Contributors' Notes

Marilyn Abildskov has published essays, stories, and poems most recently in Bellingham Review, New Orleans Review, Apalachee Review, and The Southern Review. She earned her MFA from the University of Iowa and is the author of The Men in My Country. She lives in Berkeley, California, and teaches at Saint Mary's College.

Jennifer Brice is the author of The Last Settlers. She teaches English and creative writing at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York.

Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of the novel Q Road, and the AWP award-winning collection Women & Other Animals, both Scribner paperbacks. She has a master's in mathematics and a MFA in creative writing from Western Michigan University. The New York Times has called her stories "bitter but sweetened by humor," and Publisher's Weekly said Campbell details "domestic worlds where Martha Stewart would fear to tread." She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she rarely misses a meal.

Diana Hume George is the author or editor of twelve books of poetry, creative nonfiction, and literary criticism. Her book of personal essays, The Lonely Other: A Woman Watching America, was published by the University of Illinois Press and is widely used in creative nonfiction classes. The most recent of her four books of poetry are a new edition of Koyaanisqatsi and a series of narratives titled Phantom Breast. In addition to coediting Selected Poems of Anne Sexton with Diane Middlebrook, she also wrote the first critical study of Sexton, Oedipus Anne. She is the recipient of writing fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fetzer and Cummings Foundations, the NEH, and the arts councils of both New York and Pennsylvania, among others. For many years she was the founding director of creative writing and director of the Smith Series at Penn State at Erie, and she now teaches in the MFA program at Goucher College and serves on the board of the Writers' Center at Chautauqua, where she is also a frequent writer-in-residence. Her books in progress include a memoir on living with the Seneca tribe of the Iroquois Nation, of which "The Last of the Raccoon" will be a part.

Kelly Brecher King recently completed her MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College. She currently lives in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, with her two daughters where she teaches American literature and creative writing and leads an adult writers' workshop in autobiography. King is currently at work on her own midlife memoir entitled Recognizing Home: A Life in Fabric.

Sydney Lea's eighth collection of poems, Ghost Pain, will appear in April from Sarabande Books. His prior poetry volume, Pursuit of a Wound, was a finalist for the 2001 Pulitzer. Story Line Press will publish A Little Wildness: Some Notes on a Rambling Life, of which the excerpts here are the first two chapters. He lives in northern Vermont.

Patrick Madden lives with his wife and three children in Utah, where he is a professor of English at Brigham Young University. His essays have been published in Mississippi Review, Water~Stone, North Dakota Quarterly, and other journals. His interview with Brian Doyle appeared in the Spring 2003 issue of River Teeth.

Lee Martin is the author of two memoirs, From Our House and Turning Bones; a novel, Quakertown; and a story collection, The Least You Need to Know. His new novel, The Bright Forever, will be published in May 2005. He teaches in the creative writing program at The Ohio State University.

Novelist and short-story writer Brent Spencer is the author of the novel The Lost Son (Arcade Publishing). His fiction has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Epoch, the Missouri Review, and elsewhere. His most recent book, a collection of stories chosen as one of the best books of the year by the Village Voice, is Are We Not Men? (Arcade Publishing). He teaches creative writing at Creighton University in Omaha, where he is codirector of the graduate program in English.

W. Thomas received...