2007 Spring Issue

Contents

Artwork

John McNaughton is an internationally acclaimed artist noted for creating wood sculptures and furniture designs that stretch the limits of imagination. He taught woodworking and three dimensional design at the University of Southern Indiana for thirty-five years. His work is represented in over 300 private, corporate, and museum collections, including The Smithsonian and the White House Craft Collection, and has been featured in numerous books and magazines.

Poetry

“Pantoum for Fallujah” & “At a Kitchen Table”—Michael Walls is a labor lawyer and environmental activist who lives in Atlanta. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals and magazines including New York Quarterly, Atlanta Review, Many Mountains Moving, Free Lunch, and Cumberland Poetry Review. His chapbook, The Blues Singer, was the 2003 Frank Cat Press chapbook contest winner. 

“Spiritus Mundi”—Amy Fleury’s collection of poems, Beautiful Trouble, won the 2003 Crab Orchard First Book Award and was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2004. Her poems have appeared in The American Life in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, North American Review, and The Southeast Review, among others. She is an associate professor of English at Washburn University. 

“When Spring Melts the Ground”—Lyn Lifshin has just published The Licorice Daughter: My Year with Ruffian (Texas Review Press) and Another Woman Who Looks Like Me from Black Sparrow at Godine. Her two previous Black Sparrow books, Cold Comfort and Before it’s Light, won Paterson Review Awards. Coming soon: Tsunami Poems; All the Poets (Mostly) who Have Touched Me, Living and Dead; and All True, Especially the Lies. She is working on a book about the amazing, beloved Kentucky Derby winner, Barbaro.

“Ţiganca” & “Little George”—Michael Waters has published eight books of poetry, including Darling Vulgarity (BOA Editions, 2006), nominated for a 2007 Los Angeles Times Poetry Book Award, and Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions, 2001). He has edited/co-edited several volumes, including Contemporary American Poetry (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). The recipient of a Fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts and three Pushcart Prizes, he has published poems in numerous journals, including Poetry, The Yale Review, The American Poetry Review, Rolling Stone, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review, The North American Review, and Ploughshares.

“Western Nightmare”—Bernd Sauermann is an associate professor of literature, composition, and film at Hopkinsville Community College in Hopkinsville, KY. He received his M.A. and M.F.A. in 1993 from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, LA. He makes his home in Cadiz, KY.

“In the Light Provided by the Baltimore News” & “Fear”—Pamela Garvey has published poetry and short stories in many literary journals including The North American Review, Pleiades, Sonora Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and many others. In 2003, she was a semi-finalist for the “Discovery” /The Nation poetry award; most recently she won the 2006 poetry award from Words and Pictures Magazine. She is an Assistant Professor of English at St. Louis Community College-Meramec and lives in the city of St. Louis with her husband and son.

“The Cruelest Month”—Grace Bauer’s recent books of poems include: Beholding Eye (Custom Words, 2006) and Retreats & Recognitions (Lost Horse Press, 2007: winner of the Idaho Poetry Prize). She is also co-editor (with Julie Kane) of Umpteen Ways of Looking at a Possum: Critical and Creative Responses to Everette Maddox (Xavier Review Press, 2006).

“Sestina: Family Album”—Rose Bromberg of Riverdale, NY, has published fiction and poetry in several journals including The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine; The Healing Muse (SUNY Upstate Medical University); Jewish Women’s Literary Annual; and Poetica. She is currently working on two projects: one combines her interests in poetry and medicine, the other combines her poetry and photography.

“Independence Day”—Matthew Brennan is a professor of English at Indiana State University. His poems have appeared recently in South Dakota Review, Sewanee Review, Blue Unicorn, Westview, and Poet Lore. Another poem, “Downtown at Dusk,” was selected for the Indy Arts Council's public art project that places poems on city buses. His collection of poems The House with the Mansard Roof is forthcoming from The Backwaters Press.

“A Fine Camel’s Hair Brush” & “Mermaid”—Jeffrey Thomson’s 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 BFA program at the University of Maine Farmington.

“Pastoral: New Harmony” & “February Prayer for a Roofless”—Allison Joseph teaches at Southern Illinois University Carbondale where she also serves as an editor for Crab Orchard Review and directs the Young Writers Workshop, a summer workshop for high school writers. She is the author of five collections of poetry: What Keeps Us Here (winner of the 1992 Ampersand Press Women Poets Series Competition); Worldly Pleasures (2003 winner of the Word Press Poetry Prize); Soul Train; In Every Seam; and Imitation of Life.

“Playing Tennis with the Net Down”—Abayomi Animashaun’s poems have appeared in such places as New Orphic Review, Drunken Boat, Guardian, and Rock & Sling. He has also served as a staff editor for the Red Rock Review.

“Willows”—Rodney Jones is a professor of English at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He was recently awarded the 2007 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for Salvation Blues: One Hundred Poems, 1985-2005, his eighth book of poetry. Jones was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Southeast Booksellers Association Award, and a Harper Lee Award.

Fiction

Mary C. Mohr Short Fiction Award First Prize Winner: “Decadence”—Dana Kinstler’s short stories have been published in a number of literary journals. Her essays have recently appeared in My Father Married Your Mother: Writers Talk about Stepparents, Stepchildren, and Everyone in Between; Mr. Wrong; Stella Magazine; and the London Telegraph. Kinstler lives in the Hudson River Valley, New York, and is working on a novel.

Mary C. Mohr Short Fiction Award Second Prize Winner: “Forms of Life—Kansas, 1957”—Mark Lindensmith lives and works in Virginia, where he is a lawyer and, sometimes, a writer. He and his wife, Gaytha, have six children. He is the author of the short story collection, Short-Term Losses (Southern Methodist University Press, 1996), and his fiction has appeared in journals such as Another Chicago Magazine, South Dakota Review, New Letters, and Wind Magazine. He was the 2005 winner of the Chicago Literary Award for short fiction.

Mary C. Mohr Short Fiction Award Third Prize Winner: “Fall Down Seven Times, Stand Up Eight”—Marika Lindholm recently resigned from Northwestern University, where she taught sociology for thirteen years and published several articles on gender, race, and political organizing. Her energy is now devoted to fiction writing, organic farming, and raising four children. She and her husband are impatiently waiting to bring home a second child from Ethiopia. Her first story was published last spring in Silent Voices.

“The View from Outside”—Jennifer S. Davis, a native of Alabama, is the author of Her Kind of Want, winner of the Iowa Award for Short Fiction. Her stories have been published in such magazines as The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, Grand Street, The Oxford American and in the anthology of original short fiction by women, This Is Not Chick Lit. Her second collection of short stories, Our Former Lives in Art, will be published by Random House in July, 2007. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Colorado at Denver.

Interview

“An Interview with Speer Morgan”—Brenda DeMartini teaches writing and literature at Purchase College. Her stories and poems have appeared in Confrontation, Kansas Quarterly, Minnesota Review, Mississippi Mud, Southern Indiana Review, the Sun, and Three Rivers Poetry Journal.

Reviews

“Between Night and Day—William Gay’s Twilight”—Mark Razor completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English at the University of Mississippi, where he focused on Southern literature. For the past five years Razor has been an administrator at the University of Southern Indiana, and in December 2006 he earned his PhD in Higher Education Administration from Indiana State University.

“Bringing Back the Old Music”—Seth Michelson’s chapbook, Maestro of Brutal Splendor, is available from Jeane Duval Editions, and he welcomes contact at sethmichelson@gmail.com .

“The Grace of Repulsion”—Anne Laker is manager of public programs at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and often writes about environmental issues for NUVO Newsweekly.

“No Peace in the Valley”—Ken Gillam is an assistant professor in rhetoric & composition at the University of Southern Indiana and is co-director of the writing program.