About the Contributors
- About the Contributors
Marcia Aldrich teaches creative writing at Michigan State University. She is the author of Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton and part of the Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers series. Her essays have appeared in The Best American Essays, The Beacon Book of Essays by Contemporary American Women, and a wide range of literary magazines, including North American Review, Seneca Review, and Gettysburg Review. She has been the editor of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction for four years. In 2010 she was the recipient of the Distinguished Professor of the Year Award for the State of Michigan. Her book Companion to an Untold Story was selected by Susan Orlean for the 2011 AWP Creative Nonfiction Prize and will appear in the fall of 2012.
Jan Blair is a traditional black-and-white photographer and mixed-media artist. She began working with text, using the daily newspaper to create one-page “poems,” in 1996. Originally from Milwaukee, she has lived in California for the past 30 years and now resides in Claremont, California, with her partner and two cats.
Artist’s Statement:
A newspaper story is presented to its readers as a complete whole: the NEWS, or as one paper touts “All the News that’s fit to print.”
I think that there is more between those pages and lines than meets the eye. There are hidden messages, statements, and information waiting to be discovered/uncovered. Finding them is my self-assigned task. I am looking [End Page 219] for clues that tell me more about the culture I am living in than the status quo of the everyday news.
While examining a daily edition, I gather bits of text, sentences, and images. Looking at each of them while culling the newspaper, I move them around, arranging and rearranging the information until hidden messages begin to surface, forming themselves into a kind of poetry.
The end results can be surprising, even amusing, and often reflect personal opinions and experiences we find ourselves sharing.
Jennifer De Leon’s work has appeared in Ms., Poets & Writers, Guernica, Solstice, The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010, and elsewhere. She has been awarded scholarships and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Hedgebrook Foundation, the Ragdale Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Sandra Cisneros Macondo Writers’ Workshop. She is the editor of a collection of essays, Wise Latina: Writers on Higher Education (forthcoming, University of Nebraska Press), and is working on a novel.
Sarah Einstein is a PhD candidate in creative nonfiction at Ohio University. Her work has previously appeared in journals, including Ninth Letter, Fringe, PANK, and Whitefish Review, and she has been awarded a Pushcart Prize.
Leigh Gilmore is the author of The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony and Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation, and is also a coeditor of Autobiography and Postmodernism. She has published articles on autobiography and feminist theory in Feminist Studies, Signs, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Biography, American Imago, and Genders, among others, and in numerous collections. She has been the Dorothy Cruickshank Backstrand Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at Scripps College, professor of English at The Ohio State University, and visiting professor in rhetoric and women’s studies at UC Berkeley. She is currently completing a book on controversies in contemporary life narrative.
Kevin Haworth is the winner of the most recent Columbia Journal Nonfiction Prize for the essay “Cut.” Other recent prose appears or is forthcoming in [End Page 220] Witness, Copper Nickel, Swink, Sou’wester, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He is the author of the novel The Discontinuity of Small Things and coeditor of Lit from Within: Contemporary Masters on the Art and Craft of Writing. His essay here is from the collection Famous Drownings in Literary History, forthcoming from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography in 2012.
Carl Klaus. See interview.
Keith Kroll teaches in the English Department at Kalamazoo Valley Community College in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
David LeGault’s work appears (or is forthcoming) in Black Warrior Review, Ninth Letter, and Barrelhouse Magazine. He lives and writes in Minneapolis with his awesome wife and dog.
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