Steven Harvey is the author of three collections of essays: A Geometry of Lilies, Lost in Translation, and Bound for Shady Grove. He teaches English and creative writing at Young Harris College and is a founding faculty member with the Ashland University MFA Program. “The Book of Knowledge” is an excerpt from a memoir in progress.
Jon Kerstetter has completed three combat tours of duty in Iraq with the U.S. Army as a combat physician and flight surgeon. He obtained his MD degree from the Mayo Medical School in Rochester, MN. He also holds an MS in business from the University of Utah and an MFA in creative nonfiction from Ashland University. He resides with his wife in Iowa City, IA. Dr. Kerstetter was the in-country director of the Johns Hopkins residency in Emergency Medicine at the University of Pristina in Kosovo. He has also practiced disaster medicine in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo.
Thomas Larson is the author to The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative and The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.” He is a staff writer for the San Diego Reader. He holds workshops on memoir writing and on publishing in the digital age throughout the United States. His website is www.thomaslarson.com.
Sydney Lea is author of eight collections of poems (most recently Young of the Year, Four Way Books, 2011). He has also published two collections of essays, Hunting the Whole Way Home and A Little Wildness. He is poet laureate of Vermont.
Sara Loewen’s essay collection is forthcoming from the University of Alaska Press in 2013. Her essays have appeared in Terrain, The Laurel Review, Cirque, and Literary Mama. She lives on Kodiak Island with her husband and two children.
Rebecca McClanahan has published nine books, most recently Deep Light: New and Selected Poems and The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings, a suite of essays. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, in anthologies published by Norton, Doubleday, Putnam, and Beacon, and numerous journals. Past recipient of the Wood Prize from Poetry, the Carter Prize from Shenandoah, a Pushcart Prize in fiction, and fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts and North Carolina Arts Council, McClanahan teaches in the low-residency MFA programs of Queens University and Rainier Writers Workshop. The Tribal Knot, a nonfiction saga, is forthcoming from Indiana University Press.
Leila Philip is the author of three books of nonfiction, including her most recent work, the award-winning memoir, A Family Place: A Hudson Valley Farm, Three Centuries, Five Wars, One Family (Viking 2001, Penguin 2002, SUNY Excelsior Edition, 2009). She has received numerous awards for her writing, including the Pen Martha Albrand Citation for Nonfiction and fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities, The Radcliffe Research and Study Center, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She loves exploring the boundaries of the lyric essay and walking the woods with her dog. She teaches creative writing at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, where she is an Associate Professor in the English Department. When not writing or teaching, she’s usually pruning apple trees at her family’s apple orchard in the Hudson Valley.
MaryKatherine Ramsey is a graduate of the M.F.A. program in Creative Writing at The Ohio State University. She previously earned an MA in Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati. Her work can be read or is forth coming in Limestone, Short North, and The Furnace Review. She works at The Ohio State University and lives in Columbus, Ohio with her partner and three daughters. She is currently finishing a collection of short stories and writing a book length nonfiction project about her father, who worked as a translator and spy on the Inner German Border, tentatively titled Him; A Cold War Memoir.
Dan Roche’s memoirs include Great Expectation: A Father’s Diary (Iowa, 2008) and Love’s Labors: A Story of Marriage (Riverhead, 1999), and his nonfiction has appeared in The North American Review, The Journal, Fourth Genre, Under the Sun, and other places. He’s a 2005 recipient of a New York State Foundation for the Arts fellowship in nonfiction, and he teaches journalism and creative nonfiction at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York.
Michael R. Shea is a video producer at Field & Stream and Outdoor Life magazines. A former newspaper reporter, he’s a recent graduate of the M.F.A. Writing Program at Columbia University.
Sarah M. Wells is the author of the chapbook of poems, Acquiesce, winner of the Starting Gate Award from Finishing Line Press. Her full-length poetry manuscript Pruning Burning Bushes was a finalist for the T.S. Eliot Book Prize with Truman State University Press. Other poems and essays by Wells have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry East, Alimentum, JAMA, Literary Mama, Ascent, Measure, Christianity and Literature, and elsewhere. She is the administrative director for the Ashland University MFA Program and managing editor for the Ashland Poetry Press and River Teeth. Visit her blog at http://driftwoodtumble.blogspot.com.
Read Editor’s Notes for Issue 13.2 >
