Contributors

Derrick Jensen’s most recent book is The Culture of Make-Believe (Context Books). He recently put out a live spoken-word CD called Standup Tragedy. He lives in Crescent City, California, where he works to improve the habitat of California red-legged frogs and coho salmon.

Lyn Lifshin lives in Virginia and has published more than a hundred books of poetry. Her latest book of poems, Before It’s Light (Black Sparrow Press), has won the Paterson Poetry Award. Black Sparrow recently reprinted her Cold Comfort, and will publish Another Woman Who Looks Like Me later this year. She is the subject of the award-winning documentary Lyn Lifshin: Not Made of Glass, available from Women Make Movies.

Alison Luterman is a poet and essayist living in Oakland, California, where she offers creative-writing classes in her living room. Her book of poetry The Largest Possible Life is available from Cleveland State University Press. She recently completed a play called Saying Kaddish with My Sister.

Megan McNamer prepared for a career in writing by studying ethnomusicology. “I like to write about geographies of ambivalence,” she says: “the liminal, in-between places where travelers meet their destinations.” Her essays have appeared in several anthologies and a variety of magazines, including Salon and Sports Illustrated. She lives in Missoula, Montana, and is currently at work on a book of essays.

David Romtvedt is a poet and essayist living in Buffalo, Wyoming. His books include Windmill: Essays from Four-Mile Ranch (Red Crane Books) and Certainty (White Pine Press), a volume of poems.

Sy Safransky is editor of The Sun.

Sparrow studies French every day, for about nine minutes. He is currently reading Le Petit Roi D’Ys (The Little King of Ys), about a voyage to a lost undersea kingdom. While doing dishes at night, he listens to Cuban salsa or Ella Fitzgerald. He lives in Phoenicia, New York, where he works as a substitute teacher and is a gossip columnist for The Phoenicia Times. His proverbs are available at www.bonney.org/proverbs.

Maureen Stanton is a writer living in Maine. Her essays have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including Creative Nonfiction and Fourth Genre. She talks almost as fast, and almost as much, as her mother.

One of Katherine Vaz’s first published short stories appeared in The Sun, in 1988. Since then, her fiction has appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Glimmer Train, the Iowa Review, and the Antioch Review. She lives in Santa Ana, California, and is the author of two novels, Saudade (St. Martin’s Press) and Mariana (HarperCollins/Flamingo, UK). Her short-story collection Fado and Other Stories (University of Pittsburgh Press) won the 1997 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her story in this issue is dedicated to her friend Mercedes Gomez, a musician who wrote a solo composition about steering a harp through traffic in Mexico City. The story’s title was inspired by a child’s drawing exhibited a decade ago at an art show in Laguna Beach, California.

Rita Bernstein lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Cary Clifford lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Ruth Crump lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

T. Paige Dalporto lives in Charlton Heights, West Virginia.

Bill Emory lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Barbara J. Kline lives in Ketchum, Idaho.

Karen Landmann lives in New York City.

Cindy Schäfer lives in Los Altos Hills, California.

Gregory Thorp lives in New Haven, Connecticut.

Ellen Wallenstein lives in New York City.