Editorial Statement

Gregory Wolfe, Giotto's Ratio

Fiction

Thea Swanson, Stuck in Crafts

Bruce McAllister, Sun and Stone

Poetry

Daniel Tobin, An Icon from the Flood
The Hours

Nicholas Samaras, Psalm as Frustration I Can Live With
The Psalm of Then
The Psalm of Your Face
A Man Gone to Time, a Woman Crucified

Lia Purpura, Fall
Border Report

Jeffrey Thomson, Underwhelmed
Quo Vadis?

Chris Forhan, Bone Box
Brought Back

Khaled Mattawa, Bedtime Reading for the Unborn Child
Lullaby for the Aborted Child

Jill Alexander Essbaum, Apologia

Tara Bray, Rain
A Prayer

Amit Majmudar, Answers from the Whirlwind

Visual Arts

James Romaine, Active Sight: Vija Celmins and Jackson Pollock from Pictorialism to Perception

Daniel A. Siedell, Altars to the Unknown God: Modern Art for Modern Christians

Web Exclusive: A Conversation with Daniel A. Siedell

Interview

Gregory Wolfe, A Conversation with Thomas Lynch

Essays

Pattiann Rogers, Born, Again and Again

Artur Grabowski, Unapologetic Visibility

Confessions

Kathleen Norris, Psyche, Soul, and Muse

Jessie van Eerden, Boy in a Blue Sweatshirt

Tara Bray’s poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Third Coast, Green Mountains Review, Crab Orchard Review, Puerto Del Sol, and elsewhere. Her manuscript Mistaken for Songrecently won the Lexi Rudnitsky Prize and will be published by Persea Books in January 2009.

Jill Alexander Essbaum is the author of the poetry collections Heaven (UPNE), Oh Forbidden (Pecan Grove), Harlot (No Tell Books), and Necropolis (neoNuma Arts). Her poetry has appeared in journals both religious and secular, domestic and foreign, well-known and obscure.

Chris Forhan is the author of The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars (Northeastern) and Forgive Us Our Happiness (New England), which won the Bakeless Prize. He is the recipient of a 2007 NEA fellowship, and his poems have appeared recently in Paris Review, Ploughshares, and New England Review. He teaches at Butler University in Indianapolis.

Artur Grabowski is a Polish poet, playwright, and essayist. He is an associate professor of literature at the Jagiellonian University, Krakow, and currently a Fulbright scholar at the University of Washington, where he teaches Polish culture.

Amit Majmudar is a diagnostic radiologist completing a fellowship in nuclear medicine. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio, with his wife and twin sons. His first book will be published by TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press.

Khaled Mattawa was born in Benghazi, Libya. His books of poetry include Zodiac of Echoes(Ausable) and Ismailia Eclipse (Sheep Meadow). He also translates Arabic poetry and is co-editor of two anthologies of Arab American literature. His awards include Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, two Pushcart Prizes, and the PEN American Center Poetry in Translation Prize.

Bruce McAllister is the author of The Girl Who Loved Animals and Other Short Stories(Golden Gryphon). His short fiction has appeared in many publications, including Best American Short Stories 2007. Son of a career Navy officer, he spent a portion of his childhood in a fishing village in Italy.

Kathleen Norris is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (Houghton Mifflin), The Cloister Walk, Amazing Grace, and The Virgin of Bennington (all from Riverhead). Her seven volumes of poetry include Little Girls in Church(Pittsburgh). She has been an oblate of Assumption Abbey in North Dakota for nearly twenty years.

Lia Purpura’s essay collection On Looking (Sarabande) was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of the essay collection Increase (Georgia) and the poetry collections Stone Sky Lifting (Ohio State) and The Brighter the Veil (Orchises). She is writer-inresidence at Loyola College and teaches at the Rainer Writing Workshop’s MFA Program.

Pattiann Rogers has published thirteen books, most recently Wayfare (Penguin). Her awards include a Lannan Foundation Award and five Pushcart Prizes. Her papers are archived in the Sowell Collection at Texas Tech University. She lives with her husband in Colorado.

James Romaine is co-founder of the New York Center for Arts and Media Studies, a program of Bethel University. He has a PhD in art history from the graduate center of the City University of New York, where he wrote his dissertation on Tim Rollins and K.O.S. He lectures widely and has written numerous articles on faith and the visual arts.

Artur Rosman, who translated Artur Grabowski’s essay, is a PhD student in comparative literature at the University of Washington. Currently residing in Poland, he recently translated the book God and Auschwitz for the Auschwitz Center for Dialogue and Prayer. He blogs forThe Other Journal and the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory. In September, he married Monika Mistarz.

Nicholas Samaras won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for Hands of the Saddlemaker (Yale). His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, Paris Review, Poetry, New Republic, and Kenyon Review. He is now working on a manuscript entitled “Psalms, Miktams, and Maskils,” as well as a memoir. He lives in West Nyack, New York.

Daniel A. Siedell is an assistant professor of modern and contemporary art history, theory, and criticism at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. God in the Gallery: A Christian Approach to Modern Art (Baker Academic) is forthcoming this fall. He has recently written on the work of Joel Sheesley, Conrad Bakker, David Bates, R.A. Blakelock, Enrique Martínez Celaya, and Robyn O’Neil.

Thea Swanson holds an MFA in fiction from Pacific University in Oregon. Her work appears in Our Stories and Crab Creek Review. She grew up in Buffalo, New York, and now teaches English at West Sound Academy in Washington State, cares for her three children, and is the matushka (priest’s wife) of Saint Elizabeth Orthodox Church.

Jeffrey Thomson is the author of four books of poems, including the forthcomingBirdwatching in Wartime (Carnegie Mellon). He is the Individual Artist Fellow in the Literary Arts for the state of Maine, 2008, and an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Maine, Farmington. His website is www.JeffreyThomson.com.

Daniel Tobin’s books include: Where the World Is Made (Middlebury), co-winner of the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize; Double Life (Louisiana State), nominated for both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award; and the forthcoming Second Things (Four Way). He has received the Robert Penn Warren Award, Greensboro Review Prize, and an NEA fellowship.

Jessie van Eerden, a West Virginia native, holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. Her essays have appeared in Best American Spiritual Writing, River Teeth, Ruminate, Geez Magazine, and Bellingham Review, as well as a few other journals. She held the 2007-08 Milton Fellowship at Image and now teaches at the Oregon Extension with her husband Mike.

Read our interview with Dan Siedell, only available online!