Living Blue in the Red States

Contributors

339 Contributors Jonis Agee is the author of eleven books, including four novels, Sweet Eyes, Strange Angels, South of Resurrection, and The Weight of Dreams and five collections of short fiction, Pretend We’ve Never Met, Bend This Heart, A .38 Special and a Broken Heart, Taking the Wall, and Acts of Love on Indigo Road. Her newest novel, The Riverman’s Wife, will be published by Random House in the summer of 2007. Among her awards are a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, two LoftMcKnight Fellowships for fiction, two Minnesota State Arts Board grants in fiction, and the Nebraska Book Award. She teaches creative writing at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where she directs the Nebraska Summer Writers’ Conference. She is currently at work on a collection of essays. Gilbert Allen has published four collections of poems: In Everything, Second Chances, Commandments at Eleven, and Driving to Distraction , which was featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. He received the South Carolina Literary Arts Fellowship in 2002–3, and he is a five-time winner of the South Carolina Fiction Project Prize. He coedited the anthology A Millennial Sampler of South Carolina Poetry (Ninety-Six Press, 2005). Since 1977 he has lived in upstate South Carolina with his wife, Barbara. She is a lifelong Democrat with a Rolodex memory. Sidney Burris is currently completing a memoir of reading. Portions of it have appeared in agni Magazine, The Georgia Review, The South- 340 | Contributors ern Review, Five Points, and Studies in the Literary Imagination. Another section is forthcoming in The Southwest Review. Two of these pieces were selected in 2003 and 2005 as a “Notable Essay” in Best American Essays. He has also written two volumes of poetry—one with the University of Utah Press (A Day at the Races, 1989) and the other with Louisiana State University Press (Doing Lucretius, 2000). These poems originally appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. His work was also included in Best American Poetry, 1996. David Case teaches English at Los Angeles City College and plays piano for the Amphion Quartet. He has published poems, reviews, and articles in the usual variety of places—several of them in the South, no less—and has a novel called “Poison Cures” ready for publication, or at least ready for perusal. David also helps edit King Log poetry magazine: poets, please take note of www.angelfire.com/il/kinglog. Stephen Corey, born in Buffalo, New York, and reared in nearby Jamestown, was educated at Harpur College/Binghamton University (ba, ma) and the University of Florida (PhD). He has published ten poetry collections since 1981, most recently There Is No Finished World (White Pine Press, 2003). His essays have appeared in such periodicals as Shenandoah, The Laurel Review, Poets & Writers, and Connecticut Review. Corey was cofounder, coeditor, and editor of The Devil’s Millhopper , an independent poetry journal, from 1976 to 1983. Since 1983 he has been on the editorial staff of The Georgia Review, for which he is currently acting editor. Steve Heller is professor and chair of the mfa in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University–Los Angeles. He grew up in the wheat country of central Oklahoma, where much of “Here Was Johnny” is set. Steve is best known for his novel The Automotive History of Lucky Kellerman (Anchor, 1989) and his book of short stories, The Man Who Drank a Thousand Beers (Chariton Review, 1984). His essays, nonfiction narratives, and short stories have appeared in numerous maga- Contributors | 341 zines and anthologies, including New Letters, Colorado Review, Fourth Genre, Southern California Anthology, Manoa, American Cowboy, and In Brief: Short Takes on the Personal. He is currently working on a new novel called Return of the Ghost Killer. Robin Hemley is the director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Last Studebaker, The Big Ear and Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art and Madness. His most recent books are Turning Life into Fiction (Graywolf, 2006) and Invented Eden (Bison Books, 2006). John Lane’s books include Against Information and Other Poems, Weed Time: Essays from the Edge of a Country Yard, Waist Deep in Black Water, The Dead Father Poems, and, most recently, Chattooga: Descending into...