Authors In Issue Three
Liz Abrams Morley is the author of Learning to Calculate the Half Life (Zinka Press, 2001). Her poems and occasionally stories have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies and have been read on NPR. She is co-founder of Around the Block Writers Collaborative (www.writearoundtheblock.com) and teaches poetry in schools and community centers throughout her home state of Pennsylvania.Fawzia Afzal Khan
Dani Antman is a full time healer in Lambertville, New Jersey. She received her B.F.A. from The New York School of Interior Design, in 1979. She was a free lance artist for 14 years, doing perspective illustrations of interiors, called renderings. Dani has taught rendering at Parsons School of Design, F.I.T. and New York School of Interior Design. She has studied collage with Jonathan Talbot and oil painting with Ty Hodanish, Stephen Kennedy, and others. She has studied healing for over 15 years, including training at The Barbara Brennan School of Healing and A Society of Souls.
J.T. Barbarese first two books were Under the Blue Moon (1985) and New Science (1989), both published in the Contemporary Authors Series of University of Georgia Press. His adaptation of Euripides’ The Children of Heracles appears in Euripides’, 4 in the University of Pennsylvania’s Greek Drama Series (1999). His poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Boulevard, The Georgia Review, The Denver Quarterly, The Cortland Review, and Poetry, and in the anthology, The Italian-American Reader (Morrow, 2003) and his translations in The Denver Quarterly, Boulevard, and Luna. He also writes fiction, and his literary journalism has appeared in Tri-Quarterly, The Sewanee Review, Studies in English Literature, The Journal of Modern Literature, The New York Times, and The Columbia History of American Poetry.
Lisa Bellamy graduated from Princeton and studies poetry with Philip Schultz at the Writers Studio. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Harpur Palate, Manzanita Quarterly, Ibbetson Street Press, Arsenic Lobster, and other magazines. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband Peter Bellamy, a photographer, with whom she will collaborate on a book of wilderness photography and text.
Robert Bly is a poet, storyteller, translator, and worldwide lecturer. His poetry has won many prizes, including the National Book Award. His first full-length book of prose, Iron John, was number one on The New York Times nonfiction bestseller list for ten weeks, remaining on the list itself for more than a year. With his wife, Ruth, he lives on a lake in Minnesota.
Lenore Bohm is a rabbi who serves the San Diego Jewish Healing Center. She also cofounded and codirects Soulstice Retreats through which she leads monthly spiritual growth groups, daylong and weekend retreats focusing on a Jewish approach to contemplative practice. She was ordained from Hebrew Union College in 1982 and studied feminist theology at Claremont Graduate School
Diane Bonavist founded Resourceful Woman, a community resource publication during the feminist scare of the seventies. She is a technical writer and indexer and has written historical novels about the Albigensian Crusade, Classical Greece, and 1920s New York. She teaches novel-writing techniques to adults and works in academic admissions.
Rafael Campo teaches and practices internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. His most recent books include Diva (Duke University Press, 2000), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry;
Helen Marie Casey poetry has been published in several journals and anthologies and her columns appear in various venues. Helen was a finalist for The Iowa Award in Poetry 2004 and a semi-finalist for the Louisiana Literature Prize for Poetry, the 2001 Discovery/The Nation contest and the 2002 and 1999 Say the Word competitions. She won the 2001 Boyle/Farber Award, the 2001 Erika Mumford Award and the 1998 Barbara Bradley Award from the New England Poetry Club and was a finalist for the 1998 Greensboro Awards and the 1998 New Letters Literary Awards. Finishing Line Press will be bringing out my first chapbook in April. The chapbook, titled, Fragrance Upon His Lips, is a narrative series of poems on Joan of Arc.
Raelee Chapman
Greg Cook is a native of northern New York State. He studies geography at Syracuse University and holds a degree in English and History from the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. His writing has appeared most recently in In Communion and Parabola. Cook lives in Washington State with his wife and their three cats and works in a library.
Peter Cooley was born in Detroit and grew up there in the suburbs of the city. A graduate of Shimer College, The University of Chicago and The University of Iowa, where he was a student in the Writers Workshop and received his Ph.D. He is currently Professor of English at Tulane University in New Orleans teaching creative writing. Married and the father of three children, he has published six book of poetry: The Company of Strangers (University of Missouri), which has been reissued by Coyne & Chenoweth, and The Room Where Summer Ends, Nightseasons, The Van Gogh Notebook, The Astonished Hours and Sacred Conversations, all of which were published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. From 1970-2000 he was Poetry Editor for North American Review. His new volume, A Place Made of Starlight, appeared in January 2003.
Joshua Corey is the author of Selah (Barrow Street Press, 2003) and his manuscript Fourier Series won the Fitzpatrick-O’Dinn Award judged by Christian Bok and is forthcoming from Spineless Books. He lives in Ithaca, New York and keeps a blog at http://joshcorey.blogspot.com.
Barbara Crooker’s has published in magazines such as Yankee, The Christian Science Monitor, Smartish Pace, and The Denver Quarterly, anthologies, including Worlds in their Words: An Anthology of Contemporary American Women Writers, and eleven chapbooks. Her first full-length book, Radiance, won the Word Press First Book award, and will come out in July, 2005. She has received three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships in Literature, seventeen Pushcart Prize nominations, and won the 2004 WB Yeats Society Award.
Lisa Couturier
Laura Didyk’s work has been published in Fence, Puerto del Sol, and Hayden’s Ferry Review among others. She is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Alabama. She now lives and works in the Hudson Valley.
Catherine Doty is the recipient of the 2003 Marjorie J. Wilson Award, an Academy of American Poets Award, and fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She was born and raised near Garrett Mountain in Paterson, New Jersey and has taught thereabouts for many years. Momentum, her first book of poems, was published in 2004 by CavanKerry Press
Corie Feiner is a poet, performer, and freelance educator in New York City. She was a 2004 Pushcart Prize nominee and a finalist for the 2000 Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Kalliope, Caylx, Runes, 5 AM, and Phoebe, among other journals. She is the author of Radishes into Roses (Linear Arts Press, 1997) and is currently pursuing publication of her poetry collection, Maw-Maw. She is the Contributing Editor of Tiferet.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan is the Founder and the Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ She is also a Professor and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Binghamton University-State University of New York .She has published eight books of poetry, including The Weather of Old Seasons(Cross-Cultural Communications, 1988), Where I Come From(1995) and Things My Mother Told Me(Guernica Editions,1998).Her latest book is Italian Women in Black Dresses(Guernica,2002). She is co-editor with her daughter Jennifer of three anthologies published by Penguin/Putnam: Unsettling America, Identity Lessons, and Growing up Ethnic in America. She also has co-edited with her daughter Jennifer Gillan and Edvige Giunta, Italian American Writers on New Jersey (Rutgers University Press).She is the editor of the award-winning Paterson Literary Review. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, the New York Times, Poetry Ireland, Connecticut Review, LIPS, and Rattle, as well as in numerous other journals and anthologies. She has won the Angelie Lauri award, the John Fante Award, May Carton Award, the Fearing Houghton Award, New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowships in Poetry, and the American Literary Translator’s Award through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Kerry Hardie was born in 1951. Her first collection A Furious Place was published in 1996 by Gallery Press. Cry for the Hot Belly was published by Gallery Press in 2000. Her first novel A Winter Marriage was published in 2002 by Little, Brown. The third collection, The Sky Didn’t Fall, was published by Gallery Press in 2003. Her second novel is due from Little, Brown in 2005. She has won many prizes and awards including, The National Poetry Prize. She has won the Women’s National Poetry Prize twice.
Lois Marie Harrod won a 2003 fellowship, her third, from the New Jersey Council on the Arts for her poetry. Her sixth book of poetry Spelling the World Backward (200) was published by Palanquin Press, University of South Carolina Aiken, which also published her chapbook This Is a Story You Already Know (l999) and her book Part of the Deeper Sea (l997). Her poems have appeared in journals from A-Z, American Poetry Review to Zone 3.
Meghan Hickey’s poems are published or forthcoming in The Cream City Review, Harvard Review, The Larcom Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and The Saint Ann’s Review. She lives and works in New Jersey.
Thomas E. Kennedy’s books include seven volumes of fiction, an essay collection, four of literary criticism and several anthologies. His most recent novel appeared in fall 2003 entitled Bluett’s Blue Hour. It is the second volume in his Copenhagen Quartet. The three other volumes in the Quartet are Kerrigan’s Copenhagen, A Love Story (2002), Greene’s Summer (2004), and Breathwaite’s Fall (in progress, scheduled for 2005 publication). His book of essays on writing, Realism & Other Illusions, appeared in 2002 (Wordcraft of Oregon).
Pamela Kircher’s poetry has garnered many awards, including four Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowships, a residency at the MacDowell Colony, and publication in Best American Poetry 1993. Her full-length collection of poems, Whole Sky, was published by Four Way Books in 1996.
Reeves Keyworth is the recipient of a Fellowship in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts; she has recently published in Chelsea, Nimrod, and online at mississippireview.com. She and her husband, Jim Weston, live in New York City and Tucson, Arizona.
Laurie Lamon is an Associate professor of English at Whitworth College, in Spokane, Washington. My first collection is coming out from CavanKerry in 2004-5. I have work forthcoming in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The Colorado Review, Cream City Review, and other places. My work in the past has appeared in these journals and other places including Ploughshares, The New Criterion, Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Cultures, and many others. She has a book coming out in March.
Patrick Lane Patrick Lane, considered by most writers and critics to be one of Canada's finest poets, was born in 1939 in Nelson, British Columbia. He has worked at a variety of jobs from labourer to industrial accountant, but much of his life has been spent as a poet, having produced twenty-two books ofpoetry to date. He is also the father of five children and grandfather of five.
He has won every literary prize in Canada, from the Governor General's Award to the BC Book Prize. His poetry and fiction have been widely anthologized and have been translated into many languages.
Patrick Lane now makes his home in Victoria, British Columbia, with his companion, the poet Lorna Crozier.
Linda Lappin, poet, essayist, fiction writer, and reviewer lives in Rome. Her novel, The Etruscan, appeared in 2004 with Wynkin deWorde (Ireland). She is the co-director of the Centro Pokkoli Creative Writing Center in Vitorchiano, Italy.
Jeffrey Levine first book, Mortal, Everlasting, won the 2000 Transcontinental Poetry Award from Pavement Saw Press. A new book, <Rumor of Cortez,> will be out in April from Red Hen Press. He is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press.
Lee Martin is the author of Turning Bones (University of Nebraska Press, 2003), Quakertown (Dutton , 2001), From Our House (Dutton, 2000), and The Least You Need to Know (Sarabande Books, 1996). His stories and essays have appeared in such places as Harper’s, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, and The Southern Review. He teaches in the MFA Program at The Ohio State University. His new novel, The Bright Forever, will be published by Shaye Areheart Books in May, 2005. The book will be a featured alternate in The Literary Guild, Doubleday Book Club, and Book-of-the-Month Club
Elisabeth Murawski, author of Moon and Mercury and a chapbook, Troubled by an Angel, Elisabeth Murawski’s poetry has appeared in The Yale Review, The New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Ontario Review, Chelsea, and others. She has received four grants from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation and a partial fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center.
Dennis Nurske is the author of eight books of poetry, including The Fall (Knopf, 2002) and Burnt Island (Knopf, forthcoming). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly.
Benjamin Paloff’s poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The New Republic, The Paris Review, Fulcrum, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere, and he is a frequent contributor to Boston Review and The Nation. Grove Press will publish his translation of Dorota Maslowska’s Snow White and Russian Red this spring.
Phil Phillips is co-editor of Singing Dust Press, contributing to its first volume, Wool Gatherers, dedicated to the Silent Master, Avatar Meher Babe. Phil is a graduate of the Creative Writing School of San Francisco Sate University with an MA in Creative Writing and a Secondary Teacher’s credential. He is retired after many years of teaching, most recently in Special Education. Phil lives with his painter-poet wife Nadya Rose in Walnut Creek, California, where he entertains his grandchildren and co-facilitates a bi-monthly poetry group.
Sonya B. Posmentier lives in New York City, where she is an English teacher and Director of Multicultural Affairs at Trinity School. She is the recipient of a Brio Award from the Bronx Council on the Arts, and her poems have appeared in Phoebe, Seneca Review, Lyric, and Perihelion
Lynn Powell’s second book of poems, The Zones of Paradise, was published by the University of Akron Press in November 2003. Her first book, Old and New Testaments, won the 1995 Brittingham Prize and the 1996 Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award. A native of East Tennessee, she lives in Oberlin, Ohio.
Nahid Rachlin has taught at Yale (where she is a fellow) and currently teaches creative writing at the New York School University, at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, and a variety of summer writers' conferences, including ones at Centrum, Hofstra University, Aspen, Taos, Southampton College, Iowa University and Marymount Manhattan College. She has published three novels, Foreigner (W.W. Norton), Married to a Stranger (E.P. Dutton), The Heart's Desire (City Lights), and a short story collection, Veils (City Lights) and currently has another novel in press. Individual stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in widely in periodicals and anthologies. Her awards include a PEN Syndicated Fiction Project, a Doubleday-Columbia Fellowship (Columbia), a Wallace Stegner Fellowship (Stanford), and a National Endowment for the Arts grant
Frances Richey is the author of The Burning Point, winner of the 9th White Pine Press Poetry Prize, published Spring, 2004. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Georgia Review, River Styx, Salmagundi, Bellevue Literary Review, Notre Dame Review, Gulf Coast and Cream City Review among others. She teaches yoga, meditation, and poetry workshops in New York City.
Molly Salans is a psychotherapist, poet, storyteller, author and Kabbalistic healer. She co-owns Transistions Counseling Center in Littleton Ma., and incorporates poetry, story and healings in her work with children, families, and adults.Molly gives poetry performances, and offers workshops in poetry writing. She is the author of Storytelling With Children in Crisis, Take Just One Star, How Impoverished Children Heal Through Story. Molly lives in Groton, MA. She is currently working on more poetry and her first novel.
Peter Selgin’s stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and have been published, or are forthcoming, in Glimmer Train, The Missouri Review, South Dakota Review, Salon.com, Oasis, Chicago Sun-Times, and Newsday Sunday Magazine. His books, S.S. Gigantic Across the Atlantic, (Simon & Shuster) won the Lemme Award for Best Children’s Book of 2000. The Bubble is adapted from his novel, Life Goes to the Movies.
Ruth Knafo Setton is the author of the novel, The Road to Fez. The recipient of literary fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, PEN, she has published fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction in many anthologies and journals, including Best Contemporary Jewish Writing, Wrestling with Zion, Tikkun, and The North American Review. She is Writer-in-Residence for the Berman Center for Jewish Studies at Lehigh University and Fiction Editor of Arts & Letters.
Florence Shelso is a Clinical Social Worker in private practice in Omaha, Nebraska. She is also a Kabbalistic Healer, and the poem was written for the occasion of her graduation from Jason Shulman's school of Integrated Kabbalistic Healing. She is also a Certified Seminar Leader for the Spiritual Eldering Institute and a member of the American Academy of Psychotherapists.
silent lotus was raised in Roosevelt, NJ where he lived before he left for the Caribbean in his mid twenties. Later a transatlantic voyage on a 100ft sailboat brought him to the Mediterranean and eventually he settled in the city of Rotterdam in The Netherlands. His path as a spiritual advisor has remained an international one. His poems have appeard in Sacred Journey, Ayruveda Actueel Journal, and Religie & Mystiek, as well as online at http://www.allspirit.co.uk/silentlotus/
http://www.sacredjourney.org/prayers.htm
http://www.poetseers.org/spiritual_and_devotional_poets/contemp His visual oeuvre Icons Of Silence has been exhibited in galleries and museums and the poetry archived as Listening To Love. www.silentlotus.net
Hal Sirowitz is the Poet Laureate of Queens. He is a recipient of a 2003 New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. He has a poem in Garrison Keillor’s anthology of poetry. Another of his poems was featured in the Poetry In Motion series, displayed on buses and subways in New York City.
Floyd Skloot won the 2004 PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction for his memoir, In the Shadow of Memory (Nebraska). His fourth collection of poems, The End of Dreams, is forthcoming from LSU Press, and his fifth, Approximately Paradise, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1947, he has lived in western Oregon for the last twenty years.
Ralph Sneeden’s book, Off Little Misery Island, is forthcoming from San Francisco letterpress printer Julie Holcomb’s new Il Merlo Press. Some of the poems in it have appeared in The Kenyon Review, New England Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, POETRY, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, Witness, other magazine and anthologies. My poem Evidence of the Journey received POETRY magazine’s 2004 Friends of Literature Prize. I live and teach in Exeter, New Hampshire.
Adam Sorkin’s twentieth book of poetry translation, The Bridge by Marin Sorescu was just published by Bloodaxe. Other recent volumes of translation include Medea and Her War Machines by Ioan Flora (Cluj-Napoca, Romania, 2002) and three books in 2003, Diary of a Clone by Saviana Stanescu (Spuyten Duyvil / Meeting Eyes Bindery), Singular Destinies: Contemporary Poets of Bessarabia (Chisinau, Moldova), and 41 by Ioana Ieronim (Bucharest). Other books include Sea-Level Zero, poems by Daniela Crasnaru (BOA Editions, 1999), and The Triumph of the Water Witch, prose poems by Ioana Ieronim (Bloodaxe Books, 2000), which was shortlisted for the Weidenfeld Prize, Oxford. My previous Bloodaxe book, The Sky Behind the Forest: Selected Poems of Liliana Ursu (1997), was also shortlisted for the Weidenfeld. Many of these books were translated in conjunction with the author. My poems have appeared in more than 250 literary magazines. He has been awarded a NEA Fellowship in Poetry Translation for 2005-06.
“Martin Steingesser’s poems articulate the many seasons of the heart - joy, outrage, longing, whimsy, sadness,” Maine’s Poet Laureate, Baron Wormser, said of Brothers of Morning, his first collection. He says writing and presenting poems is a way he courts a sense of grace he wants in his life. “There are moments I love in poems I have made - when they are given, when windows, doors, walls blow off, and I am in a warm, boundless space with whoever is listening,” he says. New poems are appearing in The Progressive, The American Scholar and Poetry International.
Francine Sterle Francine Sterle is the author of The White Bridge (Poetry Harbor, 1999), Every Bird is One Bird (Tupelo Press, 2001) and Nude in Winter (forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2006). Awards include a Loft-McKnight Foundation Award, a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, four Pushcart Prize nominations, a Fellowship Grant and a Career Opportunity Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board as well as residencies at the Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, the Blacklock Nature Sanctuary, and the Leighton Studios at the Banff Centre for the Arts.
Carol Stone is a professor of English at Montclair State University where she teaches literature and creative writing. Her poems appear in numerous anthologies from Doubleday, Feminist Press, and St. Martin’s, a collection from Carriage House Press, three chapbooks, and many journals. She has received three Fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
Terese Svoboda
Gladys Swan is a writer and visual artist. She has published five collections of short fiction and two novels - Carnival for the Gods and Ghost Dance: A Play of Voices. Her most recent book, a novella and stories under the title News from the Volcano, was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award.
David Swerdlow’s first book of poems, Small Holes in the Universe (WordTech Editions) was published in 2003. Recently, his poems have appeared in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and West Branch. He teaches English and creative writing at Westminster College in New Wilmington, PA.
Pia Tafdrup's first nine volumes of poetry have been recently collected in three hardcover volumes in Danish. Her 1998 collection (in English Queen's Gate, tr. David McDuff, Bloodaxe Books, 2001) received Scandinavia's most prestigious literary award, The Nordic Council Literature Prize. The poem here is translated from her newest collection, Whales in Paris (Gyldendal, 2002). In 2003 her work was the subject of an acclaimed documentary film."
"Thomas E. Kennedy's many books include the recent Copenhagen Quartet (2002-2005), four independent novels about the seasons and some characters in the Danish capital, where he has lived for nearly 30 years. He has translated numerous poems from Danish to English."
Elaine Terranova’s collections of poems include Damages and most recently The Dog’s Heart (Orchises Press, 2002). She has received the Walt Whitman Award and an NEA Fellowship and teaches writing at the Community College of Philadelphia. She has recent work in Prairie Schooner and APR.
Toni Thomas is a poet and sculptor. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and an M.A. in Counseling Psychology. She has lived many places and now resides in Oregon with her husband and two young children. She has worked as a college instructor, children’s art teacher, sales clerk, child and family counselor, factory worker, and in marketing for a major U.S. Corporation. Her poems and figurative sculptures seek to explore the struggles of beauty, spirit, and femininity to find solace in the
modern world.
Mihai Ursachi is one of Romania’s most eminent writers, his country’s Nobel Prize nominee in literature in 2001. Ursachi defected from Romania in 1981 after having been imprisoned and put in solitary confinement for an earlier escape attempt (swimming the Danube); he wound up in California (teaching swimming) and then Austin, where, while learning English (which he’d not studied) and working as a garage mechanic (for which he’d had no training) among other occupations including German instructor at the University of Texas, he put himself through grad school, then taught at La Jolla for four years. After the 1989 revolution, he returned to Romania, serving until February 1992 as Director of the National Theater in the city of Iasi, a traditional cultural center of the northeast region of Moldavia, where he was born in 1941. He lost the National Theater post due to his open opposition to the government and to his allowing the Theater to be used for a commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Great Pogrom of Iasi.
In 1992 Ursachi won the first national Mihai Eminescu poetry prize to be awarded since World War II. He lives in Iasi where he has headed the Civic Alliance chapter, a coalition of opposition intellectuals, and served as secretary of the Iasi Writers’ Association and Professor of Poetry at the “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iasi. In 1998 he published a career retrospective, Nebunie si lumina (Bucharest, Editura Nemira), or Madness and Light, which will also be the title of a book of translations by Adam J. Sorkin now in progress, from which these poems derive. His poetry has been published in Sorkin’s co-translations in Nimrod, Alea (with an essay on Ursachi), Prism International, Artful Dodge, International Poetry Review, The MacGuffin, Buckle &, Apostrof, The Montserrat Review, Exquisite Corpse / Cyber Corpse, Third Coast, Runes, River City, Many Mountains Moving, Tampa Review, Archipelago, Modern Poetry in Translation, Great River Review, Two Lines, and West Branch as well as in Sorkin’s anthology of poetry of Iasi, City of Dreams and Whispers, Sorkin’s anthology of prose poetry, Speaking the Silence, and the 2001 Oxford anthology, Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myths, edited by Nina Kossman