notes on contributors

201 Nat Akin’s work has appeared previously in Tampa Review. He has completed a collection of short stories and is at work on his first novel, set in his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, where he lives with his wife, Molly, and their son, Hall. Kevin Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Brief History of the Dead (Pantheon, 2006) and The Truth About Celia (Pantheon, 2003), the children’s novels City of Names (Viking Juvenile, 2002) and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery (Katherine Tegen Books, 2006), and the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky (Pantheon, 2002) and The View from the Seventh Layer (Pantheon, 2008). He has published stories in The New Yorker, The Georgia Review, McSweeney’s, The Oxford American, Zoetrope: All-Story, The Best American Short Stories, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and The O. Henry Prize Stories anthology. He has received the Borders Original Voices Award, the PEN USA Award, The Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, an Italo Calvino Short Fiction Award, a James Michener–Paul Engle Fellowship, three O. Henry Awards (one, a first prize), an NEA grant, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Recently he was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas. Joel Brouwer is the author of Exactly What Happened (Purdue University Press, 1999), Centuries (Four Way Books, 2003), and the forthcoming And So (Four Way Books). His poem “Flag Factory” will be reprinted later this year as a limited edition chapbook by Artichoke Yink Press. notes on contributors 202 Ecotone: reimagining place Steph Ceraso teaches courses in composition, jazz literature, and literature of place at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina. A few of her current areas of interest include jazz studies, feminist theory (particularly gendered spaces and geographies), trauma and memory in historical fiction, and composition studies. Her essays have appeared in Nebula and EnterText. Her imagination continues to be haunted by machinated sharks with claws and wheels. Steven Church is the author of The Guinness Book of Me: a Memoir of Record (Simon & Schuster, 2005), winner of the Colorado Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. His essays and stories have been published in Fourth Genre, Avery, The Pinch, Post Road, Riverteeth, Salt Hill, Quarterly West, and others. He teaches in the MFA Program at California State University, Fresno. Trinie Dalton lives in Los Angeles. She is author of Wide Eyed (Akashic Books, 2005), A Unicorn Is Born (Abrams Image, 2007), and coeditor of Dear New Girl or Whatever Your Name Is (McSweeney’s, 2005), an art book based on confiscated high school notes. As a journalist, she writes about music, art, and film. She has an MFA from Bennington Writing Seminars and teaches fiction writing at various colleges. Alison Hawthorne Deming is the author of three books of poems and three books of essays, most recently Genius Loci (Penguin Poets, 2006). She teaches at the University of Arizona and lives near Agua Caliente Hill in Tucson, except when she’s lost in the fog on the Bay of Fundy. Carolyn Ferrell is the author of the short story collection Don’t Erase Me (Houghton Mifflin, 1997), which won the Art Seidenbaum Award of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the John C. Zacharis Award given by Ploughshares, and the Quality Paperback Book Prize for First Fiction. Her stories have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike, and Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers, edited by Kevin Young. She lives with her husband and children in the Bronx. 203 notes on contributors Bob Finch is the author of seven books, most recently The Iambics of Newfoundland (Counterpoint Press, 2007), in which this essay appears. He is also co-editor of The Norton Book of Nature Writing (W.W. Norton & Company, 2002) and teaches nonfiction at the MFA in Writing program at Spalding University in Louisville. He broadcasts a weekly radio commentary, “A Cape Cod Notebook,” on WCAI, an NPR affiliate in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. In 2006 he won an Edward R. Murrow Award for radio writing. Suzanne Frischkorn is the author of four chapbooks, most recently, Spring...