notes on contributors

430 notes on contributors steve almond is the author of five books, the most recent of which is (Not That You Asked), a collection of essays. francisco j. ayala is University Professor and Donald Bren Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He has published over 950 articles and is author or editor of thirty-one books. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and received the 2001 U.S. National Medal of Science . The New York Times named Ayala the “Renaissance Man of Evolutionary Biology.” sven birkerts is the author of eight books, most recently The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again (Graywolf Press, 2007). He edits the journal Agni at Boston University and is Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars. “The Points of Sail” is forthcoming in the anthology The Book of Dads: Essays on the Joys, Perils, and Humiliations of Fatherhood, due out from Ecco/HarperCollins in May. michael p. branch is Professor of Literature and Environment at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is book review editor of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment and coeditor of the University of Virginia Press book series Under the Sign of Nature. He has published five books and more than 150 articles, essays, and reviews, and his recent creative nonfiction has appeared in Orion, Isotope, Whole Terrain, Hawk and Handsaw, New South, and Watershed. brock clarke, a 2008 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in fiction, is the author, most recently, of the best-selling novel An Arsonist ’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England­ . A New York Times Editors’ Choice, the book will be reprinted in ten foreign editions. Clarke’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in many magazines, as well as in the Pushcart Prize and New Stories from the South anthologies. He teaches at the University of Cincinnati. christopher cokinos is the author of The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars, forthcoming from Tarcher/Penguin in summer 2009. “The Resurrection of Acraman” is excerpted from the book. 431 notes on contributors The winner of a Whiting Award, he is also the author of Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds, which will be rereleased in May. kwame dawes is the author of thirteen books of poetry and many books of fiction, nonfiction, and drama. His collection Hope’s Hospice (Peepal Tree Press) will be published this spring. He is Distinguished Poet in Residence at the University of South Carolina, where he directs the South Carolina Poetry Initiative and the University of South Carolina Arts Institute. Dawes is also the programming director of Jamaica’s Calabash International Literary Festival, which takes place each May. jan deblieu is the author of dozens of articles and essays, and four books: Hatteras Journal (1987); Meant to Be Wild (1991); Wind (1998), a winner of the John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Natural History Writing; and Year of the Comets (2005). She lives on the North Carolina Outer Banks with her husband and son. robert finch is the author of seven books, most recently The Iambics of Newfoundland: Notes from an Unknown Shore (Counterpoint, 2007). He is coeditor of The Norton Book of Nature Writing and a faculty member in creative nonfiction at Spalding University in Louisville. Finch also broadcasts a weekly radio commentary for WCAI (a National Public Radio affiliate in Woods Hole, Massachusetts). He lives on Cape Cod and in Newfoundland. ben fountain lives in Dallas. He is the author of the story collection Brief Encounters with Che Guevara (Ecco/HarperCollins), which won the 2007 PEN/Hemingway Award and the Barnes and Noble Discover Prize. His novel The Texas Itch is forthcoming from Ecco/ HarperCollins. philipgerardistheauthoroffourbooksofnonfictionandthreenovels , as well as numerous essays, short stories, and documentary scripts. He chairs the Department of Creative Writing at UNC Wilmington. barry goldstein was serving as the first Artist-in-Residence at the New York University Medical School on September 11, 2001, an experience that led to his collection Being There: Medical Student 432 Ecotone: reimagining place Morgue Volunteers Following 9/11. His collection of photographs from Iraq and oral histories from...