Virtue

Anne Welch, Lady Undressing

Claire Holley, The Wisdom of Goodnight Moon: On Making a Record, as the Mother of a Two-year-old

Jill Noel Kandel, Asking for Salt

Web Exclusive: Interview with Claire Holley

Book Review

Hannah Faith Notess, Carol Ann Davis's Psalm
Mark Jarman's Epistles
Kwame Dawes's Gomer's Song

Bruce Bond’s books of poetry include Blind Rain (Louisiana State), Cinder (Etruscan), The Throats of Narcissus (Arkansas), Radiography (BOA), The Anteroom of Paradise (QRL), andIndependence Days (Woodley). He is currently the poetry editor for American Literary Reviewand professor of English at the University of North Texas.

Kelly Cherry has published seventeen books and eight chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Her latest is Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems (Louisiana State). She lives in Halifax, Virginia, with her husband and their dog.

Michael Chitwood is the author of the poetry collections From Whence (Louisiana State) andSpill (Tupelo), as well as a book of essays, Hitting Below the Bible Belt (Down Home). His poetry and fiction have appeared in Poetry, Ohio Review, The New Republic, Threepenny Review, and Oxford American.

Sharon Cumberland has published two chapbooks as well as poems in Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Indiana Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Midwest Quarterly, Verse, and many others. She won the 2007 Zola Prize for Poetry, awarded by the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Association, Kalliope Journal’s Sue Saniel Elkind Award for poetry, and first prize in the Writer’s Haven Press Bright Side poetry competition. She teaches English and poetry at Seattle University.

Stuart Dybek’s most recent book of poems is Streets in Their Own Ink (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). He is also the author of three books of fiction. His awards include a Lannan Literary Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, Whiting Writers’ Award, MacArthur “Genius Award,” and the Rea Award for the Short Story.

Gordon Fuglie is the curator of exhibitions and collections at the San Luis Obispo Art Center. He recently wrote the exhibition catalogue for Looking Back, a retrospective on the thirty-year career of New York painter Neill Slaughter at the Wellington B. Gray Gallery at East Carolina University in Greenville.

A.G. Harmon is the author of A House All Stilled (Tennessee), 2001 winner of the Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel. His fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in the BellinghamReview, Arkansas Review, TriQuarterly, Commonweal, Antioch Review, and elsewhere. He is also the author of a treatise on Shakespeare and the law, “Eternal Bonds, True Contracts”: Law and Nature in Shakespeare’s Problem Plays (SUNY). He teaches at the Columbus School of Law at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.

Heidi Hart holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her books include the memoir Grace Notes (Utah) and the poetry collection Edge by Edge (Toadlily Quartet Series). Hart’s current project, an essay collection titled “Crazygarden,” explores intersections of art and violence. In addition to her work as a writer, Hart is training to provide harp and vocal music for the dying.

Bruce Herman holds the Lothlórien Distinguished Chair in the Fine Arts at Gordon College. His paintings have appeared in over seventy-five exhibitions in major cities in the United States and abroad. His work is housed in the Vatican Museum, UCLA’s Grunwald Center, the Armand Hammer Museum, and the DeCordova Museum, and elsewhere, and is on the web at BruceHerman.com and ABrokenBeauty.com.

Claire Holley, a native of Mississippi, has released six albums. Her music has been featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition and ABC’s Men in Trees. In 2006 she was nominated for an LA Weekly Theater Award for her music for the premiere of the play See Rock City by Arlene Hutton. She is now working on music for an independent film and will be touring this summer in support of her latest release, Hush. Hush is available at CD Baby, iTunes, and at ClaireHolley.com.

Jill Noel Kandel grew up in North Dakota. As an adult she lived in Zambia, Indonesia, England, and in her husband’s native Netherlands. After working abroad for ten years she returned to the U.S. and currently lives with her husband and children in Minnesota. She has been published in Relief: A Quarterly Christian Expression and in Minnesota Literature. She has essays forthcoming in Brevity and Apalachee Review.

Greg Miller’s poems have appeared in the Paris Review, Chicago Review, Open City, Tikkun,and other journals. His books of poems include: Mississippi Sudan (Mercy Seat), Rib Cage, Iron Wheel, and the forthcoming Watch, all three from the Phoenix Poets Series (Chicago). He is also the author of a scholarly work, George Herbert’s “Holy Patterns”: Reforming Individuals in Community (Continuum).

Hannah Faith Notess recently completed her MFA in creative writing at Indiana University. She has recently published work in Crab Orchard Review, Rattle, The Cresset, Ruminate, andChristian Century. She will hold the Milton Center Fellowship at Image during the 2008-09 academic year.

Margaret Rabb’s books of poetry include Granite Dives (New Issues) and the chapbook Old Home (New American). Her poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Light Quarterly, and elsewhere, and her awards include the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize and North Carolina’s Roanoke-Chowan Award. She has taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Washington; next year she will direct the creative writing program at Wichita State University.

Melissa Range is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and a “Discovery”/The Nation Award. Her poems have appeared in the Georgia Review, Paris Review, Poetry London, and Western Humanities Review, among others. She has been poet-in-residence at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, the Emory University Ethics Center, and the Richmond Theological Consortium, and a fellow at Yaddo and the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown.

Melanie Rae Thon’s books include the novel Sweet Hearts (Houghton Mifflin) and the story collection Girls in the Grass (Random House). Her work has been included in Best American Short Stories (1995, 1996), three Pushcart Prize anthologies (2003, 2006, 2008), and O. Henry Prize Stories (2006). Originally from Montana, she now migrates between the Pacific Northwest and Salt Lake City, where she teaches at the University of Utah.

Cintio Vitier is a major figure in Cuban letters, and an internationally acclaimed poet, literary critic, anthologist, and editor. His literary career emerged within the legendary Orígenes group that formed around José Lezama Lima in the late 1940s. With his wife, poet Fina García Marruz, Vitier converted to Catholicism as an adult; the two helped host the historic visit of Pope John Paul II to Cuba. His awards include Cuba’s National Literature Prize and Mexico’s Juan Rulfo Prize.

Kathleen Weaver is a poet, anthologist, and translator from Spanish. Her most recent work is the forthcoming Peruvian Rebel: The World of Magda Portal, with Selected Poems (Penn State). Her translations include the books Where the Island Sleeps Like a Wing by Nancy Morejón (Black Scholar) and Nicaraguan Sketches by Julio Cortázar (Norton). She is preparing an anthology of Cuban poets in translation, “O Tropics!” Her own poems have most recently appeared in ZYZZYVA.

Anne Welch lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Lady Undressing” is her first published nonfiction.

Tony Woodlief is an MFA student in creative writing at Wichita State University. He is a regular essayist for World Magazine, and his blog on faith, parenting, and writing can be found on the web at TonyWoodlief.com. His fiction has also appeared in Ruminate. He lives in Wichita with his wife and four sons.

Geoff Wyss’s first novel, Tiny Clubs, was published in 2007 by Livingston Press. His fiction has appeared in Northwest Review, Chariton Review, Seattle Review, and Mid-American Review. His story “Kids Make Their Own Houses,” first published in Image, was reprinted inNew Stories from the South 2006. A native of Peoria, Illinois, he lives in New Orleans, where he teaches high school.

Read our interview with Claire Holley, only available online!