Contributors: Issue 22 (Spring 2006)

About the Artist: Alexandrea Lau was born in Malaysia in 1974. Her chidlhood was spent with a grandmother who told her many stories. She grew up in many places, moving from city to city, across oceans and continents. Alex is now embracing a new life in the Land of the Long White Cloud, Aotearoa, New Zealand. The creatures in her head are friendly and the stories are her way home.

Artist’s Statement: The Pasarasa Divine. Between the act of dreaming and the motion of drawing is a place I call the Pasarasa: a marketplace (pasar) of other senses (rasa). It is a preipheral realm of other worlds, of other customs, creatures and mysteries. The stories generated from this realm are often amusing scenes of strange activity which are nevertheless connected to common human experiences. The processes of printmaking allows the flavor of each scene to come to life through color, mark-making, tactile pressure, accidents . . . the possibilities are as varied and intriguing as the stories themselves.

Kristin Bock (“Imagination,” “The Somniloquy of the Sleeping Asp”) has published poems in Black Warrior Review, Cream City Review, FENCE, Gulf Coast, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, and Quarterly West, among others. She received an MFA from the University of Massachusetts where she currently teaches in the honor’s program. She also works with her husband restoring oil paintings and iconography in churches throughout western Massachusetts.

Tara Bray (“Washoe Lake Refuge,” “Carolina Chickadees”) has published poems in The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Crab Orchard Review, New Orleans Review, Green Mountains Review, and The Massachusetts Review. She currently teaches writing at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Christine Caya (“Night Vision”) was a Finalist in Glimmertrain’s 2003 Fiction Open, received Honorable Mention for the 2003 & 2004 Josephine Friedman Award for Fiction, First Place for the 2004 Lewis and Rhoda Kurzweil Award for Nonfiction,and won the 2005 GCACWT Graduate Award in Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Florida Humanities, Wolf Moon Press Journal, Florida English, Gulfstream!ng, Altar Magazine and is forthcoming in River City. She is working on a novel.

Rob Cook (“Letter to Myself at Four, 1973,” “The Sniper’s Apartment”) lives in New York City where he co-edits Skidrow Penthouse with Stephanie Dickinson. His work has appeared in The Bitter Oleander, New Orleans Review, LIT, Harvard Review, Poetry International, The Canary, The Portland Review, Mudfish, and others. He is the author of four collections of poetry, all of which are unpublished but have beenfinalists for national book contests.

Linda Cooper (“What Takes the Place of Health,” “Refuge,”) is a Park Ranger in the Stehekin District of North Cascades National Park. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University, and work published or forthcoming in Diner, Elixir, and Redactions.

Aleš Debeljak (“Columbus,” “A Bath Before Bed”, “Christmas in America”) is a poet and cultural critic. He directs the Center for Cultural and Religious Studies at the University of Ljubljana. He has won several awards, including the Slovenian National Book Award, the Miriam Lindberg Israel Poetry for Peace Prize (Tel Aviv) and the Chiqu Poetry Prize (Tokyo). His recent publications in English include Reluctant Modernity; Twilight of the Idols: Recollections of a Lost Yugoslavia; and three books of poems Anxious Moments; The City and the Child; Dictionary of Silence.

Erica Johnson Debeljak (“A Deeper Geography”) is the American-born author of two books of literary nonfiction published in Slovenia. Her stories and essays appear in literary journals in the United States, Slovenia, Great Britain and other European countries. She is also a translator, her most recent book being a translation of the selected poems of Slovenian poet, Dane Zajc. She was a special guest editor for this issue of Third Coast. She lives in Ljubljana with her husband and three children.

Mike Dockins (“Letter to Johnston from Carlisle”) lives in Atlanta. He has an MFA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Previously his poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, The Cream City Review, Washington Square, and 5 AM.

Jason Grunebaum (“What We Know”) grew up in Buffalo, NY. He has lived and worked in Kosovo, East Timor, and Kashmir, India. He received an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University, and was recently awarded a PEN Translation Fund grant. He currently teaches Hindi at the University of Chicago.

Michael Gushue (“How the Mockingbird Got His Mock,” “The Bandwidth Presidents”) has published poems in The Indiana Review, American Letters & Commentary, The Cream City Review, The Germ, and Redivider, among other journals. He is co-coordinator for the Brookland Poetry Series and poetry editor for an independent newspaper, Washington Spark. He works in international development and lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife and five children.

James Allen Hall’s (“Pleasure,” “The End of Myth”) poetry and personal essays have appeared recently in Bellingham Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Rhino, Cimarron Review, New Orleans Review, Margie, and elsewhere. He is currently finishing a PhD at the University of Houston.

Chad Hanson (“Working Class Glass”) teaches sociology at Casper College in Casper, Wyoming. His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Big Sky Journal, North Dakota Quarterly, and South Dakota Review.

Jean Hanson’s (“The Caribe Club”) writing has appeared in numerous magazines, including North American Review, Zoetrope, Indiana Review, Nimrod, New Letters, and Alaska Quarterly Review. She has received a Pushcart Prize nomination, an artist fellowship from the Colorado Council on the Arts, the Hackney Prize, the Writers Repertory Award, the Literal Latte Essay Prize, and the Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, Inc. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop.

Roger Hart’s (“Fireflies”) stories and essays have appeared in journals and magazines such as Natural Bridge, The Sun, and Runner’s World. His story collection, Erratics, won the George Garrett Prize and was published by Texas Review Press. Roger is a graduate of the Minnesota State University MFA program in fiction. He and his wife, Gwen, live in Athens, Ohio. “Fireflies” is the first chapter of a novel in-progress.

Susan Hutton (“Against Our Nature,” “Wujakari, Yartijumurra, Arawunga, Tokwampari,” “First Glance”) recently completed a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and is currently the director of development at the independent poetry publisher Autumn House Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Epoch, Alaska Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and Mid-American Review.

Drago Jancar (“A Sunday in Oberheim”) is one of the preeminent writers in Eastern Europe. His novels, essays, and stories have been widely published and translated. In 1993 he won the France-Preseren Prize, Slovenia’s highest literary award, for his lifetime achievement in letters.

Mark Jarman (“We Are All Praying for Our Father,” “The Comet”) is a professor of English at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. His most recent book of poetry is To The Green Man. He has been awarded NEA grants in poetry in 1977, 1983, and 1992, and a fellowship in poetry from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for 1991-1992. He lives in Nashville.

Judith Kerman (“Persephone”) has published seven books or chapbooks of poetry, most recently the bilingual collection, Plane Surfaces / Plano de Incidencia (Santo Domingo: CCLEH, 2002). She was a Fulbright Scholar to the Dominican Republic in 2002, translating the poetry and fiction of contemporary Dominican women.

Barbara Korun (“I Saw a Man,” “The Touch”) was born in Ljubljana in 1963. She is a leading figure in contemporary Slovenian women’s poetry. She has published several volumes of poetry in her original Slovenian. She has also published a chapbook titled Chasms (Chatanooga 2003) and a book of her poems titled Songs of Earth and Light (translated by Theo Dorgon) was published by Southwood Editions (Cork, Ireland) last year.

Andrew Kozma (“Heteroglossia”) is a doctoral candidate at the University of Houston where he is also a nonfiction editor for Gulf Coast. Poems of his have appeared or are forthcoming in Lilies and Cannonballs, Washington Square, Pebble Lake Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Illya’s Honey.

Ted LoRusso (“Woman With Coffee”) is a freelance writer. His plays have been produced both Off and Off-Off Broadway. His screenplay for “Cracking Up” won the Venice International Film Festival Critic’s Choice Award and the New York Underground Film Festival People’s Choice Award, and will be released on DVD in early 2006. He attended Marywood College and New York University. He is a member of Emerging Artists Theatre Company, Paul Adams, Artistic Director.

Thomas Lux (“The Ambulatory Paranoid,” “Nolens Volens (Whether Willing or Unwilling),” “Autobiographobia”) holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry and is the director of the McEver Visiting Writers Program at Georgia Institute of Technology. He has been awarded three NEA grants and the Kingsley Tufts Award and is a former Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in Atlanta.

Matt Miller (“Hierarchy of Paradise”) was born in Lowell, Massachusetts. He played football at Yale University and earned an MFA in Creative writing from Emerson College. He is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. His first book of poems, Cameo Diner, was published by Loom Press in 2005.

Edward O’Connell (“Part-timers”) has published fiction in Black Warrior Review, Puerto Del Sol, Northwest Review, RiverStyx, Cimarron Review, and Greensboro Review. He holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and lives in Washington state with his wife and daughter.

Julie Sophia Paegle (“The Prejudiced Goat”) has recent or forthcoming publications in Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, Colorado Review, New Orleans Review, Carolina Quarterly, Bellingham Review, The Iowa Review, and Alpinist and other magazines. She has twice won an Academy of American Poets prizes as well as two Utah Arts Council prizes. She lives with her husband and son in Utah.

M. Lynx Qualey (“Hysterical,” “Without Fingernails”) divides her time between Cairo, Egypt and St. Paul, Minnesota. She is working on her MFA at the University of Minnesota.

Bill Rasmovicz (“The Accordian”) is a graduate of the MFA Program at Vermont College, and currently works as a pharmacist in Portland, Maine. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Terra Incognita, Nimrod and other magazines.

Tomaz Šalamun (“the lime in the desert,” “The Face”) has been a leading figure in Slovenian poetry for forty years, during which time he has published more than twenty collections of poetry in his native Slovenian, as well as four collections translated into English. They include: The Selected Poems of Tomaz Salamun (Ecco Press, 1998), The Shepard, the Hunter (Pedernal, 1992), The Four Questions of Melancholy (White Pine, 1997), and Feast (Harcourt Brace, 2000). His collection, Book for my Brother is forthcoming from Harcourt Brace.

Kathryn Schwartz (“August 1983: Saginaw Street, Flint”) is a librarian in Flint, Michigan. She has been published in The MacGuffin.

S.W. Senek (“12 Rounds”) won the 2005 Oglebay Institute Towngate Theatre award and the 2004 William Patterson University’s NJ Playwright’s Contest, and was a 2005 finalist for the Tennessee Williams / New Orleans Literary Festival. He also received a 2005 New York IT award nomination. His works have appeared at Theatre Three, the Nantucket Short-Play Festival, Last Frontier Theatre Conference, Playwrights Circle, and the NYC 15-Minute Play Festival. He is a member of The Theatre Project, Emerging Artists Theatre, and the Dramatists Guild of America, Inc. His website can be viewed at www.dramatists.us/swsenek

Lisa Sewell (“Ghazal for the First Day of Spring”) is the author of The Way Out (Alice James Books) and Name Withheld (Four Way Books, 2006). Her work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, Denver Quarterly, and Electronic Poetry Review. She teaches at Villanova University.

Erin Elizabeth Smith (“Macha Speaks of Her Children,” “Sin (Storm) : A Pantoum”) is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Illinois, where she serves as the editor-in-chief of Stirring. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Sojourn, The Cortland Review, Mot Juste, The Adirondack Review, and Small Spiral Notebook among others. She is also an alumna of the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets.

Celia Stuart-Powles (“The Gift”) lives in Oklahoma where she works as a designer. She has poems published or forthcoming Atlanta Review, The Distillery, Fugue, Carquinez Poetry Review, Nimrod, and Prairie Schooner among others. Her work has also appeared in anthologies, the most recent being Erotic Haiku.

Marcela Sulak (“Unsettled Land Between,” “Not a Ghazal #3”) has poems published or forthcoming in Fence, The Indiana Review, The Notre Dame Review, and Quarterly West among others. Her published translations include a book-length romantic poem from the Czech by Karel Hynek Macha called May (Twisted Spoon Press, 2005). She teaches world poetry and translation at American University.

Mark Vinz (“Work, for the Night Is coming,” “The Tribe”) teaches at Moorehead State University in Moorehead, Minnesota. His poems, stories, and essays are widely published and he has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry.

Uroš Zupan (“December Sketches,” “May,” “The Village of Migojnice”) has published six volumes of poetry and three books of essays in his native Slovenian.