Fall 2007

Contents

Artwork

The Myth of Talos, Unable to See Over the Hegemony, Self Portrait as Hare, Construction/Deconstruction Mask, Icarus Chair, & Apparatus for Unrequitedness—Rob Millard-Mendez teaches Design in Materials and Woodworking at the University of Southern Indiana. He received his M.F.A. in sculpture from UMass Dartmouth in 1998. His work, consisting mainly of large, toy-like, kinetic, interactive sculptures made mostly of wood, has been exhibited in over 150 museums and galleries. Millard-Mendez has received numerous awards, and his sculptures are held in over forty private and public collections.

Altar Piece I, Geo’s Bride, The Fatalist, Gestation—Tracy Robb currently teaches at Ivy Tech Community College in Evansville, Indiana. Her specialties include digital montage and alternative processes in photography. She holds an M.F.A. in photography from Savannah College of Art and Design. Robb's work has been exhibited internationally and featured in many national publications including Camera Arts and Photographers Forum Magazine. She resides in Evansville with her daughter, Sophia.

Poetry

“[Both Have Died on Me]”—B.J. Best holds an M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis. His work has appeared in numerous journals, and most recently in The Cream City Review, Permafrost, and Nimrod. His long poem Crapis available as a chapbook from Centennial Press. He teaches at Carroll College in Wisconsin.

“Mitla” & “Musica of Love”—D.E. Zuccone, a graduate of Xavier University and the Vermont College M.F.A. program, works as an English and reading teacher in Houston. He has work appearing in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, The Hurricane Review, International Poetry Review, Lullwater Review, South Carolina Review, and Water~Stone.

“Cooling Into Steel”—Tonya Northenor is an English instructor at Owensboro Community and Technical College. She holds an M.F.A. from the University of Memphis, and her poetry has been published in various literary journals including Calyx and Cider Press Review. She lives on a fifth-generation family farm near Owensboro, KY.

“What Enters Us”—Irene McKinney is the recipient of a NEA Fellowship in Poetry and a West Virginia Commission on the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. She is the author of four books of poetry: The Girl with a Stone in Her Lap, The Wasps at the Blue Hexagons, Quick Fire and Slow Fire, and Six O’clock Mine Report. She was appointed Poet Laureate of West Virginia in 1994. Her new book, Vivid Companion, is published by West Virginia University Press.

“Odysseus in Autumn”—Richard Cecil is the author of four collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Twenty First Century Blues. He teaches at Indiana University Bloomington and in the Spalding University Brief Residency M.F.A. Program.

“Claim”—Eva Hooker is professor of English and writer-in-residence at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana. The Winter Keeper, a hand-bound chapbook (Chapiteau Press, 2000), was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award in poetry in 2001. Her poems have recently appeared in The Harvard Review,Water~Stone, Orion, Agni online, and The Notre Dame Review. She is a Sister of the Holy Cross.

“I Swear that Kid was all Heart”—John Calvin Hughes has poems and stories forthcoming or published in Mississippi Review, Snow Monkey, Apostrophe, Dead Mule,Word Riot, and others.  Hughes is the author of The Novels and Short Stories of Frederick Barthelme from the Edwin Mellen Press. He lives and works in Florida.

“French Professor”—Gregory Fraser has published poetry in the Southern Review, The Paris Review, the Chicago Review, and many other literary journals. A two-time finalist for the Walt Whitman Award, Fraser’s first book of poems,Strange Pietà, was published in 2003 by Texas Tech University Press. The recipient of a grant from the NEA, he teaches at the University of West Georgia, outside Atlanta.

“The Tempest” & “Emergency Medicine”—Seth Michelson’s chapbook, Maestro of Brutal Splendor, is available from Jeanne Duval Editions, and he welcomes contact at sethmichelson@gmail.com.

“Plowed”—Nora Hutton Shepard is a native of Raleigh, North Carolina. She graduated from Hollins University and recently earned an M.F.A. from North Carolina State University, where she presently teaches a creative writing class in poetry. She maintains a studio for her painting.

“False Attribution”—Melanie Jordan is currently teaching at the University of West Georgia. She received her Ph.D. in creative writing and literature at the University of Houston, and her M.F.A. from Southern Illinois University–Carbondale. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Iowa Review, Black Warrior Review, Southeast Review, Diagram, Poetry Southeast, Pebble Lake Review, and others.

“Motel”—Jenny Kander, a resident of Bloomington, Indiana, for the past fourteen years, is convinced that in the beginning the Word was poetry. In addition to radio poetry programs, she has edited two poetry collections and co-edited two more. Taboo, her first chapbook, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2004.

“Birthday”—Brent Fisk is a writer from Bowling Green, Kentucky. He is a three-time Pushcart nominee whose work has appeared in Rattle, Southern Poetry Review, and Southeast Review. He is working on his first book, Accidental Body of Knowledge.

“Night Sweats”—Sue Howell is a former teacher of literature and writing. She received her M.A. from Tulane University and her Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University. She lives in Carbondale, Illinois, where she is working on a series of Florida poems.

“Sacrifice,” “No Verges for the Next Two Miles,” & “The Work of Revelation”—Richard Jackson is the author of nine books of poems, most recently Half Lives: Petrarchan Poems, Unauthorized Autobiography: New and Selected Poems, and Heartwall. In 2000, he was awarded the Order of Freedom Medal for literary and humanitarian work in the Balkans, and he won his fifth Pushcart Prize in 2003. Jackson teaches at the University of Tennessee–Chattanooga and in the Vermont College low-residency M.F.A program.

Interview

“Revelation: An Interview with Richard Jackson”—Contributing editor Brenda DeMartini’s stories and poems have appeared in Confrontation, Kansas Quarterly, Minnesota Review, Mississippi Mud, the Sun, and Three Rivers Poetry Journal.

Fiction

“Grain Chute”—Kate Gale is the managing editor of Red Hen Press, the president of the American Composers Forum Los Angeles, and the editor of The Los Angeles Review. Her latest work is Mating Season from Tupelo Press and librettos Rio de Sangre with Don Davis, Disney Hall, 2005 and Paradise Lost with Stephen Taylor, VOX, New York City Opera, 2006. Gale has published five collections of poetry; an autobiographical novel, Lake of Fire; and a bilingual children’s book.

“Close Range”—Mary Feuer is the executive story editor of the television series Dante's Cove, which has been described as Dark Shadows meets The O.C. meets Queer As Folk, if you can imagine that. She is currently developing her original pilot God and Mann for Maverick TV. Feuer’s short story “House on Fire” won the 2006 Writer’s Digest Annual Awards Grand Prize. She supports her fiction habit by rewriting feature films that usually don’t get made.

“Live Girls”—Paul Michel has lived in Seattle for twenty-five years. He is a graduate of Kenyon College and of the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program for Writers. His work has appeared in Glimmer Train, the Red Rock Review, Short Story Journal, the Rockhurst Review, Rosebud, and other journals. His first novel, Houdini Pie, is under representation by Barbara Braun Associates, Inc. of New York. Along with being a writer of fiction, Michel is also a songwriter, singer, and fiddle player.

“Miss Brighton Beach, 1937”—Meryl Peters, a resident of Santa Barbara, California, has never lived in Brooklyn, New York. “Miss Brighton Beach, 1937” is an excerpt from her novel, The First One to Speak Loses. Peters has an M.F.A. from Antioch University, was the runner up for the 1999 Cottonwood Art Cooperative Fiction Fellowship, and was also a 1999 AWP Writers’ Conferences & Festivals scholarship finalist.

Nonfiction

“The Pasageway”—Douglas C. Wilson, who retired in 2002, lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, where for twenty-seven years he was a publications director and editor at Amherst College, his alma mater. Before that he spent thirteen years as a reporter for The Providence Journal—first in Rhode Island, and later as Washington correspondent. But as the son, grandson, and great-grandson of Hoosiers, he still regards Indiana as home.

“Gypsies, Duende, and Dualities in Frederico García Lorca’s Poem of the Deep Song”—Mihaela Moscaliuc’s co-translations of Romanian poetry appear in Arts & Letters, Connecticut Review, Mid-American Review, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. Other publications include articles in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal and History of the Literary Cultures in East-Central Europe and Interculturality and Translation; book reviews in TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner,Georgia Review, Fugue, and Poetry International; and poems in Great River Review, Near East Review, Crab Orchard Review, New Letters, The English Record, and Meridians.

Reviews

“Current Affairs”—Liam Callanan, author of All Saints and The Cloud Atlas, coordinates the Ph.D. in creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

“Lyrical Brilliance”—Pamela Garvey has published poetry in many literary journals including The North American Review, Sonora Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and Pleiades. Her chapbook entitled Fear is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. She is an assistant professor of English at St. Louis Community College–Meramec.

“The Comfort of Cruelty: Liam Rector’s The Executive Director of the Fallen World”—Eric Norton lives in State College, Pennsylvania, where he is pursuing a Ph.D. in American literature at Penn State University.

“Sensual Transcendence”—L.J. Farrell is a Ph.D. candidate in Irish Studies at Southern Illinois University.

“That Kind of People”—Jeffrey Thomson’s Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, a chapbook based on the mythical Chinese encyclopedia, was published by RopeWalk Press in 2006; his third book of poems, Renovation, was part of the Carnegie Mellon University Press poetry series in 2005; and his second, The Country of Lost Sons, was published by Parlor Press at Purdue University in February 2004. His first book, The Halo Brace, was brought out by Birch Brook Press in 1998. He was awarded a 2005 Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2006 Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Individual Artists Fellowship. Thomson is currently an assistant professor of creative writing in the B.F.A. program at the University of Maine Farmington.