GRIST
vol. 1, 2007
The Journal for Writers
Contributors
CLAIRE BATEMAN lives in Greenville and teaches at the Fine Arts Center. Her books are The Bicycle Slow Race (Wesleyan, 1991); Friction (Eighth Mountain, 1998); At the Funeral of the Ether (Ninety-Six Press, 1998); Clumsy (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2003); and Leap (New Issues, 2005).
JOHN CANADAY’s first book, The Invisible World, won the 2001 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets; he is also the author of a critical study, The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs. “Louis Slotin,” “James Nolan,” and “Robert Serber” are from Critical Assembly, a series of poems in the voices of the scientists, spouses, laborers, locals, and military personnel involved in the Manhattan Project.
BRIAN DICKSON balances his time between four realms of education with tutoring, farming kindergarteners, teaching composition in the cyberworld, and teaching composition at the Community College of Denver. He enjoys spending time riding his bike to work and around Denver cultivating an awareness of things around him. Some publications include Copper-Nickel, Matter, Goodfoot, The Blue Mesa Review, and others.
TOM FRANKLIN is from Dickinson, Alabama. He attended the University of South Alabama and the Univ. of Arkansas. His books include Poachers: Stories and two novels, Hell at the Breech and Smonk, all published by William Morrow. Currently he is a writer-in-residence at Ole Miss and teaches in its MFA program. He’s married to the poet Beth Ann Fennelly, and they have two children.
ELIZABETH GILBERT is the author of the short story collection, Pilgrims [a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award] and the novel, Stern Men, as well as The Last American Man and the #1 New York Times Bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love. The author currently lives in New Jersey, and is at work on a new book.
JESSE GRAVES is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Tennessee. His poems can be read in recent and upcoming issues of Connecticut Review and Bat City Review. Three of his poems plus an essay, entitled “Lattice Work: Formal Tendencies in the Recent Poetry of Robert Morgan and Ron Rash,” will appear in the forthcoming “State of Southern Poetry” special issue of Southern Quarterly.
JEFF HARDIN teaches at Columbia State Community College in Columbia, TN. His first collection, Fall Sanctuary, received the 2004 Nicholas Roerich Prize from Story Line Press. He is also the author of two chapbooks, Deep in the Shallows and The Slow Hill Out.
BRET ANTHONY JOHNSTON is the author of Corpus Christi: Stories and the editor of Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer, both from Random House. In 2006, he won a National Book Award for writers under 35. He can be reached on the web at www.bretanthonyjohnston.com
JULIA LEVINE’s poetry collections include Ditch-tender, (forthcoming from University of Tampa Press); Ask, winner of the 2002 Tampa Review Prize, and Practicing for Heaven, which won the 1998 Anhinga Prize for Poetry. She received her Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley in clinical psychology. She lives and works in Davis.
JEFF DANIEL MARION, a native of Rogersville, TN, has published seven poetry collections, four poetry chapbooks, and a children’s book, Hello, Crow. The poems published here are part of a new manuscript called Letters to the Dead: A Memoir, with each poem addressed to a significant deceased person in his past.
LINDA PARSONS MARION is the poetry editor of Now & Then magazine and the author of Home Fires. Her poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Cornbread Nation 2, Negative Capability, Nimrod, Potomac Review, CALYX, Helicon Nine, Atlanta Review, Poet Lore, among others. Her work was nominated for a 2006 Pushcart Prize, and she has received two literary fellowships from the Tennessee Arts Commission, among other awards. Essays and poems have also appeared in The Movable Nest (Helicon Nine Editions, 2007), Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia (University Press of Kentucky, 2003), Her Words: Diverse Voices in Contemporary Appalachian Women’s Poetry (University of Tennessee Press, 2002), and Sleeping with One Eye Open: Women Writers and the Art of Survival (University of Georgia Press, 1999). Marion is an editor at the University of Tennessee and lives in Knoxville with her husband, poet Jeff Daniel Marion.
JERRY D. MATHES II is a recipient of a Jack Kent Cooke Scholarship and was named Outstanding Humanities Graduate at Lewis-Clark State and Outstanding Graduate Writer at East Carolina University. He received Special Mention for Fiction in The Pushcart Prize XXXI, and is currently in the MFA program at the University of Idaho, Moscow. He loves his wife and two daughters very much.
MARY ANN MCGUIGAN is the author of two novels for young adults, Cloud Dancer (Scribner's Sons) and Where You Belong (Atheneum), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her third novel, Morning in a Different Place, is also for young adults and will be published in 2009 by Front Street Press. Mary Ann also writes short fiction for adults and is publisher for Bloomberg Press in New York.
ERIC PUCHNER is author of the story collection Music Through the Floor, which was a finalist for a California Book Award and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant, he lives in San Francisco with his wife, novelist Katharine Noel, and their baby daughter.
RON RASH’s latest book is Chemistry, a collection of stories. He teaches at Western Carolina University.
DENNIS SAMPSON’s most recent volumes of poetry are Needlegrass (Carnegie Mellon University Press) and For My Father Falling Asleep at Saint Mary’s Hospital. He lives in Winston-Salem, NC.
NICK TAYLOR’s debut novel The Disagreement will be published by Simon & Schuster in April 2008. The novel tells the story of a 17-year-old medical student in Virginia during the Civil War. Nick is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at San Jose State University.
RANDALL WILHELM is a Lecturer at The University of Tennessee, where he teaches courses in 19th and 20th century American literature. He has published articles on Cormac McCarthy, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, William Gay and Lee Smith, among others, and is currently editing a collection of essays on William Faulkner and the Visual Arts.
TAMMY WILSON of Newton, NC has published in such journals as The Potomac, The Healing Muse and Crossroads: A Southern Culture Annual and has received grants and fellowships sponsored by the N.C. Arts Council, Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
WILLIAM WRIGHT was raised in Edgefield, South Carolina. He has a full-length collection of poems, Dark Orchard, published by Texas Review Press and winner of the 2005 Breakthrough Poetry Prize. He is founding editor of Town Creek Poetry (www.towncreekpoetry.com) as well as co-editor of The Southern Poetry Anthology (Texas Review Press).