Contributors
Louis Adame's ("School Days, 1977") work has appeared in The Chiron Review, The Chachalaca Poetry Review, Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, and Southwestern Louisiana Literary Journal.
Originally from Oregon, Ron Bayes' ("Courtyard" & "The Last Hours of Prince Illyricus" & "Politics") latest of twelve books of verse is Guises (Northern Lights Press). These poems are from his work in progress, Vere. He directs the Writing Program at St. Andrews College, Laurinburg, North Carolina.
Jeffery Beam ("Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English" & "'Particularities' by Kevin Bezner" & "Anne Carson's Economy of the Unlost & Men in the Off Hours" & "Evaporate Again by C. A. Conrad" & "Four Books by Ricky Garni" & "To Do As Adam Did by Ronald Johnson" & "The Listeners" & "Three Books about Books" & "Blackbird Dust by Jonathan Williams") is OBR's poetry editor.
Kevin Bezner's ("Thom Gunn's Boss Cupid & Anne Stevenson's Granny Scarecrow" & "Nature: Poems Old and New by May Swenson" & "Ford Swetnam's Ghostholders Know") collection of poetry The Tools of Ignorance was published in 1997 by Cincinnati Writers' Project. CWP also published Wherever in 1999 and Particularities in 2000. Bezner is also co-editor of The Wilderness of Vision: On the Poetry of John Haines, published by Story Line Press.
J. W. Bonner ("Andrea Selch & George Elliott Clarke's Succory & Gold Indigoes") has written previously for Oyster Boy Review. His work also appears regularly in The Asheville Poetry Review; an essay on Mina Loy and a review of a Forrest Gander poetry collection appeared in the most recent issue.
Collin Bunting ("Motive") lives in Chicago and is currently looking into applying for an MFA in poetry at several schools across the United States.
George Elliott Clarke's ("I.iii" & "I.v" & "I.vii") books include Saltwater Spirituals and Deeper Blues and Lush Dreams and Whylah Falls (Polestar Books). Originally from Nova Scotia, Clarke teaches at the University of Toronto.
C. A. Conrad's ("When Frank Breaks into Your House" & "Frank and his Wife") work has appeared in American Writing, Exquisite Corpse, Chiron Review, and other magazines. A book, Frank, is forthcoming from The Jargon Society, and advanced ELVIS course is forthcoming from Buck Downs Books.
Jim Cory ("Iron Kettle" & "Of Pyrus communis") 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.
Thomas Rain Crowe ("Back Nets") is the author of eleven books of original and translated work and editor of the acclaimed anthology of Celtic language poets _Writing the Wind: A Celtic Resurgence was released in August of 2001 by Shambhala. He lives in the mountains of western North Carolina.
Jim DeWitt ("Because I Wanted To") has published in numerous magazines including Stroker, Street Beat, and Taggerzine. He lives in Michigan where he edits Cephalic Thunder.
Sophie Drew ("Three Bath-tub Poems"), now four, is Oyster Boy Review's youngest poet yet. The poems were orally transmitted to her mother during a two-week stretch in November 1999, mostly while Sophie took her bath. She lives with her mother, Gianna Menapace-Drew, and her father John Drew, in Concord, Massachussets. Sophie has a baby brother Nate, born September 28, 2000. Sophie is the granddaughter of photographer John Menapace, featured in this issue.
Born in 1947 in Los Angeles, California, G. G. Gach ("Three Songs of Xanadu Made New") is editor of What Book: Buddha Poems from Beat to Hiphop and author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Buddhism (Alpha Books, 2001).
Born in 1920 in Hawaii, C. H. Kwock is co-translator, with Vincent McHugh, of Old Friend from Far Away: 150 Chinese Poems from the Great Dynasties and Tiger Rider & Other Chinese Epigrams (The Li Po Society of America, 1986).
Ricky Garni ("Class Notes" & "Requiem for the Common Man, Or Fanfare of the Common Man, Or Possibly, Laundry") lives in Carrboro, North Carolina, near the Farmers' Market and the fire station. He is presently working on a book of designs with his son, Linus. With his other son, Dashiell, he is baking oatmeal cookies.
Dan Gerber ("Contemplating My Reflection in a Puddle on the Last Day of the 20th Century") has published three novels, a short-story collection, six volumes of poetry and, in 2001, A Second Life: A Collected Nonfiction. He lives with his wife Debbie in Santa Ynez, California, and on the Idaho-Wyoming border.
Will Inman ("A Late Tatter of Eden" & "Deep in Under, Out in Air") was born May 4, 1923, in Wilmington, North Carolina. Now retired, he lives in Tucson, Arizona. Latest chapbooks: Surfing the Dark Sound and You Whose Eyes Open Naked Into Me (Mille Grazie Press).
George Kalamaras's ("The Birds Cannot Disappear" & "A Temple Pool Might Ignite Lotus-Blood from Your Heart") poems appear in Best American Poetry 1997, Boulevard, Epoch, The Iowa Review, New Letters, Sulfur, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Heart Without End and Beneath the Breath (Tilton House, 1988). His first full-length collection, The Theory and Function of Mangoes, won the 1998 Four Way Books Intro Series in Poetry Award and was published by Four Way Books in 2000. He is associate professor of English at Indiana University & Purdue University, Fort Wayne.
Janet Lembke ("One" & "Zero") has been the poet in a poet-scholar collaboration translating Greek tragedies for Oxford University Press: two by Aeschylus, two by Euripides. Otherwise, she writes essays about the natural world—wildlife and wild people. Forthcoming from Burford Books is Touching Earth, tales of vegetable gardening, including chapters on bugs and weeds
Joseph Massey ("Center of a Room") writes: "Work has appeared in House Organ, Longhouse, Milk, Mungo Vs. Ranger, Nemocolin X Press, Poethia, Poetry Broadside, and is forthcoming in Antennae. I have no idea where I'll be living by the time this appears."
John Menapace ("Two Photographs") is a distinquished photographer and former editor at Duke University Press. His works include Letter in a Klein Bottle (Jargon Society, 1984). He is the grandfather of Sophie Drew, whose poems appear in this issue.
Keith Mitchell ("Ancestors by Kamau Brathwaite") is a graduate student in the Department of Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill. His area of concentration is Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature. His interests also include North African and African American literature. Currently, he is co-editing a collection of essays on the African American writer Gayl Jones.
Mark Roberts' ("The Lost Sea by Keith Flynn") poems and reviews have appeared in Oyster Boy Review in the past. He is the Director of the Writer Center at Virginia Intermont College.
Alan Sondheim ("My Medical Expert System" & "I am in Love with Language") is a writer and theorist living in Brooklyn and Miami, editor of Being On Line, The Case of the Real, Disorders of the Real, and .echo (published by Alt-X). Sondheim founded the Fiction-of-Philosophy list on the Internet, and co-founded Cybermind and Cyberculture email lists.
Shelby Stephenson's ("Billy" & "For the Birds") new book is Fiddledeedee.
Robert West's ("Re-Sounding: Selected Later Poems by Theodore Enslin" & "'A Certain Light' by Debra Kaufman" & "When I Find You Again It Will Be in Mountains") poems have recently appeared in Pembroke Magazine and Hummingbird. His poetry reviews appear regularly in Oyster Boy Review, The Carolina Quarterly, and The Asheville Poetry Review. He teaches at Wake Forest University. He has recently begun a new magazine for the short poem called Blink.