Contributor's Notes - Eclectica Magazine, v10n1, Jan/Feb 2006

Jan/Feb 2006

Tom Dooley co-founded Eclectica in 1996 and serves as its Managing Editor. In the 12 years between earning a BA in English literature from the University of Chicago and a MPA in municipal management from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he taught middle and high school English in Alaska, Arizona, and Wisconsin, amassing fond memories, dubious experiences, and debt. Two careers post-teaching later, he now creates spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides for the man by day, edits Eclectica by night, and feels very grateful for the blessings he has received—chief among them being married to the sweetest gal and the best poet he knows. He and said gal reside in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with enough rescued lapdogs to field a diminutive Iditarod racing team and the empty-nest echoes of two amazing Haitian-American children who have flown the coop.

Paul Sampson is Eclectica's Nonfiction and Miscellany Editor and has been a regular contributor to the Salon. A professional writer and editor for many years, he worked until recently for a mammoth corporation. He has since been downsized, although he remains the same height and weight as formerly. Some of his essays and poems have been published in Image, The Alsop Review, The 2River View, Illya's Honey, The Sulphur River Literary Review, the British publication World Wide Writers II, and the anthology Best Texas Writing (Rancho Loco Press). He lives on the outskirts of a small town east of Dallas, Texas.

Colleen Mondor is Eclectica's Review Editor. She also reviews for Bookslut, the Voices of NOLA, and Booklist. Short story excerpts from her novel on Alaskan aviation have recently appeared in failbetter and Storyglossia. She maintains a daily blog on all things literary (and sometimes not) at her site, Chasingray.com.

Elizabeth P. Glixman is Eclectica's Interview Editor. Her fiction and poetry have appeared online and in print in Wicked Alice, In Posse Review, 3 A.M. Magazine, Tough Times Companion, a publication of The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, Her Circle Ezine, Frigg, and Velvet Avalanche, an anthology of erotic poetry. Besides Eclectica, her author interviews, articles, book reviews, and creative non-fiction pieces have appeared in The Pedestal Magazine, Whole Life Times, Spirit of Change, Hadassah Magazine, and the anthologies Chocolate for A Woman's Soul II and Cup of Comfort For Women. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks: A White Girl Lynching (Pudding House Publications, 2008), Cowboy Writes a Letter & Other Love Poems (Pudding House Publications, 2010), and The Wonder of It All (Alternating Current, 2012). Elizabeth's story, "Mother's Bony Behind," was chosen one of the notable online stories of 2006 by the Million Writers Award. Elizabeth is an animal lover, and she has a blog devoted to shelter animals, especially those at kill shelters.

Jennifer Finstrom has been the Poetry Editor of Eclectica since the fall issue of 2005. This is her final issue in that capacity. A former Spotlight Author, she teaches in the First-Year Writing Program, tutors in writing, and facilitates writing groups at DePaul University. Recent publications include Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Escape Into Life, Gingerbread House Literary Magazine, and NEAT. For Silver Birch Press, she has work appearing in The Great Gatsby Anthology, the Alice in Wonderland Anthology, and in Ides: A Collection of Poetry Chapbooks.

Mike Spice is Eclectica's Travel Editor. He is working on a Master's Degree in International Business at the University of Wollongong in Dubai. His poetry and prose have appeared previously in Eclectica and Modern Haiku.

Elena Arosemena is a graduate student in the Creative Writing MFA Program at Queens University in Charlotte, N.C. She has worked in the telecommunications industry for 20-plus years but is on hiatus while she completes her MFA. She is a native of the Republic of Panama.

Charles Clifford Brooks III is a freelance writer from Jasper, Georgia, USA. He contributes monthly articles in the Pickens County Progress concerning theological-social issues as well as a column totally devoted to making people laugh. Charles was inducted into the National Creative Society his senior year at Shorter College, which sealed his fate as a man of letters. He graduated from Shorter with a Bachelor's of Science in History. His poetry has been published in AEGIS, Awen, Eclectica Magazine, Poetry Motel, Foliate Oak, Confused in a Deeper Way, resume, Wet Ink (Winner of Wet Ink's 2005 Poetry Contest), The Chimes, Pulsar Magazine, and GreenInk. His prose has won the Sassafrass Literary Exchange's writing competition in Fiction and Nonfiction two years running. Samples of his short fiction can be found in Ha! Magazine, Sein und Werden Magazine, and The Chimes. Today, he is employed by Georgia's Department of Juvenile Justice, where he works with the at-risk children and their families. "My Buddhist Beginnings" was the first in a collection of poems he started after taking up the path of the Buddha.

Mark Budman has published fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry in such literary magazines as Mississippi Review, Virginia Quarterly, Exquisite Corpse, Iowa Review, McSweeney's, Cafe Irreal, Another Chicago, The Bloomsbury Review and Turnrow. Exquisite Corpse nominated him for the XXVI Pushcart Prize. He is the publisher of a flash (short-shorts) fiction magazine Vestal Review and the recipient of the Broome Country Art Council grant. One of his stories has been accepted for the new WW Norton anthology of flash fiction.

Jared Carter lives in Indianapolis. His fourth collection of poems, Cross this Bridge at a Walk, is forthcoming from Wind Publications in Kentucky. Additional work may be found on his web site, Jared Carter Poetry.

Jane Cates when not building boats, teaching Sunday school, or learning just how Gilgamesh became Gilgamensch, is a fixed income analyst on Wall Street (Bonds, Jane's Bonds).

Fleur Chapman lives in London with her partner and son. She is a freelance journalist and writes with Alex Keegan's Bootcamp. She has stories in Seventh Quark Magazine, Cadenza and Leaf Books, and was shortlisted for the Fish International Short Story Prize.

Tom Conoboy is Scottish but now lives in England, where he works in local government. He started writing in 2005 and has had a number of publications. He writes with Alex Keegan's online Boot Camp.

Barbara De Franceschi lives with her husband in Broken Hill (where she was born), a small mining town in outback Australia, where they own and operate an earthmoving business and have a grown-up family of three sons and two daughters. She recently launched her first collection of poems, titled Lavender Blood.In 2002 she was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for service to the community especially in the area of multiculturalism. Barbara joined the Broken Hill Writer's Forum in 2000 when she started to take her writing seriously. Since then she has had her poems and short stories published in literary journals and magazines throughout Australia, including Famous Reporter, Centoria, The Bunyip, Poetrix, The Tablet and Yellow Moon, in which her poem titled "Dust Storm" won first prize in the nature poetry section (to be published in July 2003). She has also read her poetry on radio live to air. She describes her poetry as "immediately accessible."

Cy Dillon lives in the Virginia mountains on a farm that has been in his family for six generations. A veteran college librarian, he is fiction editor of the Nantahala Review and co-editor of Virginia Libraries, which is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. Dillon's poetry can be found online in Eclectica, Maverick Magazine, and Red River Review.

Steven J. Dines lives in the granite city of Aberdeen, Scotland, where he has been writing short fiction for many years. His work has appeared in Dark Tales, Buzzwords, The Writer's Post Journal, Word Riot, Noo Journal, Underground Voices, Outsider Ink, and many others.

Jason Fraley works at an investment firm in West Virginia and is pursuing his M.B.A. His wife and cat see him occasionally. He has been published in Redactions, Confluence, Whistling Shade, Words on Walls, Pebble Lake Review, and others.

Patrick Frank is a poet-songwriter, singer-guitarist, essayist, and certified counselor who has served as an advocate for the poor in New England, the South, and on the Zuni Indian reservation in New Mexico. A civil rights and peace worker, he has participated in the VISTA and AmeriCorps programs and was homeless himself for a year in New England while recovering from the effects of previously untreated Bipolar Disorder. During the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Patrick and his wife, a school psychologist, hosted an evacuee from New Orleans. His poetry and prose have appeared in the Journal of Poetry Therapy, Modern Haiku, Psychopoetica (Univ. of Hull, UK), Haiku Reality, Pegasus, Ashe Poetry Journal, Language and Culture.net, and Niedergassen. He was formerly the editor and publisher of Point Judith Light, a periodical of Eastern forms of poetry and aesthetic philosophy, and has published a chapbook of linked haiku focusing on urban life in Western New England and poverty issues (Tiny Poems Press). His father was a bestselling novelist, and his sister is a freelance editor in Washington, DC. He has three kids: a son, a step-daughter, and a step-son. The son teaches computer science at Florida State University, the step-daughter attends the Maine College of Art, and the step-son teaches creative writing to high school students in California. The haiku in "Well Past Midnight" are non-traditional, in that they do not conform to the 5-7-5 syllable dictum, they are not rendered in three lines, they don't necessarily include aspects of nature (like senryu), and they focus more directly on the emotional side of experience than do traditional haiku (like tanka). "Midnight" depicts Patrick's slide into homelessness in the late nineties in Western Massachusetts. "For most individuals," he writes, "the early stages of homelessness constitute a complex and confusing array of elements."

Joel Fry has appeared in Stirring, Melic Review, and Poetry Sz. His favorite contemporary poet is Mark Strand, whom he credits as an influence. He is also a big fan of Anne Sexton, learning the art of simile from reading her poems. He says, "I have a great fondness for the river and often write from the perspective of a hermit."

Tiffany German is a book enthusiast. She is in her Junior year in college, studying Entrepenuership at the University of Central Florida, wants to one day be a sex therapist.

Robert Gray owns Fresh Eyes Now LLC, a consulting company that offers a frontline bookseller's perspective to publishers and authors interested in dramatically expanding their readership. He worked as a bookseller and buyer for the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, VT from 1992 to 2005, and was named the store's first Master Bookseller in 2000. He is also the author of Fresh Eyes: A Bookseller's Journal, a publishing industry blog. Gray's written work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Publishers Weekly, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Tin House, and Cimarron Review. He earned an MFA in Writing & Literature from Bennington College in 2003. He is currently working on a book about reading and readers from a bookseller's perspective.

Kate Hall is a former poetry editor of Stirring: A Literary Collection. Her poetry and stories have appeared in such journals as Antioch Review, In Posse, Mudlark, Big Bridge, Disquieting Muses, Poetry Magazine, The 2River View, Perihelion, Mississippi Review, Zuzu's Petals Quarterly, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, Rattle, and SoMa Literary Review. She was awarded the Robert Frost Poetry Prize by Kenyon College, where she graduated Magna Cum Laude. She also holds a J.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Thomas J. Hubschman is a regular contributor to Eclectica's Salon, the author of the novel Billy Boy (Savvy Press), and the publisher of Gowanus, an ezine for authors in and from the so-called Third World. He is also editor of The Best of Gowanus: New Writing from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean (Gowanus Books). His short stories, articles and reviews have appeared in The Blue Moon Review, Morpo Review, New York Press, on the BBC World Service and in numerous other print and online publications.

Irakli Iosebashvili was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, grew up in New York City, and now resides in Moscow, Russia, where he occasionally writes for The Moscow Times. He enjoys playing the guitar, shooting pool, and hanging out with his wife, Khatuna. This is his first fiction publication.

Nuzhat Jabinh is a Londoner. She has worked with The Poetry Translation Centre at SOAS and has been published by The Guardian.

Stanley Jenkins has appeared in Amelia, 32 Pages, The Blue Moon Review, CrossConnect, and the Oyster Boy Review. A former Spotlight Author, Stanley is a regular contributor to Eclectica's Salon and holds the record for greatest number of appearances in our issues. He lives and works in Queens, New York.

Anju Kanumalla holds a day job in the pharmaceutical industry as a medical writer, which allows her to feed her addiction to yarn and science books. Much of her other work can be found at Two-Penny Words. She is also a contributor at The Bitter Quill.

Sam Kean was born and raised in the cold Dakotas, and he has found his writing works best in short, one-page bursts. These pieces in Eclectica are part of an Arabian-Nights style collection he's working on called Too Much of Himself in the Thing. His maxims, quips and odes to rejection letters can be perused on his blog.

Alex Keegan lives in Newbury, England with his wife Deborah, son Alex and daughter Bridie. Born in Wales in 1947 of an Irish mother and Welsh father, he played around with writing almost all his life, but only got serious when recovering from injuries and mental trauma after the Clapham (London) train crash in December, 1988. In October, 1992, he decided to "give up the day job" and give himself five years to get published. The result was five "Caz Flood" mystery novels, the first of which was shortlisted for an Anthony Award for best first novel. Since then Alex has moved to writing literary short fiction. His publications include Atlantic Monthly Unbound, Mississippi Review, Blue Moon Review, The Alsop Review, Crania, and of course, Eclectica.

Caroline Kepnes was born in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 1976. After graduating from Brown, she moved to New York where she wrote for Tiger Beat and Entertainment Weekly. She now lives in Los Angeles and writes for a gossip column called "The Awful Truth" at E! Online. Her short stories have been published in Eyeshot, Hobart, Thieves Jargon, The Duck & Herring Co.'s Pocket Field Guide, Yankee Pot Roast and Word Riot, and are forthcoming in The Barcelona Review, Carve, Monkey Bicycle, The Blue Moon Review, and Spoiled Ink. Her story, "The Way You Make Me Feel," appeared in Eclectica's Jul/Aug 2005 issue. When not writing, Caroline plays cards, swims, or run-dances on the treadmill, listening to '80s mix tapes on her Walkman.

Deborah P. Kolodji works in information technology to fund her poetry obsessions and to pay for her children's ever-increasing college tuition. She is a member of the Haiku Society of America and the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Her work has appeared in Modern Haiku, Frogpond, bottle rockets, The Heron's Nest, Electica, FireWeed, The Red Moon Anthology, Gin Bender Review, Strange Horizons, Star*Line, St. Anthony Messenger Magazine, and many other places, both on and off the web. She is one of four winners of the 2004-2005 Virgil Hutton Haiku Memorial Award Chapbook Contest for her winning manuscript, Seaside Moon, published by Saki Press. Kolodji is one of 17 haiku poets included in The New Resonance 4: Emerging Voices in English Language Haiku by Red Moon Press. She moderates the Yahoo e-list CinquainPoets, and is the Editor of Amaze: The Cinquain Journal.

Natalie Kring is a former Spotlight Author and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. She is at work on her first book, Sister Salty, Sister Sweet, co-written with her sister Shannon, to be released by Running Press in 2007.

Andy Lewis

Robert Link is a Personal Development Trainer and Counselor in Southern California, specializing since 1985 in semantics-oriented methods to achieve behavioral gains for his students and clients. Robert also dabbles in experimental writing and is currently enrolled as a law student.

Robert Lopez teaches an experimental fiction workshop at The New School and lives with his wife, Heather. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in many print and online journals, including BOMB, American Letters & Commentary, New Orleans Review, New England Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Willow Springs, Confrontation, Indiana Review, SleepingFish, The Barcelona Review, Failbetter, 5_Trope, Nerve, and other elsewheres. "The Price of Fish" is one of a series of ten Blindster stories so far. Others can be found or will turn up in Elimae, DIAGRAM, Small Spiral Notebook, Frigg, and Unsaid. He is the new co-editor of SleepingFish.

Pamela Mackey teaches English at a community college in central New York. Earlier in her career, she wrote feature stories for newspapers, including The New York Times. Even earlier, she was a researcher and editor in the magazine industry, holding staff positions at LOOK and Saturday Review magazines. She writes poetry and is the proud mother of a gifted young novelist. She lives with a small flock of blue and white parakeets and a big black chow puppy named Koo.

Don Mager has published some two hundred and fifty original poems and translations from Czech and German over the last thirty years, including two books: To Track The Wounded On (1986) and Glosses (1995).

Scott Malby received an email a few months ago. He feels it says it all: "There is nothing about you that is even remotely interesting. Most people who read what you write would agree."

Antonios Maltezos has stories in Night Train, Ink Pot, SmokeLong Quarterly, Pindeldyboz, Thieves Jargon, Verbsap, Foliate Oak, Flashquake, and The Mad Hatter's Review, among other places. He is the spring 2006 guest editor for Flashquake, and was recently nominated for a Pushcart. He lives in Montreal with his wife and four children.

Kat McElroy was born in Laramie, Wyoming in 1950. She came to in Delta Junction, Alaska in 1986. She is a high school drop-out. She has a minor criminal record. She has been employed in a wide variety of occupations including drug dealing, bull-cook in a gold mine camp, bartender, wood-cutter, waitress, meat-wrapper, barroom floozie, and town drunk. She is a mother and a grandmother. She spent ten years living a subsistence lifestyle in the Interior of Alaska. During all this, she wrote, which she continues to do. She raises MacKenzie River Huskies and likes to play with fire. She has over-corrected in the criminal-behaviors arena and is now known as something of a stick-in-the-mud.

Corey Mesler owns Burke's Book Store in Memphis, Tennessee, one of the country's oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He has published poetry and fiction in numerous journals, including Rattle, Pindeldyboz, Quick Fiction, Cranky, Thema, Mars Hill Review, Poet Lore, and others. He has also been a book reviewer for The Memphis Commercial Appeal. A short story of his was chosen for the 2002 edition of New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, published by Algonquin Books. Talk, his first novel, appeared in 2002 with nice blurbs from Lee Smith, John Grisham, Robert Olen Butler, Frederick Barthelme, and others. He has a new novel, We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon, just out from Livingston. His latest four poetry chapbooks are Chin-Chin in Eden (2003), Dark on Purpose (2004), Short Story and Other Short Stories (2006), and The Heart is Open (2006). He also claims to have written "Pleasant Valley Sunday." Most importantly, he is Toby and Chloe's dad and Cheryl's husband.

Ashok Niyogi was born in Calcutta in 1955. He was schooled all over India in Irish Christian Brothers' Schools and graduated with Honors in Economics from Presidency College. Ashok spent 30 years in the world of International Commerce, 15 in Eastern Europe and Russia and the CIS. His work has taken him all over the world, and he now divides his time between California (where his two daughters live), Russia, and India. He is currently unemployed because writing poetry is not considered gainful employment, but does have a timber plantation in Goa, India. Ashok has two books of poetry in India: Crossroads and Reflections in the Dark (both from A-4 Publications); one book of poems in the USA titled Tentatively (iUniverse); and numerous chapbooks from ScarsTV, Slow Trains, UCL-Davis etc. He has been published extensively online and in print in the USA, the UK, New Zealand, Australia and Canada in magazines and anthologies.

Stanley Noah has a degree from The University of Texas at Dallas and is a member of The Academy of American Poets.

A. Ray Norsworthy along with his short story collection, Indiahoma: Stories Of Blues And Blessings, was the subject of Elizabeth Glixman's interview in the Oct/Nov 2005 issue of Eclectica. His short stories have appeared in Night Train III, Zoetrope All-Story Extra, The Story Garden, Gator Springs Gazette, and 12 Gauge. Besides Indiahoma, he has written two novels and a number of plays and short stories. The most recent novel (unpublished) is True Revelations (A Love Story of the Apocalypse). "All The Way To Grangeville" was loosely inspired by Richard Ford's great story "Rock Springs." Regarding the story, Ray says, "What I wanted to capture was that same palpable sense of yearning in two pugnacious characters who encounter each other on the mythic American desert highway the day before Thanksgiving; both of them damaged souls emotionally adrift and in danger of sinking; the man searching for a way out and the girl a way back home."

Timothy David Orme is a recent graduate of Boise State University, where he has been working with Martin Corless-Smith and Janet Holmes, and also on the editorial staff of Ahsahta Press. His poetry has previously been published in Interim, The Colorado Review, Gutcult, and CWHOBB, among others.

Laurie Porter decided at age seven that she would be an artist and writer when she grew up. She's been a little bit of both over the years alongside her many other jobs (the strangest of which involved monitoring mold growth on bread). She lives in the UK with a bunch of amazing people and some animals.

Dave Prescott lives with his wife Billie in Herefordshire, UK. His work has appeared, or will appear, in Buzzwords, Seventh Quark, Blue Mag, Southern Ocean Review, and an anthology from Leaf Books. He writes with Alex Keegan's Boot Camp.

Gilbert Wesley Purdy has published poetry, prose and translation in many journals, paper and electronic, including: The Georgia Review (University of Georgia); Jacket Magazine (Australia); Poetry International (San Diego State University); Grand Street; the Valparaiso Poetry Review (University of Valparaiso); The Pedestal Magazine; SLANT (University of Central Arkansas); Orbis (UK), and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. His Hyperlinked Online Bibliography appears in the pages of The Catalyzer Journal.

Jessy Randall is the Curator of Special Collections at Colorado College. Her poems have been hung from trees, used in library advertisements, made into Canadian rock songs, recited on closed-circuit television, sold in gumball machines, and printed in a miniature village. She lives in Colorado Springs with her husband, two young children, and sister-in-law.

Jose Rivera would like to say that his wife, who is also a writer, has saved his life and made him happy and the poem is his way of saying, "I love you, and I'm sorry." His work will soon appear in Poesia.

Nancy Saunders is a fiddle-playing mother of two lovelies from Bristol, who has been writing for the last couple of years with Alex Keegan's Boot Camp. Nancy has three publications in Alex's lit mag Seventh Quark and a clutch at Bluemag on the net.

Ann and David Skea live in Australia. Ann is the author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE Press, Australia).

Ian Duncan Smith is this issue's Spotlight Author. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmith's, University of London. While he reports that his background is mainly in poetry, he has also written a novel, Tony Blair: The Wilderness Years, available through Booksurge.com.

Walter Smith was born in London, studied at Falmouth School of Art in Cornwall, and now lives on a boat in the east of England. He has written and illustrated two children's books, which a publisher somewhere must be hoping will land on their desk. He is responsible for AllWorldKnowledge.com, a satirical, not-very-educational website. His fiction has appeared on pulp.net and Identity Theory. "Rules Rules Rules" was written as part of Boot Camp's "October Blast."

Maryanne Snell

Nigel Spriggs is 35 and lives in Hampshire, England.

Stephanie Storey is a fiction and screen writer who recently left her life as a television producer to pursue her writing career full-time. Her television credits include Tavis Smiley on PBS, The Conspiracy Zone with Kevin Nealon, and Exhale with Candice Bergen. Stephanie has a BA in Fine Arts from Vanderbilt University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband. "Sex in the Jungle Room" is her first story to appear in Eclectica.

Ray Templeton is a Scottish writer and musician, living in St. Albans, England. His poetry has appeared in Magma and at The Argotist Online. He is a member of the editorial board of Blues & Rhythm Magazine, and his writing on various kinds of music has also appeared in Musical Traditions, Keskidee, and others.

Colin Upton lives in Bristol with his wife. He has been writing for three years, and his stories have been published in print at Cadenza, Monaya Press, and Slingink, as well as on a number of websites.

Jennifer VanBuren is the editor of Mannequin Envy, a web-based journal of visual and literary arts. She has degrees and a former career in the field of science, education and instructional technology, but now does volunteer work while raising her two children—in addition to writing and studying poetry, digital photography, and editing. She lives in Baltimore, where she reports taking advantage of the many benefits of city life, but also enjoys camping and hiking in the Maryland woods, climbing waterfalls, skipping stones, and attempting to lure songbirds into her tiny yard. She has appeared on-line and in print in such publications as Poetry Motel, Free Verse, Midwifery Today, ken*again, Pemican, Niedergasse, and Clean Sheets. One of her poems was nominated for a Pushcart prize, and her poetry and photography has been featured in from East to West, Artistry of Life, and Admit 2. A more complete list of her publications and samples of her art and poetry can be found on her home page.

Allan Wasserman graduated from Boston University with a BFA in Acting. He has appeared on Broadway with Al Pacino, and his television appearances include The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Comeback, Kitchen Confidential, and Seinfeld, among others. His short fiction has appeared in Elimae, Another Toronto Quarterly, and Morpho Review, and he won second place in Glimmer Train's Short-Story Award for New Writers last year. "The Passover Pugilist" is one in a series of short stories that take place in the Bronx. See his website for other Bronx stories, as well as acting and music credits.

William Winfield Wright was born in California, lives in Grand Junction, Colorado, has published in The Beloit Poetry Journal, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Field, Permafrost, The Ninth Letter, and elsewhere, and recently edited a special bilingual edition (English and Norwegian) of the journal Pinyon. The three poems in this issue are each associated with a different place: "Author" is a Colorado poem, "Gary" a Norway poem, and "Last" a San Francisco poem.

Grzegorz Wróblewski was born in 1962 in Gdansk and grew up in Warsaw, Poland. Since 1985 he has lived in Copenhagen. He has published seven volumes of poetry in Poland, three (translations) in Denmark, and selected poems in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Mostar 2002). He is also the author of several plays. English translations of his poems have appeared in London Magazine, Poetry London, Chicago Review, 3rd bed, Lyric Poetry Review and in the anthologies Altered State: The New Polish Poetry (Arc Publications, Todmorden, UK 2003) and Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird (Zephyr Press, Brookline, USA 2004).