~CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES~

KIMBERLY BLAESER is the author of two poetry collections, Trailing You, which won the First Book Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas, and Absentee Indians.  She is also author of a critical study, Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition and editor of a collection of Anishaabe prose, Stories Migrating Home.  She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

BILLY COLLINS, current Poet Laureate of the United States, has published seven books of poetry, including Nine Horses, Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems, The Art of Drowning, Questions About Angels, and Picnic, Lightning.  He teaches at Lehman College (CUNY). 

BARBARA CROOKER is the author of eight collections of poetry, including Ordinary Life, the 2001 winner of the ByLine magazine national competition, in which "Driving Under the Clerestory of Leaves" appeared.  Her work has also been published in various journals, including The Christian Science Monitor, Denver Quarterly, and Negative Capability, 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 Their Words: An Anthology of Contemporary American Women Writers (Prentice Hall). 

CATHERINE DALY has had poetry and essays published widely online and in print.  While not developing online business applications for clients including Fox, Goldman Sachs, NASA, and Universal, she teaches an online poetry workshop through UCLA Extension.

MICHAEL DOBBERSTEIN teaches creative writing and other writing courses at Purdue University Calumet in Hammond, IN. He has published poems in Poetry and The Literary Review. 

CAROL FROST's publications include Pure, Venus and Don Juan, and Love and Scorn: New and Selected Poems, all from Northwestern University Press.  She is writer-in-residence at Hartwick College and founder and director of the Catskill Poetry Workshop. 

BRENDAN GALVIN is the author of thirteen collections of poems, including The Strength of a Named Thing and Sky and Island Light, both from Louisiana State University Press.  His translation of Sophocles' Women of Trachis appeared in the Penn Greek Drama Series.

PAMELA GEMIN is the author of Vendettas, Charms, and Prayers (New Rivers Press), co-editor of Boomer Girls (anthology, University of Iowa Press), and editor of the forthcoming Are You Experienced? , (anthology, University of Iowa Press).  She teaches at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh.

DAVID GRAHAM's six collections of poetry include Stutter Monk (Flume Press), Second Wind (Texas Tech University Press), and Magic Shows (Cleveland State University Press).  His essays have been published in the Georgia Review, The American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.  He has served as the poetry editor of Blue Moon Review and been Poet in Residence at the Robert Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire.  With Kate Sontag, he co-edited After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography (Graywolf Press), where "Voluminous Underwear: or, Why I Write Self-Portraits" appears.  He is a professor of English at Ripon College.

GREGG HERTZLIEB is the Director of the Brauer Museum of Art at Valparaiso University.  He has been awarded the Edward L. Ryerson Traveling Fellowship by the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and a Conant Writing Award for Poetry from Millikin University.  His artwork has been exhibited widely, including at the Aron Packer Gallery, August House Studio, the Central School of Art and Design in London, Columbia College, Elgin Community College, the Goodman Theater, and Struve Gallery. 

BERNHARD HILLILA has had eight books published, three of them collections of poetry, including Cutting Edge (Chimney Hill Press).  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. 

COLETTE INEZ has authored eight collections of poems, including Getting Under Way: New and Selected Poems (Story Line Press), and most recently Clemency (Carnegie Mellon University Press).  She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and twice from the National Endowment for the Arts.  She is on the faculty at Columbia University. 

NATHAN S.JONES received the Theodore Roethke Prize and the Bains-Swigget Prize as a graduate student in the MFA program at the University of Michigan.  He has worked on the staff of Michigan Quarterly Review and as an editorial assistant at The North American Review. 

WILLIAM MATTHEWS taught and lectured all over the United States.  His dozen collections of poetry include After All: Last Poems, Time & Money, and Selected Poems and Translations, 1969-1991, all from Houghton Mifflin.  At the time of his death in 1997 he was a professor of English and director of the writing program at the College of the City University of New York. 

RICK MULKEY is the author of a collection of poetry, Before the Age of Reason (Pecan Grove Press).  His poems also have appeared in numerous journals including The Connecticut Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and Southern Poetry Review.  He has lived and taught at universities in Warsaw, Poland, Kansas, Ohio, and South Carolina, where he currently directs the Creative Writing Program at Converse College.

ANDREW MULVANIA, a doctoral candidate in the creative writing program at the University of Missouri-Columbia, received an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Virginia in 1999 and has been the recipient of Jacob K. Javits and Henry Hoyns Fellowships. His poems have appeared in various journals, including The North American Review, Poetry, and Southern Poetry Review.

ALICIA OSTRIKER is the author of nine volumes of poetry, including The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, which was a National Book Award finalist.  She is also the author of The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions, a combination of midrash and autobiography, and Dancing at the Devil's Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics, and the Erotic.  She is a professor of English at Rutgers University. 

STANLEY PLUMLY's most recent volume of poetry is Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me: New and Selected Poems 1970-2000 (Ecco Press).  His work has been honored with the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award and nominations for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and The Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.  He is a Distinguished University Professor and a professor of English at the University of Maryland. 

KATE SONTAG won the 1995 Ronald H. Bayes Poetry Prize.  Her poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, such as Boomer Girls, In Praise of Pedagogy, The Chester H. Jones National Winners Anthology, Prairie Schooner, Green Mountains Review, Southern Poetry Review, Salt Hill Journal, Kalliope, and elsewhere.  With David Graham, she co-edited After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography (Graywolf Press), where "Mother, May I?: Writing with Love" appears.  She teaches at Ripon College and the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh. 

LARRY THOMAS has had three collections of poetry published: The Woodlanders (Pecan Grove Press), The Lighthouse Keeper (Timberline Press), and Amazing Grace (Texas Review Press).  His poetry has also appeared in many literary journals, including The Journal of the American Medical Association, The Midwest Quarterly, Poet Lore, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and Writers' Forum.