Contributors
Danny P. Barbare ("The German Shepherd") lives in Greenville, South Carolina and enjoys traveling throughout Western North Carolina.
Jeffery Beam ("Voices of Light" & "Two Anthologies" & "Manifesto: A Century of Isms" & "Antler: The Selected Poems" & "The Soul of Rumi" & "Don't Touch the Poet: The Life and Times of Joel Oppenheimer" & "Basil Bunting On Poetry" & "Pagan Days") is poetry editor of Oyster Boy Review. His enhanced spoken word CD compilation, What We Have Lost: New & Selected Poems 1977-2001, was released in March by Green Finch Press. He's now working on an opera based on the Persephone myth, and a children's book. Visit Beam's Web site at www.unc.edu/~jeffbeam.
Brian Booker's ("The Bread Baker: A Nightmare In Thirty-One Bits") stories have appeared in New England Review and Literal Latte. He is a doctoral candidate and writing teacher at New York University. He is also a contributing editor and book reviewer for Literal Latte.
Tom Bradley's ("Riding the Horse") essays appear in Salon.com, Gadfly, Exquisite Corpse, 3AM, Poets & Writers, McSweeney's, nthposition, and lots of other places. His fiction is in 3AM, Pindeldyboz, Big Bridge, Killing the Buddha, and will be in the next Newtopia. Various of his five published novels have received nominations for the Bobst Prize, the Editor's Book Award, and the AWP Award Series in the Novel. More can be learned by visiting his Web site: www.tombradley.org.
Kyle Conner ("Two Poems") received his MA in creative writing from Temple University in 1995, where he studied with Toby Olson. In the summer of 1998 he published a first chapbook, Songs for South St. Bridge. He has poems and book reviews published in Mass Ave and St. Mark's Poetry Project Newsletter, and work forthcoming in Bivouac. He co-curates the Highwire Reading Series in Philadelphia, and has taught several semesters of remedial and college composition at Temple University and the Community College of Philadelphia.
Cy Dillon ("At the Sky's Edge: Poems 1991-1996" & "Drunk on the Wine: 100 Poems of Hafiz") is a college librarian, living on a small farm at the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. A former editor of Virginia Libraries and associate editor of Nantahala Review, he is fascinated by Web publishing. Active in library issues concerning literacy and freedom of information, he serves as a board member of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government and is past president of the Virginia Library Association. Dillon's poems can be seen in the ezines, Maverick Magazine and Savoy.
Miles Efron ("O Western Wind, When Wilt Thou Blow" & "Untitled") is a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina. He lives in Chapel Hill.
Charles Fort ("American Family Poems #1" & "American Family Poems #2" & "American Family Poems #3" & "American Family Poems #4" & "Elevator Man" & "Walt's Chicken Store") holds the Reynolds Endowed Chair in Poetry and is Professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. A MacDowell Fellow, he has authored numerous works of poetry. "We Did Not Fear the Father" (reviewed in OBR 12) appeared in The Best American Poetry 2000.
Zoë Francesca ("4") is a writer living in Berkeley, California. She gets paid to write about archetypal symbols and shopping districts.
Barry Gifford's ("Life is Like This Sometimes") next book will be The Rooster Trapped in a Reptile Room: The Barry Gifford Reader (Seven Stories Press, 2003). He can be found at www.barrygifford.com.
Reginald Harris ("Herrera's New Loteria" & "What's the Tough Guy Feeling?") is the author of Ten Tongues: Poems (Three Conditions Press, 2002) and head of the Information Technology Support Department of the Pratt Library in Baltimore, Maryland.
Lucy Harrison ("Escaping Reality: Bees and Marijuana and Everything In Between") lives and works in Tallahassee, Florida. Twice winner of eScene's Best Online Fiction award, she was a student of Harry Crews' at the University of Florida. Her first novel, Pray the Lie, is being agented for publication, and she is working on her second novel.
Baker Lawley ("Funeral Game") is finishing his MFA at the University of Alabama this year. His work has also appeared in The Southeast Review, and he is currently at work on a novel about a Civil War battle reenactment gone very, very wrong.
Mitchell LesCarbeau ("What the Tarot Lady Said") has published poems in Albatross, The New England Review, The Nation, and The Carolina Quarterly, and won the Discovery/The Nation poetry contest and Grolier Poetry Prize. LesCarbeau is a professor of English at Green Mountain College where he edits The Blue Zenith, a journal of nature writing.
Kevin McGowin ("The Pursuit of Oblivion: A Global History of Narcotics" & "Old Gods Almost Dead: The 40-Year Odyssey of the Rolling Stones" & "Boulevard: A Novel of New Orleans" & "Shoppers: Two Plays" & "Roscoe" & "From a Buick 8" & "Everything's Eventual: 14 Dark Tales" & "Lullaby" & "The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression") is the author of three acclaimed novels, two volumes of poetry, and numerous stories, articles, essays, and reviews. He currently divides his time between New York, where he is a Literary Assistant to James Purdy; New Orleans, where he directed a successful production of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya" in August; and Tampa, where he and his folk-rock band, Rasputin's Daughter, are recording a new CD, "New Moon Visible." He plans to begin his next novel, The Most Brazen Whore in Tampa, in January 2003.
Jason Ockert's ("Sing Like the Boardies") recent fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Virgin Fiction 2, McSweeney's, River City, CutBank, EggBox, Reinventingtheworld.com's Perfect Anthology of Fiction, and Highway 14. He teaches writing at Ithaca College.
Max Ruback ("Road") lives in West Palm Beach, Florida. Recent or forthcoming fiction appears in Illuminations, Snake Nation Review, Virginia Adversaria, Quick Fiction, and Thrift. Nonfiction in Turnrow, The Writer, The Carolina Quarterly. Ruback is in the midst of finishing a collection of stories.
Laurel Savino ("Common Ectoids of Arizona") lives, works, and walks the dog in New Mexico.
University of Pittsburgh Press published Reginald Shepherd's ("Poems of the Quotidian World" & "A Luminous Desert: Kenny Fries' Painterly Poetics") first book, Some Are Drowning, in 1994 as the winner of the 1993 Associated Writing Programs' Award in Poetry, and also Angel, Interrupted (1996), and Wrong in 1999. His fourth book, Otherhood, is due some time in spring 2003.
Corvin Thomas ("Plant" & "Dope" & "Last Night" & "Jungle Jim" & "Black Out") is a former award-winning television news reporter, recovering alcoholic and addict. Corvin is 45 years old, married, the father of a son, and works freelance.
Karen Trimbath ("The Hell Screens") was born in Taipei, Taiwan, and grew up in the United States. She received her MFA in fiction from Penn State and is working on a novel.
David Tomb ("Five Paintings") grew up in Marin County and attended the College of Marin before receiving his BFA from California State University, Long Beach. Tomb has exhibited widely on both coasts and his work is found in the collections of the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco, and the Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock, among others. Tomb is represented by the Hackett-Freedman Gallery of San Francisco (www.hackettfreedmangallery.com).
Robert West's ("Adjusted Outcome") poems have also appeared in Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, and other magazines. The editor of Blink: A Little Little Magazine of Little Poems, he teaches at Mississippi State University.
Ted Wojtasik ("Glenway Wescott Personally: A Biography") is the chairman of the Creative Writing Department at St. Andrews College in Laurinburg, North Carolina. He has had one novel published, No Strange Fire, based upon Amish barn fires in Pennyslvania. Another novel, Collage, will be published in 2003.