» Art
» Poetry
» Fiction
» Essays
» Reviews
» Contributors

Jeffery Beam ("Keith Aldritt's The Poet as Spy: The Life and Wild Times of Basil Bunting" & "Cappellazzo & Licata's In Company: Robert Creeley's Collaborations" & "Cid Corman's Nothing Doing" & "The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics' by Rachel Blau DuPlessis & Peter Quartermain, editors" & "Dan Gerber's Trying to Catch the Horses" & "'Illume' by Andrea Rosenberg" & "Luminous Debris: Reflecting on Vestige in Provence and Languedoc' by Gustaf Sobin") is OBR's poetry editor.

J. W. Bonner ("'Rain Mirror' by Michael McClure") has published fiction, poetry, and criticism in many magazines, including Artforum, The Asheville Poetry Review, OBR, and The Quarterly. He teaches literature and writing at The Asheville School in Asheville, North Carolina.

Michel Suret-Canale ("Drawing") was born in 1957 in Paris, where he still lives and works. Michel studied at Sorbonne and earned a Doctorate in Arts and Sciences of Art in 1996. A painter, Michel has worked mainly since 1989 on mixed techniques, using a computer and a Vuteck printer for large compositions (www.robotic-painting.com).

About the [print] cover illustration, Michel writes: "Alas, I have no other drawings from this exhibition I did in 1996 called 'mimematic portraits' and which was a kind of performance in an 'undernet café' because the portraits where done one by one, people where filmed, digitized, vectorized, printed, and I finished the portraits with watercolors, but with people in front of me. It was a way of looking qt the 'unheimlich' Freud was talking about, this strange sensation of strangeness in front of ordinary things (but the face is not, of course, an ordinary thing). I worked like that with people, and it went really well, until very early morning, and the next day when I came back, the portraits fixed on the wall had been put in the garbage by error, so I lost all except what I gave to people and this one which was the prototype with my one face."

Jim Cory ("'At Dusk Iridescent: A Gathering of Poems, 1972-1977' by Thomas Meyer") is a Yaddo and Pennsylvania Arts Council fellow who has authored six chapbooks of poems. He is currently working on a book-length poem about the architect Louis Sullivan.

Miles Efron ("'Wherever' by Kevin Bezner") is a graduate student at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Michael Estabrook ("Guess I Was Just One of the Girls" & "At the Side of the Road") writes, "Alas, the children have finally all moved out. One has only gone to college so she isn't really fully out on her own yet. Anyway, my wife and I recognize there may be a whole new exciting world out there to investigate and explore. The last time we had such thoughts was 25 years ago. Yippee! at more fodder for my poetry farm (but don't tell her I'm looking at it that way)."

Charles Fort ("American Gargoyle" & "The Magic Man Held a Blue Crystal Ball") holds the Reynolds Endowed Chair in Poetry and is Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Kearney. A MacDowell Fellow, he has authored numerous works of poetry. A poem from We Did Not Fear the Father appeared in The Best American Poetry 2000.

Zoë Francesca ("'Serpent' by Nicholas Mosley" & "'Mixing Cement' by Peter Tomassi") is a freelance writer and consultant living in Berkeley, California. She has an MFA in poetry from Mills College and is poetry editor of a new online magazine called On the Page.

Tod Goldberg ("Recognition") is the author of Fake Liar Cheat and his short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including Other Voices, The Santa Monica Review, and The Sun. His novel, Living Dead Girl, will be released in 2002. Tod Goldberg lives in Southern California where he teaches creative writing in the Writers Program at UCLA.

At the time her story was accepted, Sara Graser ("Kissing Charles Bukowski") was living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and had graduated recently from University of New Mexico.

Mark Hornburg ("'Before It's Light' by Lyn Lifshin") is editor of The North Carolina Review of Books and of the online magazine Lather. He is principal book critic for The Independent Weekly and a contributor to Gadfly magazine. He is currently at work on a short story collection.

Larry Johnson ("'The Love-Artist' by Jane Alison") has been publishing poetry in magazines since 1965. His book Veins: Poems 1966-2000 will appear later this year from iUniverse. He teaches at North Carolina State University and is at present writing a novel.

Debra Kaufman ("Directions" & "I Followed Him into the Woods") lives in Mebane, North Carolina, and works at Duke University Press. Her first chapbook, Family of Strangers, was published by Nightshade Press; her second, Still Life Burning, won the Kinloch Rivers Memorial Chapbook Prize sponsored by the South Carolina Poetry Society. Her collection, Certain Light, was published in April 2001 from Emrys Press.

Though an Alabamian by birth, Chip Lands ("In the Dust") lives, works, and writes in Florida, the state to which he has long since pledged his allegiance. He hopes one day to find himself associated with the state's modern literary tradition, following in the footsteps of such writers as Harry Crews, Carl Hiaasen, and Randy Wayne White.

Jared Leising ("Hit and Run") lives in Seattle and teaches English at Cascadia Community College. His work has appeared recently in Rain Crow, and, as a member of the Jack Straw Writers Program, Jared read at the 2001 Seattle Poetry Festival.

Lyn Lifshin's ("Reprieve" & "She Said It Was Her Mother's Breasts") book, Cold Comfort, published by Black Sparrow, was a finalist for the Patterson Award. She has published over 100 books, edited anthologies of women's writings, and has been the subject of a documentary film, Not Made of Glass.

Lindsay Martell ("Amor Eterno by Patricia Preciado Martin") is a freelance journalist and a frequent contributor to New Moon Magazine and OBR. She lives in San Francisco and is an Associate Producer for CNBC Television.

Ann McGarrell ("Roswell") lives unequally in Vermont and Umbria. Her cycle of poems based on the Welsh painter Gwen John is being set to music by the American composer Greg Sandow.

No poorer than before, though having more fun, Kevin McGowin ("'The Body Artist' by Don DeLillo" & "Editor's Note" & "'The Dying Animal' by Philip Roth" & "'Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan' by Howard Sounes") recently resigned from teaching at NC State University to write full-time, currently a volume of Porn entitled Flies in the Buttermilk under the name Rufus Furlong.  McGowin is the author of The Benny Poda Years.

Timothy Normandin's ("The Small Things Come Easy to Me") short stories have been published in Mississippi Review, Mountainfreak, The Nightstand Nightshade Reader, and Potato Eyes. He is a schoolteacher who lives on a lake in northern Massachusetts.

David Plumb ("Felipe's Heart"): "Writing from South Florida. No hills where anyone can get a shot at you. Teach Creative Writing at Florida Atlantic University. Poetry readings on boats and trails. Lived in San Francisco. Edited Smoking Mirror Press. Prose and poetry appear in The Miami Herald, St. Martin's Anthology, Mondo James Dean, Santa Barbara Review. Miss the hills. Hot hot hot! I keep writing. Book of stories this fall, The Truth about Goofy's Head."

Elisha Porat ("Beach Games" & "Triple Jump"), the 1996 winner of Israel's Prime Minister's Prize for Literature, has published 17 volumes of fiction and poetry in Hebrew since 1973. His works have appeared in translation in Canada, England, Israel, and the United States.  His novel The Messiah of Laguardia was published by Mosaic Press in 1997 and is available from Amazon.com. As a lifelong member of his Kibbutz, Porat has worked many years as a farmer as well as a writer.

Dee Rimbaud ("Four Drawings") is a neo-pagan who celebrates life through art, writing, music and drugs. Unlike Arthur, he chose a re-arrangement rather than a derangement of the senses. He is on his way to a happiness that surpasses understanding.

M. A. Roberts' ("'Once in Vermont' by Bob Arnold" & "The Poetry of Benjamin Saltman") poems and reviews have appeared often in OBR. He is the Director of the Writer Center at Virginia Intermont College.

C. C. Russell ("Mike, Waiting, the Smoke Around Your Head Closing In") works as convenience store clerk in Laramie, Wyoming. He was editor of the Owen Wister Review from 1996-7. His poetry has appeared in The Hiram Poetry Review, Mobius, Sulpher River Literary Review, and past issues of OBR, among other places.

Ken Wainio ("Jar of Sperm" & "Pretty Girl" & "The Real Thing") is a San Francisco-based poet and novelist currently holed up under Mt. Konocti in Lake County, California.  An excerpt from his novel Starfuck appeared in OBR9. Bob Kaufman says: "Ken Wainio is the opium of the people."