Contributors Notes

Fiction

Ace Boggess received his B.A. from Marshall University in 1993, and his Juris Doctorate from West Virginia University in 1998. In addition to his poetry book, he has published four chapbooks. His writing has appeared more than 600 times in various literary journals, including the Harvard Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry East, Atlanta Review, Antietam Review, The Oregon Review, Baltimore Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Chaminade Literary Review, Portland Review, Potomac Review, Elixir, Birmingham Poetry Review, Clay Palm Review, Bryant Literary Review, Cider Press Review, The Southeast Review, Lullwater Review, INKWELL, The Florida Review, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Blue Mesa Review, and many others. He has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize.

Sarah Gillespie is a student at Emory & Henry College.

Jo Neace Krause publishes often in literary journals such as the Yale Review, University of Windor Review, Witness, Exquisite Corpse, River City, Potomac Review, and the University of South Carolina Review.

Janna McMahan grew up in Campbellsville, Kentucky. She earned a BA and MA in journalism from the University of Kentucky and the University of South Carolina, respectively. Her short fiction has won the South Carolina Fiction Project, the Piccolo Spoleto Fiction Open and the Harriette Arnow Award. Her stories have appeared in Limestone, The Midday Moon, The Charleston Post & Courier, Free Times and online. McMahan recently completed a novel, Gathering Call, set in Kentucky. She teaches creative writing at Midlands Technical College in Columbia, SC and writes book reviews for The State Newspaper. Her essays and articles on visual and literary art have been published in numerous magazines including Charleston, Arts Across Kentucky, MAMM, CURE, Skirt! and South Carolina Wildlife. She lives in Columbia, SC with her husband Mark and their daughter, Madison.

Melissa Mitchell was born in Petaluma, California but has lived in the mountains
of Colorado since she was five years old. She is a student at Colorado State University. 
 

R. T. Smith lives in Rockbridge County, Virginia. His newest books are Brightwood (LSU, 2004) and The Hollow Log Lounge (Illinois, 2003). Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995. During the coming winter he will serve as the Philips Family Distinguished Chair in Composition and Rhetoric at Virginia Military Institute. Li-Young Lee recently selected Smith’s The Hollow Log Lounge as the recipient of this year's Maurice English Prize, given to the collection the judge deems to be the best of the year by a poet of fifty or older. 

Nonfiction

Fred First is an Alabama native who has searched for home through three southern Appalachian states and as many careers to find at last a perfect fit in the Virginia Blue Ridge county of Floyd, Virginia. After teaching biology for twelve years, then caring for patients as a physical therapist for as many years, his third calling is leading him toward discovery of place and belonging. He credits his weblog, Fragments from Floyd, for the motivation to write (and post his photographs) daily. Out of these photo-journal entries have come more than a dozen essays on the Roanoke NPR station as well as pieces in GreenPrints, Birmingham Arts Journal, Blue Ridge Country Magazine, and elsewhere. He contributes a bimonthly column, “The Road Less Traveled,” to the local Floyd Press.

Patricia Sutherland is an assistant professor of speech and theatre at Tennessee Wesleyan College.  She is a graduate of the University of Tennessee Knoxville from the days before it was necessary to identify the campus with the city.  She still sits in the back of the house and watches her "creations" come to life on the stage.

Liza Field is a hiker, teacher and tree-planter working to save land along the New River in Virginia. She wants to thank all writers and seekers for listening to those voices in nature that often get ignored, in our time. "Let's continue to speak up for those who cannot speak, and keep the faith!" If anyone would like to dedicate a sapling along New River, in honor of a friend, and meanwhile save some unspoiled land, contact her: fieldnotes@wiredog.com.

Robert Yardley was born in St. Petersburg, Florida. Genetically poor, honest, and hardworking, he has lived in Appalachia as poor as they come but rich in experiences. He walked the hills of Jackson County, Tennessee and the mountains of Cherokee, N.C. looking for heart and knowledge. “The Last Medicine Man in Cherokee” is about both found.

Amy G. Whitney, who started her adult life as a botanist in Oklahoma, is an English Instructor for Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia, and serves as a co-managing editor for Kennesaw Review, an online literary journal. Some of her poems are collected in the chapbook, Billy Goat 5: Natural Deceptions, published by Billy Goat Press in 2003.

Tina McBride is an English Professor at Brevard College

Jeanne Bryner is a registered nurse, nationally known poet, and author from Newton Falls, Ohio. She was born in West Virginia. Her work includes collections of poetry including Breathless (Kent State University Press, 1995); Blind Horse (Bottom Dog Press, 1999); and a collection of short stories, Eclipse (Botton Dog Press, 2003); and most recently Tenderly Lift Me: Nurses Honored, Celebrated, and Remembered (Kent State University Press, 2003).

Poetry

Mark DeFoe is chair of the English department at West Virginia Wesleyan College. His fifth book, The Green Chair, will appear fall 2004. He has recent work in

Poetry, Louisville Review, Roanoke Review, Cumberland Poetry Review, and others.

Edison Jennings directs the Writing Center at Virginia Intermont College. He earned an MFA in poetry writing from Warren Wilson College. He has published in many journals, both academic and independent. Two of his poems will appear in the Kenyon Review this year.

Janice Moore Fuller is Writer-in-Residence and Professor of English at Catawba College. Her second poetry book, Sex Education, will be published in 2004 by Iris Press. Her plays have and will be produced at Catawba’s Florence Busby Corriher, Charlotte’s BareBones Theater, and the 2004 Minneapolis Fringe Festival. Her libretto for German composer Knut Mueller’s Destructive Science premiered at the Rendez-Vous Musique Nouvelle in France in November 2003. Educated at Duke University (B.A.) and UNC-Greensboro (M.A., Ph.D), she has been a Fellow at the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Ireland, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain, Hawthornden Castle in Edinburgh, and the Vermont Studio Center. A staff writer for the Asheville Poetry Review, she descends from Scots-Irish and Irish people, some of whom still live in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Clyde Kessler grew up in the Appalachian mountains. He lives and writes in Blacksburg, VA.

Thorpe Moeckel earned an MFA at the University of Virginia. He currently lives and works in Chapel Hill, North Carlolina.

Thomas Sanders grew up in the limestone hills between Nashville and Huntsville, Alabama. Aside from a brief time at Francis Marion University in South Carolina, and seven years spent as an editor and writer at the University of Chicago, he has spent his entire adult life in the Appalachian region. He is an advancement writer for the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee.

R. A. Skeens is a retired coal miner from Southwest Virginia. His poetry has appeared in many literary journals since he traded his pick and shovel for pen and paper. His poem “Dying” won first place in the Virginia Highlands Poetry Competition in 2000.

Danielle Thorne was raised in the smoky mountains of Waynesville, North Carolina, and later Tennessee. She graduated from BYU-Idaho in 1990 and then returned South to reclaim the Appalachian heritage her family instilled in her. Published, she currently writes mountain poetry and short fiction while marketing her first Appalachian novel, a remarkable account of her father’s childhood in the Smokies.

Photography & Mixed Media

Barry R. Jones is an Assistant Professor of Art at Emory & Henry College, teaching photography , digital imaging, and sculpture. He holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Austin Peay State University, Clarksville, TN

Jon Hounshell earned an MFA at East Tennessee State University.

Views

Casey Clabough is a visiting professor at Lynchburg College and a 2005 Fellow at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities in Charlottesville. He is the author of Elements: The Novels of James Dickey (2002) and Experimentation and Versatility: The Early Novels and Short Fiction of Fred Chappell (Forthcoming, 2005).

Carol Mason, Ph.D is originally from West Virginia. She is an interdisciplinary Americanist who teaches and writes about the rise of the right since the 1960s. Her book, Killing for Life, was published by Cornell UP in 2002; she is now writing a book about the 1974 Kanawha County, West Virginia, textbook controversy. As assistant professor of Women's Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, she embraces the absurd.

Jim Minick lives, writes and farms in Wythe County, Virginia. He also teaches in the English Department at Radford University.

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