Contributors' Notes

Contributors' Notes

Karen Babine was born and raised in northern Minnesota, received her MFA from Eastern Washington University, and now teaches at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, where she is also the nonfiction editor of Mid-American Review. Her essays have appeared in such journals as North Dakota Quarterly, Lake Effect, and Ascent.

Michael W. Cox has published creative nonfiction in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The St. Petersburg Times, New Letters, and Best American Essays 1999; his short stories have appeared in a number of literary journals, including Other Voices, Columbia, ACM, and Cimarron Review. He holds a PhD in American literature and teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Pittsburgh–Johnstown, where he is currently visiting assistant professor.

Omar Eby—a former teacher in Somalia, Tanzania, and Zambia—has published books of fiction, biography, and personal experience. His latest book is Fifty Years, Fifty Stories: The Mennonite Mission in Somalia, 1953–2003. Before taking early retirement to write full time, Eby was for twenty-seven years a professor of literature and writing at Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia.

Jynelle A. Gracia is a recent graduate of the University of Iowa's nonfiction writing program.

Steven Harvey is the author of Bound for Shady Grove, a collection of personal essays about his experiences learning to sing and play the traditional music of the Appalachian Mountains where he lives. The University of Georgia Press published it in June 2000. He is also the author of two other collections of personal essays, A Geometry of Lilies (South Carolina) and Lost in Translation (Georgia), and is the editor of an anthology of personal essays called In a Dark Wood: Personal Essays by Men on Middle Age (Georgia).

Joe Kraus teaches at the University of Scranton. He is coauthor of An Accidental Anarchist (Academy Chicago, 2001), and his essays and criticism have appeared, among other places, in The American Scholar, Callaloo, The Centennial Review, and MELUS.

Sydney Lea's eighth collection of poems, Ghost Pains, is now available from Sarabande books. His seventh collection, Pursuit of a Wound, was one of three finalists for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. His second volume of nonfiction, A Little Wildness: Some Notes on Rambling, will be published soon by Story Line Press. His stories, poems, essays, and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and many other periodicals, as well as in more than forty anthologies.

Buddy Levy is the author of Echoes On Rimrock: In Pursuit of the Chukar Partridge (Pruett, 1998) and most recently, American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett (Putnam, 2005). His essays on nature, sports, lifestyle, and the outdoors have appeared in the Utne Reader, Big Sky Journal, SKI, Hooked on the Outdoors, Field & Stream, Sun Valley Magazine, Canoe & Kayak, Trail Runner, and Poets & Writers. He teaches English and writing at Washington State University.

Lee Martin is the author of the memoirs From Our House and Turning Bones, the novels The Bright Forever (Pulitzer Prize finalist) and Quakertown, and the story collection, The Least You Need to Know. His essays and stories have appeared in such places as Harper's, Ms., The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, The Southern Review, and Prairie Schooner. He is the winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. Since 2001 he has taught in the MFA program at The Ohio State University where he is now professor of English and director of creative writing.

Chris Offutt is the author of Kentucky Straight, Out of the Woods, The Good Brother, The Same River Twice, and No Heroes. His stories and essays have been published in Esquire, GQ, The New York Times, Best American Short Stories, and Best Stories of the South. He is the recipient of...