Contributors' Notes: Issue Four (Winter/Spring 1997)

Michelle Boisseau won the 1996 Samuel French Morse prize, and her book Underway was recently published by Northeastern University Press. She teaches at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Jennifer Call is currently a Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing at Stanford University. Her poems have appeared in Western Humanities Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, The MacGuffin, and a number of other journals.

Charles Cannon is a Ph. D. student in English at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He also tends bar in Chicago, the city he has adopted as his new home since moving there from New Orleans. Presently he is at work on his second novel.

Peter Ho Davies' fiction has been selected for Best American Short Stories 1995 and 1996, and is forthcoming in The Paris Review and Story. His collection, The Ugliest House in the World , will be published by Houghton Mifflin next year. The recipient of a Transatlantic Review Prize from the Henfield Foundation and a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, he currently teaches at Emory University.

John Emile lives in Bogota, Colombia, where he works as a film critic. "Sins of Scarlet" is his second published story.

Catherine Gammon is the author of the novel Isabel Out of the Rain (Mercury House, 1991). Other recent fiction appears in Ploughshares, Central Park, Manoa, and The Kenyon Review. She teaches fiction writing at the University of Pittsburgh.

Nicholas Flynn was born in Scituate, Massachusetts. He has worked as an electrician, ship's captain, photographer, and case worker with homeless adults. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Reginald Gibbons is the author of four books of poems and, most recently, a novel, Sweetbitter (Penguin, 1996). He is the editor of TriQuarterly magazine.

Albert Goldbarth lives in Wichita, Kansas -- somebody has to. His new book of poems, Adventures in Ancient Egypt, is just out from Ohio State University Press.

Richard Hefter, a former MFA student at Western Michigan University and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, was a recent finalist in the Mid-list Press First Novel Series and a nominee for a Pushcart Prize. His stories have appeared in ACM and Other Voices, among others. "Hachita" and "Power" are excerpted from his book of travel vignettes, Innerstate, which was awarded a 1992 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Award.

Tony Hoagland's first book, Sweet Ruin, is from University of Wisconsin Press. He currently teaches in the writing program of New Mexico State, and in the Warren Wilson MFA program. His new book, Donkey Gospel, is slouching towards Bethlehem.

Cynthia Huntington is the author of two collections of poetry, The Fish Wife (Univ. of Hawaii, 1986) and We Have Gone to the Beach (Alice James Books, 1996). She has been the recipient of two NEAs and a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She teaches at Dartmouth and Vermont College.

Anne Leahy lives in Athens, Ohio, and is a doctoral candidate at Ohio University.

Thomas Lynch is the author of two collections of poems, Skating with Heather Grace and Grimalkin: Other Poems. A book of his essays -- The Undertaking, Life Studies from the Dismal Trade -- will be published in '97 by W.W. Norton and Jonathan Cape. He lives in Milford, Michigan, where he is the funeral director.

William Matthews most recent book is Time and Money (Houghton Mifflin, 1996).

Jack Myers' latest books are Blindsided, which won the Texas Institute of Letters Award in poetry, and the CD/anthology Leaning House Poets, Vol. 1., which he co-edited. He teaches at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and in the Vermont College MFA in Writing Program.

Marsha de la O recently graduated from the MFA program at Vermont College. She has poems forthcoming in Art/Life and Solo.

Anna Maria Ortese's first first book, a collection of short stories titled Angelici dolori, was published in 1937, when the author was just 22. Since then, there has been a steady stream of novels, stories, poems and journalism by a writer who is now regard as being among the most important Italian authors of the post-War era. Ortese, who divides her time between Rapallo and Milan, has been awarded virtually every major Italian literary prize, and her recent books have at last won her a large and appreciative audience. Comparatively little of her work has appeared in English translation, however. McPherson &Company;published her most famous novel, The Iguana (1986), and the first of two volumes of selected stories, A Music Behind the Wall, Volume One (1994), both translated by Henry Martin. The companion volume, in which "Redskin" will appear, is scheduled for publication by McPherson in 1997.

April Ossmann received her MFA from Vermont College. She teaches poetry at Lebanon College, works as an editorial assistant at a university press, and has published poetry in numerous journals including The Cimarron Review, The Antioch Review, Seneca Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Cincinnati Poetry Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, ART: MAG (forthcoming), and a book review in Black Warrior Review.

Bradley Paul is a native of Baltimore, MD, and will be receiving his MFA from the University of Iowa this spring. He was recently an American representative at the International PEN conference in Bled, Slovenia, as well as the Iowa representative at the 95 Flat Earth Society Colloquium.

Rebecca Reynolds received a 1995/96 fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Development of State. She has an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan, where she received a Hopwood Award for a manuscript of poems. Her work has appeared in literary journals including Earth's Daughters, Caliban, US1 Worksheets, Blue Violin, and forthcoming in Negative Capability and American Letters and Commentary.

Sarah Smith was raised on Magician Lake in rural south western Michigan. Her stories have appeared in Passages North, The New England Review, and The Madison Review. She is currently a lecturer in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Cathy Smith Bowers' The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas was published in 1992 by Texas Tech University Press.

Peter Stokes lives in Somerville, MA, and teaches at Tufts University. His writing has appeared in the Denver Quarterly, the Hawaii Pacific Review, The Journal of Popular Culture, and Critique.

Chris Weidenbach's poems have appeared recently in Cimarron Review, CutBank, and Teacup. He is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Arizona.