~CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES~

JAMES FINN COTTER is a professor of English at Mount Saint Mary College,.  He is the author of Inscape (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972) and articles on Dante, Chaucer, Philip Sidney, G.M. Hopkins, and J.D. Salinger.  He reviews poetry for the Hudson Review and America, and has translated The Divine Comedy (SUNY, Stony Brook, 2000).  His poetry has appeared in a number of places, including The Hudson Review, Nation, America, The Commonweal, Thought, and The New York Times.  He is president of the International Hopkins Association.

BARBARA CROOKER is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently In the Late Summer Garden (H & H Press, 1998), from which the poems here are reprinted.  Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Atlanta Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, Denver Quarterly, Passages North, and West Branch, as well as a number of anthologies, including Boomer Girls (University of Iowa Press), For a Living: The Poetry of Work (University of Illinois Press), and Worlds in Our Words: Contemporary Women Writers (Prentice Hall).

REGINALD GIBBONS is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Sparrow: New and Selected Poems (LSU Press, 1997) and Homage to Longshot O'Leary (Holy Cow! Press, 1999); a collection of short fiction, Five Pears or Peaches (Broken Moon Press, 1991); and a novel, Sweetbitter (Penguin, 1996).  He is also the editor of The Poet's Workand, with Gerald Graff, Criticism in the University.  He is a professor of English at Northwestern University.

BERNHARD HILLILA has had eight books published, three of them collections of poetry, most recently Cutting Edge (Chimney Hill Press, 1996).  His poetry also has appeared in various literary journals, including America, The Christian Science Monitor, The Critic, The Formalist, and The Lyric.  He is Professor Emeritus of Education at Valparaiso University.

HALVARD JOHNSON has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council, and Baltimore City Arts.  He has had several residency grants at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and a poetry fellowship at the Ragdale Foundation.  He has four out-of-print poetry collections archived at the Contemporary American Poetry Archives <http://capa.conncoll.edu>.  Recent poems have appeared in Poetry New York, For Poetry, CrossConnect, Salt River Review, Blue Moon Review, Crania, Gulf Stream, Florida Review and Synaesthetic.  For many years he taught in Germany, Japan, and South Korea in the overseas divisions of the University of Maryland.  He lives in New York City with his wife, the prize-winning fiction writer and painter, Lynda Schor.

LAURENCE LIEBERMAN is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, including Flight from the Mother Stone (University of Arkansas Press, 2000), from which "Angel at the Helm" is reprinted, and three books of criticism, including Beyond the Muse of Memory: Essays on Contemporary Poetry (University of Missouri Press, 1995).  He is a professor of English at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.

DIANE LOCKWARD's poems have been published widely in magazines, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Kalliope, The Literary Review, Poet Lore, Poetry Daily, and Rattle.  "Last Dance" first appeared in Cumberland Poetry Review.

JOEL PECKHAM has had poems in many journals, including Ascent, Black Warrior Review, Malahat Review, Passages North, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, Sycamore Review, and Texas Review.  "Nightwalking" first appeared in Nimrod and is the title poem of his first collection, Nightwalking (Pecan Grove Press, 2001).

MARILYN TAYLOR is the author of Accident of Light (Thorntree, 1991) and Shadows Like These (Caxton, 1994).  She has received an Associated Writing Programs Intro Award, an Academy of American Poets Award, and the 1999 Passager Poet Award from Passager magazine.  Her work has appeared in various other journals.  "Poem for a 75th Birthday" first appeared in Poetry and "Rondeau: Old Woman with Cat" is reprinted from The American Scholar.  She teaches in the Honors Program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

CHRISTINA-MARIE UMSCHEID's publications includeCaliban, Chicago Review, Hiram Poetry Review, Huron Review, Negative Capability, The Poetry Review, and Sou'wester.  Her poems also have appeared in the anthology At the Edge of the Mirror (Plain View Press, 1999), and others.

CHARLES WRIGHT received the National Book Award for Poetry in 1983 for Country Music: Selected Early Poems, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 1995 for Chickamauga, and the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award in 1998 for Black Zodiac.  His most recent collection of poems is Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), reviewed in the Fall/Winter 2000-2001 issue of Valparaiso Poetry Review.  The poems reprinted here first appeared in Meridian.
 

Cover photo of Laurence Lieberman by William Wiegand.