Contributors - Issue 3
Click on the contributor in the table below to go to a brief biography and links where available.
Russell Banks is the author of sixteen works of fiction, including Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, Cloudsplitter, The Darling, and The Reserve. Two of his novels, Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter, have been made into critically acclaimed motion pictures. Banks has won numerous awards for his work, including Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships; O. Henry, Pushcart, Fels, and Best American Short Story Awards; the John Dos Passos Award; and the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been a PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist (Affliction and Cloudsplitter) and a Pulitzer Prize Finalist (Continental Drift and Cloudsplitter). He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a New York State Author (2004-2008). Banks currently serves as president of Cities of Refuge North America. (more . . . )
Marianne Barcellona was born in Buffalo, New York, grew up in Texas, and is now a painter and photographer based in New York City. In August, 2008, she was an artist in residence at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation’s Arts Colony in Ithaca, New York. Her travels have taken her to 29 countries and her photographic assignments have ranged from formal celebrity and corporate portraits to photojournalistic reporting for magazines and humanitarian relief organizations. The paintings included in Stone Canoe are based on some small, particularly moving Egyptian figurines she encountered in the Cairo Museum in 2006, while she served as the official photographer for Brown University’s archaeological excavations near the pyramids of Giza. (more . . . )
Judith Baumel is director of the Creative Writing program at Adelphi University, Long Island, New York. A former director of the Poetry Society of America, her poetry, translations, and essays have been published in Poetry, The Yale Review, Agni Review, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. She is a recipient of fellowships from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Bronx Council on the Arts, and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. Her books of poetry include The Weight of Numbers, for which she won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Now. (more . . . )
E. Shander Bawden is a professional flamenco dancer and teacher now living in Syracuse with her husband and two children. She has written articles for the Boston Globe and Kirtland Air Force Base’s Focus and had essays published in the University of New Mexico’s Rodey View and Best Student Essays. This is her first work of fiction.
E.R. Baxter III, a lifelong resident of Niagara County, New York, is Professor Emeritus at Niagara County Community College. He is the author of Captain Hooter at Niagara, a forthcoming novel, and Looking for Niagara, a book of poetry (Slipstream Press, 1993). His work has also appeared in the journals New Madrid, Wormwood Review, Trace, Kiosk, and Beloit Poetry Journal, among others. He is the recipient of a New York State CAPS Award for fiction and a Just Buffalo Literary Center award. (more . . . )
Mark Bevington is the founder of ninedot, a purpose-based design agency synonymous with outstanding graphic design and communications. He is a graduate of SUNY Buffalo and has an M.A. in advertising design from Syracuse University. Clients include: FM Global, Progreso Latino, Lunesta, Roger Williams University, ADHD Tri-Plan, and others. He has been recognized through various publications and recognition awards, including Graphic Design USA, Communicator Awards, Summit Creative Awards, Healthcare Marketing Advertising Awards, and The Astor Awards. Mark is a current board member of Adoption Rhode Island and president emeritus and co-founder of the AIGA RI Chapter, where he acts as advisory council to the Rhode Island board. (more . . . )
Marty Blake has worked as a collage illustrator and graphic designer for decades. Her illustration work includes book jackets, editorial illustration, and projects of her own making. Her clients have included Alfred A. Knopf, HarperCollins, and The Washington Post. Among her self-generated projects are the many dozens of collages based on cabinet-card portraits, with cigar-box lettering forming words on the surface. Some are bound into books, the pairings of cards on each spread fashioning a found poem. Some of the pictorial chapbook titles are “Odd Ditty,” “Odd Ditty Two (Ditty Dumb Ditty Too),” and “DoBeDoBeDo.” (more . . . )
Alice K. Boatwright grew up in Connecticut and Central New York. She majored in writing at Syracuse University and holds an M.F.A. from Columbia University. She taught writing and worked as a writer at University of California, Berkeley, for many years. Boatwright’s fiction has appeared in Mississippi Review, Amarillo Bay, Paterson Literary Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, Enterzone, America West, Storyglossia, and other journals. Since 2004, she has been a freelancer based in Paris, France. Her book Leaving Vietnam was a finalist for the 2006 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. (more . . . )
Lauren Bristol is a native of the Syracuse area. She received a degree in education and art from the University of Texas at Austin in 1985. In 1997, after twenty years, she returned to Syracuse. Bristol is a self-taught fiber artist and has maintained a studio since 1978. She is represented by Delavan Art Gallery in Syracuse and New East Arts in Austin, Texas. Her work is exhibited and collected nationally. (more . . . )
Noni Brierley Bristol graduated with honors from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School and The College of Arts and Sciences (Religious Studies). She has been an assistant director of the national news bureau of the Methodist church (Chicago) and state editor for Louisiana’s Lake Charles American Press (daily). She has written, but not published, poetry for many years. Noni grew up in Le Roy, New York, and has lived in Syracuse for 5O years. She established her own company, Constructing Communication, to help provide parent education in the Syracuse area, including teaching in the Humanistic Studies program at University College. Rotary International recognized her, in 1988, for her service to community and named her a Paul Harris Fellow.
Julia Calagiovanni is a junior at West Genesee High School in Camillus, New York. She contributes to Voices, the teen page of The Post-Standard, Syracuse’s daily newspaper. She is a member of her school’s newspaper staff and Model United Nations club. She enjoys reading and volunteering and plans to pursue a career in journalism.
Peter Conners is author of the prose poetry collection Of Whiskey and Winter (White Pine Press, 2007), and the novella Emily Ate the Wind (Marick Press, 2008). His memoir, Growing Up Dead: the Hallucinated Confessions of a Teenage Deadhead, will be published by Da Capo Press in April 2009. His next poetry collection, The Crows Were Laughing in Their Trees, will be published by White Pine Press in 2010. He is editor of PP/FF: An Anthology, which was published by Starcherone Books in April 2006. He lives with his wife and children in Rochester, New York. (more . . . )
Elinor Cramer has an M.F.A. in creative writing from Warren Wilson College. Her poems have been published in The Comstock Review, Blueline, and The Healing Muse. She is the recipient of a New York State John DeFrancisco Heritage Grant for a collection of poems on the Erie Canal. She lives in Syracuse, where she practices psychotherapy.
Patrick Dacey graduated from Syracuse University’s M.F.A. program where he was a creative writing fellow and two-time recipient of the Peter Neagoe Prize for Fiction. He has published in the Smithsonian magazine, Faultline, Avery, the Washington Square Review, and Bomb magazine. He has completed a novel and a collection of stories and is currently at work on a second novel.
Sylvia de Swaan is a Romanian-born photographer who has lived and worked in Mexico, Europe, and the United States. She engages in long-term narrative projects whose content deals with issues of transience, loss, memory, history, and war. Her photographs have been exhibited and published nationally and internationally and are included in collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, New York City; the William Benton Museum of Art, Storrs, Connecticut; Colgate University; and Hamilton College. Her work is presently part of an international exhibition at the Centers for Contemporary Art in Ekaterinburg and Moscow, Russian Federation. Titled “In Transition,” it deals with changing cultural identity in an age of massive shifting populations. Sylvia de Swaan is a Saltonstall Foundation Fellow and founding director of Sculpture Space in Utica, New York. A former visiting instructor at Hamilton College, she is currently enjoying life as an unaffiliated full-time artist. (more . . . )
Elaine R. Defibaugh is an artist in residence and proctor in a subsidized studio space program with chashama in New York City. She received her B.F.A. from Texas A & M University, and her M.F.A. from Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). Defibaugh has received numerous grants and awards, including an Individual Artist Grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. She was also selected for the Everson Museum of Art Biennial in Syracuse. She has taught at RIT since 1993 as an adjunct professor and teaches workshops throughout the country, including working with brain trauma injury patients at the Biscayne Institutes of Health and Living, Inc., in Miami. (more . . . )
Deborah Diemont has called three countries and six U.S. states home. She recently settled in Syracuse after three years in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, where she wrote for a bilingual magazine of arts and culture and translated video scripts at the Museum of Mayan Medicine. Her poems and book reviews have appeared in The Texas Review, Lucid Rhythms, and NewPages, among other journals. She is a member of the Syracuse YMCA Downtown Writer’s Center and has contributed articles to the Syracuse City Eagle. (more . . . )
Donna L. Emerson is a college instructor, photographer, poet, and prose writer who splits her time between her homes in Bath, New York, and Petaluma, California. She finds her Steuben County home provides grounding and inspiration. When California is hot, dry, and brown, New York is green and full of the changeable seasons she grew accustomed to as a child. She has been published in many literary journals, including South Carolina Review, Phoebe (SUNY-Oneonta), So To Speak, California Quarterly, and Fox Cry Review.
Shelley Ettinger’s work has been published or is forthcoming in Cream City Review, Mississippi Review, Mizna, failbetter.com, and other journals. She was a 2008 resident fellow in fiction at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation’s Arts Colony in Ithaca, New York, where she worked on her second novel. In summer 2007, she was a fellow at the first annual Lambda Literary Foundation Writers’ Retreat in Los Angeles. She was awarded a research grant by the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund to work on her first novel, Vera’s Will. She is a longtime left activist, employed for nearly as long as a secretary at New York University. (more . . . )
Dean A. Faiello is an avid reader, crossword puzzle fanatic, student of meditation, and twelve-stepper who writes in the early mornings, inspired by espresso and sea gulls bleating. “Kismet” is his second essay in print. “Adivina” appeared in the summer 2008 issue of the minnesota review.
Paul Farinacci has been awarded numerous fellowships, grants, and residencies throughout the U.S. and Spain, including residencies at the Millay Colony for the Arts in Austerlitz, New York; the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine; and most recently at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation’s Arts Colony in Ithaca, New York. His artwork has been seen in numerous exhibits across the U.S. and internationally. He is the recipient of a Fulbright as well as grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His public art commissions include sculptures for the Carnegie Mellon Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh; the American Cancer Society, San Antonio; ChildLine, London, England; and a 50-foot mural in the East Village, New York City. He is a professor at Hofstra University. (more . . . )
Lisbeth Firmin is a contemporary American realist known for her urban landscapes. For over three decades her work has been in hundreds of solo and group shows across the country and internationally. Firmin was the featured artist in The Gettysburg Review summer issue 2008 and is the cover artist for the spring issue of EPOCH, Cornell University’s literary magazine. Recent awards include a 2007 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for printmaking (Lily Auchincloss Fellow). Other awards include a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, the New York Print Club Emerging Artist Award, first prize in the LANA International Arts Competition, and full fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, National Seashore Residency, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. (more . . . )
John Fitzsimmons was born in Fulton, New York, and now lives in Fayetteville, New York. He majored in painting at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and has a diverse professional background, working at various times as a product designer, an industrial surplus dealer, and a factory manager. Fitzsimmons exhibits regularly around the country in both solo and group exhibitions. He had paintings on long-term loan to the U.S. Embassy in Dhaka, Bangladesh. His commissions include Post Modern Reliquary, ha ha ha in Syracuse and With Quiet Eyes at Stone Quarry Hill Art Park, Cazenovia, New York.
Emily Fleisher is an adjunct instructor at Syracuse University in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, Department of Fiber Arts and Material Studies. She also teaches in the Department of Photography at Onondaga Community College. She has exhibited at Stay Gold Gallery, Brooklyn, New York; the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse; and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art in Providence, Rhode Island. She received a B.F.A. in sculpture from Syracuse University and an M.F.A. in sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design.
Bob Gates studied photography at the University of Iowa School of Art while completing his Ph.D. in English, after which he joined the English department at Syracuse University. His photographs have won numerous awards in regional and national contests; have appeared in group, individual, and juried exhibitions; and have been published in national and international magazines including PhotoLife (Canada), MaVista (UK), The Photo Review, Photographic, Shutterbug, The Best of Photography Annual, FStop, National Geographic Traveler, and Popular Photography. His poetry and fiction have been featured in many publications including Santa Clara Review, The Alchemist, The Brooklyn Review, and The New York Quarterly. (more . . . )
Jon Christopher Gernon worked as an illustrator for a toy company while still in college. After becoming intrigued with an Egon Schiele exhibit in New York City, he gave up illustration and began to study fine art. He has studied graphic arts and photography at the Sage College of Albany and studied printmaking at the Woodstock School of Art. He has exhibited throughout New York State and internationally, including shows in Europe. For the past six years he has painted exclusively in egg tempera and teaches this technique at his home studio in Latham, New York. (more . . . )
Jules Gibbs recently moved to Syracuse from Madison, Wisconsin, where she worked for The Progressive magazine. She teaches poetry at the Downtown Writer’s Center and creative writing to kids at the Franklin Arts Magnet School.
Thomas C. Gibbs, M.Ed., M.D., is a native of Cortland, New York, and went to Union Springs Academy near Auburn, New York. He is an obstetrician-gynecologist practicing in Orlando, Florida. His work has been published in The Sylvan Echo, Hospital Drive, The Healing Muse, On Becoming a Doctor, and Creative Nonfiction magazine’s anthology.
Thomas Gokey is from Saint Paul, Minnesota. He studied anthropology in New Guinea, where he lived in grass huts with a Stone Age tribe, and studied philosophy at The Oregon Extension of Houghton College, a school community in log cabins in the mountains of southern Oregon. In 2007 he received an M.F.A. in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and moved to Syracuse in August of that year. He teaches studio art in the Department of Foundation at Syracuse University and philosophy at Cazenovia College. (more . . . )
Fred Gonyea (1952-2007) grew up on the Onondaga Nation near Syracuse, one of the youngest in a family of ten children. He graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Haskell University in Lawrence, Kansas, and was a communications specialist for the U.S. Coast Guard for four years. Gonyea’s stone works have had limited exposure in the East. Upon returning home ten years ago, his newer works were primarily in wood, a natural available element. Fred was a quiet, well-read, kind individual with a great sense of humor.
Áine M. Greaney is a native of Ireland who emigrated from County Mayo to Saratoga Springs, New York—clad in a jean-jacket and sneakers for her first Upstate winter—21 years ago. After living and writing in Saratoga and Albany, New York, she moved to the New England seacoast with her husband, Ken, who is an Albany native. Her stories and essays have appeared in numerous U.S. and Irish literary journals, and she has published a novel, The Big House, and a chapbook short-fiction collection. Her second novel awaits publication, while she works on her third novel set in the mid-Hudson Valley and the West of Ireland. (more . . . )
Naomi Guttman was born and raised in Montreal, Canada. In 1992, her book Reasons for Winter won the A.M. Klein Award for Poetry and was short-listed for The League of Canadian Poets Pat Lowther Memorial Award. She has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, as well as an Artist’s Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Wet Apples, White Blood, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, was co-winner of the Adirondack Center for Writing’s Best Book of Poems for 2007. She teaches English and creative writing at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. She is also co-leader of the Central Leatherstocking's Slow Food Chapter. (more . . . )
Paul Hamill was 2007-08 Poet Laureate of Tompkins County in Upstate New York, where he works at Ithaca College and enjoys sailing on Cayuga Lake. He previously taught at Morehouse College, Indiana State University, and Temple University. He was the first board chair of the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County and a founding board member of Ithaca City of Asylum, part of a worldwide network of Cities of Asylum, supporting writers whose works are suppressed, lives are threatened, cultures are vanishing, and languages are endangered. He has published in many journals including Poetry, The Georgia Review, and The Southern Review. (more . . . )
Erica Harney is a painter from the Albany/Saratoga Springs, New York area. She earned a B.F.A. in painting from the School of Art and Design/New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. She also studied at the Santa Reparata International School of Art in Florence, Italy. She is a two-time fellowship recipient of the Vermont Studio Center and is currently pursuing her M.F.A. at the Penn State University School of Visual Arts. Harney’s work has appeared in duet and group showings in New York City and various venues throughout Upstate New York. She has had solo exhibitions around the region and will have her first international solo show in January 2009 in Castlecomer, Ireland. Harney’s work belongs to several private and public collections around the country, and she was featured as the centerfold of Artscope Magazine in September/October 2008. (more . . . )
Mary Lee Hodgens is the program manager at Light Work, the nonprofit photo and imaging center at Syracuse University that has been supporting emerging and under-recognized artists for over 30 years. She is a graduate of Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts with an M.F.A. from the School of Art and Design and has also worked as an instructor of design and drawing.
George Hovis received his Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is currently an assistant professor of English at the State University of New York (SUNY) Oneonta. He has published numerous articles and interviews related to Southern literature. His stories and essays have appeared in Carolina Quarterly, The Gihon River Review, Mississippi Quarterly, and elsewhere. His book, Vale of Humility: Plain Folk in Contemporary North Carolina Fiction, was published by The University of South Carolina Press in fall 2007. (more . . . )
Steven Huff is a poet and fiction writer living in Rochester, New York. He is the director of adult education and programming at Writers & Books, teaches creative writing at Rochester Institute of Technology, and is the voice of “Fiction in Shorts” on WXXI-FM. He also teaches in the Low-Residency M.F.A. program at Pine Manor College in Boston. His new book of poems, More Daring Escapes, was published in 2008, and his first book of stories, A Pig in Paris, is due out soon. His previous books include The Water We Came From and Proof, which was named Editor’s Choice in the 2004 Two Rivers Review Chapbook Competition. (more . . . )
Michael Jennings was born in the French Quarter of New Orleans and grew up in East Texas and Iran before graduating from the University of Pennsylvania and the Creative Writing program at Syracuse University. He has published eight books of poems, including Silky Thefts from Orchises Press in 2007 and Bone-Songs and Sanctuaries, New and Selected Poems 1970-2008, to be released by Sheep Meadow Press in 2009. He is also an internationally recognized breeder and judge of Siberian Huskies and has written several books on the breed. He lives with his wife, Suzanne Shane, on Otisco Lake in Upstate New York. (more . . . )
Mary Karr’s four volumes of poetry are Sinners Welcome, Viper Rum (New Directions), The Devil’s Tour, and Abacus. Her poems and essays have won Pushcart prizes and have appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Parnassus. Her memoir, The Liar’s Club, was a New York Times bestseller for more than a year and was selected as one of the best books of 1995 by many periodicals, including The New Yorker, Time, People, and Entertainment Weekly. Cherry: A Memoir (Viking), her follow-up to The Liar’s Club, was a bestseller for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and San Francisco Chronicle, and was named “Best Book” of 2000 by Entertainment Weekly, Us, and Amazon.com. She was a Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe College and is now the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University. She was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry in 2004. (more . . . )
Tatana Kellner is a visual artist with over 20 solo exhibitions in U.S. and Canada. This year she received grants from The Puffin Foundation, and, in 2005, from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. She is also the recipient of two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships and two Photographers’ Fellowship Fund awards from The Center for Photography at Woodstock. She has been awarded residencies at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation’s Arts Colony, Light Work, Visual Studies Workshop, and The MacDowell Colony, among others. She is a founding member and artistic director of Women’s Studio Workshop, an artists’ workspace in Rosendale, New York. (more . . . )
Nancy Kline grew up in Greenwich Village and Woodstock, New York, where she now lives. Her stories, essays, translations, and reviews have been widely published. She won a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing grant and has twice been a fellow at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation’s Arts Colony in Ithaca, New York. She has published six books, including a novel (The Faithful), a critical study of the poetry of René Char (Lightning), a biography of Elizabeth Blackwell (A Doctor’s Triumph), and a translation (with Mary Ann Caws and Patricia Terry) of Paul Eluard’s The Capital of Pain.
Doran Larson’s stories have appeared in The Iowa Review, Boulevard, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Best American Short Stories. He is the author of two novels (The Big Deal and Marginalia) and a novella (Syzygy). He is associate professor of English and creative writing at Hamilton College. (more . . . )
John Lavelle was born in Lackawanna, New York. He has a B.A. and an M.A. in English from SUNY at Buffalo, an M.A. in creative writing from the University of Central Florida, and a Ph.D. from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He was a finalist in the New Letters Literary Awards for fiction from the University of Missouri at Kansas City and also long-listed in the Fish Publishing 2004 Fiction Awards in Dublin, Ireland. He has been published in the Pisgah Review, The Southwestern Review, and The Cypress Dome. Lately, he has been traveling throughout the U.S. for no reason other than for the adventure.
Aldo Lira is a native of Central New York. He received a B.F.A. degree from Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts in 1997. He earned his M.F.A. in painting (2002) from the New York Academy of Art, where he acquired his skills in narrative and portrait painting. Lira’s paintings have appeared in exhibitions in New York City, Los Angeles, Northern California, and in Rosario and Santa Fe, Argentina. He has lived in New York City for seven years, the Balkans for nearly five years, and the San Francisco Bay area of California for four years. He relocated permanently to New York State in the fall of 2008. (more . . . )
David Lloyd teaches for the Creative Writing program at Le Moyne College. His poetry collection, The Everyday Apocalypse, won the Maryland State Poetry & Literary Society’s chapbook contest. In 2000, he received the Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Memorial Award, judged by W.D. Snodgrass. In 2001, he received a Distinguished Scholar Fulbright Award for residence at the University of Wales, Bangor, UK. He served as poetry editor for DoubleTake/Points of Entry magazine and as fiction editor for the 2008 issue of Stone Canoe. (more . . . )
Margaret Lloyd was born in Liverpool, England, of Welsh parents and grew up in a Welsh community in Utica, New York. She earned her B.A. at the University of Rochester and her Ph.D. from the University of Leeds, England. She has published a book on William Carlos Williams’ poem Paterson and two poetry collections. She has also published widely in journals in the U.S. and in Wales. Lloyd has received a number of awards for her work, most recently a writing residency at Yaddo. Presently, she chairs the Humanities Department at Springfield College, Springfield, Massachusetts. (more . . . )
David R. MacDonald is a native of New Jersey. He attended Hampton University in Virginia on an athletic scholarship, majoring in art education. He then received a graduate fellowship at the University of Michigan. After earning his M.F.A. degree, he joined the faculty of the School of Art and Design at Syracuse University in September 1971. In addition to teaching and crafting ceramic works for use and exhibition in art galleries throughout the country, MacDonald is actively involved in the Syracuse community. He has mentored and judged the NAACP’s high-school-level Academic, Cultural, Technical, and Scientific Olympics and was one of the founders of “Feats of Clay,” a high school ceramics competition held in Syracuse. He is a founding member of the Community Folk Art Center in Syracuse and volunteered in a number of public schools. He has also been a judge for the Scholastic Arts awards. (more . . . )
Mary Lynn Mahan was raised in Syracuse and attended the Syracuse City Public Schools. She earned a B.S. in biology from SUNY Potsdam and a master’s in art education from Syracuse University. Mahan was a silversmith with a studio in Armory Square before entering the teaching field in 2002. She is now in her sixth year of teaching at Edward Smith Elementary School in Syracuse. (more . . . )
Farah Marklevits lived in Cortland, New York, while enrolled in the creative writing program at Syracuse University. She earned an M.F.A. and taught at SU, and also participated in community arts programs in Syracuse. Her poems have appeared in Cimarron Review, Born Magazine, DIAGRAM, and other journals. She was one of three poets from the creative writing program featured in a book-length collection called Three New Poets, published in 2006. Last summer, she moved to Davenport, Iowa, where she lives with her husband and daughter. (more . . . )
Jennifer Marsh earned her M.F.A. degree and taught plastics techniques and sculpture at Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts. She served as an English and art teacher to elementary school children in Dharmasala, India. Marsh did undergraduate work at Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio and trained in neon and stained-glass making at the internationally renowned Pilchuck Glass School in Seattle, Washington. She is the founder and director of the public art project of the International Fiber Collaborative, which incorporates work by more than 450 artists and 2,500 students from 15 countries. She has received national media coverage in USA Today and The Washington Post, and on CBS and Fox News. Marsh’s work is supported by The Puffin Foundation, The Gifford Foundation, the Partnership for Better Education, and the Cultural Resources Council of Syracuse and Onondaga County. She is a visiting assistant professor in the art history department at the University of Alabama Huntsville.
Lalit K. Masih was born in India and studied traditional Indian art with R.C. Sathi, a prominent North Indian artist. Masih came to the United States for graduate studies in psychology and continued with courses in drawing and painting at Syracuse University. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in counseling psychology from Syracuse University in 1962 and worked as a professor of counseling at Long Island University, C.W. Post Center, for 35 years. During the late 1970s, he began exhibiting and entering juried shows. In 1985, he earned an M.F.A. in painting and design from the School of Visual and Performing Arts at C.W. Post College. Now retired, he devotes his time completely to the exploration of watercolor as a primary medium of expression. (more . . . )
DeLoss McGraw has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Europe. His pieces have received critical acclaim in over 80 solo exhibitions, and are collected by such eminent institutions as Oxford, Syracuse, Temple, and Cornell Universities, as well as by the Whitney Museum of American Art Library Collection, the Library of Congress, the San Diego Museum of Art, and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York recently acquired two of his paintings. His illustrated version of Alice in Wonderland won the Illustrator’s Society Book of the Year Award for 2002. McGraw has worked in collaboration with W.D. Snodgrass since 1981, and the two have published several books combining Snodgrass’s poems with McGraw’s paintings, most recently Make-Believes: Verses and Visions. (more . . . )
Janet McNally earned her bachelor’s degree from Canisius College and an M.F.A. at the University of Notre Dame. She has been published in Traffic East, New Madrid, the Iron Horse Literary Review, and Compass Rose. She was recently awarded a fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and is considered to have been instrumental in the early success of the Canisius College Contemporary Writers Series. Currently, she teaches high school English in Buffalo, New York, where she is at work on a novel.
Bridget Meeds grew up near Syracuse and now lives in Ithaca, New York. Her long poem, Light, was published in Wild Workshop (Faber and Faber, UK, 1997) and in The American Poetry Review. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Witness, Seneca Review, Dos Passos Review, and Natural Bridge. She has published full-length books through Ithaca publisher Vista Periodista: Audience (2007) and Tuning the Beam (2000). In spring 2000, she was the first-ever poet in residence at Cornell University’s Wilson Laboratory. While there, she presented a “Poetry for Physicists” workshop where participants were invited to join in writing poetry. (more . . . )
Maggie Millner is currently a senior at Cherry Valley-Springfield Central School in Cherry Valley, New York. She is excited about going to college, where she plans to major in creative writing. However, she has qualms about leaving her beloved cat, Bubbah Kinneh.
Peter Mishler has lived in Syracuse for the past four years. In 2007, he received his M.F.A. in creative writing (poetry) from Syracuse University. He has also been a part of the Syracuse community as program designer/director for urban youth enrichment camps sponsored by the City School District and the Westcott Community Center. He currently attends Syracuse University, pursuing his master’s degree in English education. Mishler plans to continue his career as an educator in the city of Syracuse. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Crazyhorse, Black Warrior Review, DIAGRAM, Sonora Review, and LIT.
Elaine Mott has lived in the Catskills since retiring from teaching and was previously a long-standing summer resident there. Her poems have appeared in Midwest Quarterly, Louisville Review, and Poet Lore, among other magazines. Her work was included in the following anthologies: Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry (Monitor Book Company, 1989) and Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust (Texas Tech University Press, 1991). (more . . . )
Rebecca Murtaugh splits her time between Brooklyn and Central New York. She received her B.S. from the Pennsylvania State University and her M.F.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University. She has exhibited nationally at venues that include the Contemporary Art Fair with Thatcher Projects, New York City; the Redhouse, Syracuse; Pentimenti Gallery, Philadelphia; and the Morris Graves Museum of Art, Eureka, California. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Artworld Digest, and Shamenet Magazine. She is an assistant professor of art at Hamilton College, Clinton, New York. (more . . . )
Steve Pearlman is a native of Syracuse. He earned a B.A. from SUNY Buffalo and an M.P.A. from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. He has since held administrative positions in service organizations supporting the developmentally disabled. He lives in DeWitt, New York, with his wife Eleanor. He is a self-taught photographer and an
active member of the Syracuse Camera Club. In addition to his addiction to photography,
he enjoys gardening, cooking, and sports at all levels.
Stephan Phillips was born in Upstate New York and first studied art at Syracuse University. Leaving after only two years, he traveled about the country before landing in Seattle, Washington, where he earned a B.F.A. from Cornish College of the Arts. Even amidst the incredible landscapes of the Pacific Northwest, the deciduous forests, rolling hills, and winter snows of New York never let go of his imagination. After ten years in Seattle, he and his wife came back East and settled in Ithaca, New York.
Derek Pollard is currently Managing Editor at Barrow Street Press and an associate editor at New Issues Poetry & Prose. His poems and reviews recently appear or are forthcoming in issues of American Book Review, Best of the Net, Colorado Review, Pleiades, and Zoland Poetry, among other anthologies and journals. (more . . . )
Georgia A. Popoff is a community poet, performer, educator, spoken-word producer, and senior editor of The Comstock Review. A teaching poet in schools and community settings, her work has appeared in numerous journals, anthologies, and web publications. Her first collection is Coaxing Nectar from Longing. She is a faculty member at the Downtown Writer’s Center in Syracuse and a board member of the Association of Teaching Artists. (more . . . )
Joan Potter was born in Tupper Lake, New York, attended Syracuse University, and graduated from Cornell University. She has been published in numerous newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times and Adirondack Life. Her personal essays appear in the anthologies Rooted in Rock; Living North Country; and Illness & Grace, Terror & Transformation. She edited, among other books, Growing Up Strong: Four North Country Women Recall Their Lives. She is the author of three nonfiction books, including African American Firsts: Famous, Little-Known and Unsung Triumphs of Blacks in America. She has been teaching memoir writing since 1993. (more . . . )
Awenheeyoh Powless is an Onondaga artist. She was born and still lives on the Onondaga Nation, south of Syracuse. She received a B.F.A. degree from Elmira College and then interned as part of the Washington Internships for Native Students program at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. She has continued to paint and make art. Her deep love for her culture and community is a fundamental part of her work. One of her paintings received an honorable mention in April 2008 from the National League of American Pen Women. She received first place and best of show in August 2008 at the New York State Fair Indian Village Art exhibit, and second place at the Seneca Fall Festival in September 2008. She also had a solo exhibition in November at the Medical University Library in Syracuse in celebration of Native American month at Syracuse University. (more . . . )
Minnie Bruce Pratt is completing Inside the Money Machine, with Nothing to Lose, poems about living under capitalism. Her most recent book of poetry, The Dirt She Ate: Selected and New Poems, received a 2003 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry. Her previous book, Walking Back Up Depot Street, was named Best Lesbian/Gay Book of the Year by ForeWord: The Magazine of Independent Bookstores and Booksellers. Her work, Crime Against Nature, was chosen as the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. She is professor of writing and rhetoric, and women’s and gender studies at Syracuse University. (more . . . )
Cristina Maria Quiñones-Betancourt, a thirteen-year resident of Central New York, is a literature and creative writing student at Le Moyne College. Her work has previously been featured in TeenWork magazine and in Le Moyne College’s The Salamander.
The work of Mark Robbins bridges the fields of art and architecture, encompassing photography, installations, and site-specific pieces. His work has been exhibited in the United States and abroad, including The Museum of Modern Art in Saitama, Japan; the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio; and the Clocktower Gallery of the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) in New York City. He is a recipient of the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome and a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. His photographic series, Households, was published by Monacelli Press in 2006. Robbins is currently dean of the Syracuse University School of Architecture. (more . . . )
Paul B. Roth is a native of the Syracuse area, now residing in Fayetteville, New York. He is the editor and publisher of The Bitter Oleander Press, whose journal was recognized by National Public Radio as the Best Literary Journal for 2005 and was awarded its “Excellence in Print” award. His sixth collection of poems, Cadenzas by Needlelight, is to be published in 2008 by Cypress Books. Roth received honorable mention in the Common Ground Review’s Poetry Award for 2008.
Nicholas Samaras was born on Rudyard Kipling’s estate in Cambridgeshire, England. He was raised there and on the island of Patmos, Greece (the “Island of the Apocalypse”), and finally in America. He has lived in Greece, England, Switzerland, Austria, Yugoslavia, and Jerusalem, and writes from a place of permanent exile. His first book of poetry, Hands of the Saddlemaker, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. His poetry has been included in various journals and magazines, including The American Scholar, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, and The New Yorker. He earned his doctorate from the University of Denver and, until recently, taught at the University of South Florida. He lives in West Nyack, New York, and is working on several new books. (more . . . )
Soniya Shah is fourteen years old and is from Western New York. She has loved writing since she was seven and hopes to pursue it as a future career. In her spare time when she is not writing, she likes swimming and reading. Many of her ideas for writing have been drawn from personal experiences or conversations she has heard. If writing does not work out for her, she wishes to become a doctor.
Roger Shimomura’s paintings, prints, and theater pieces address sociopolitical issues of Asian America and have often been inspired by diaries kept by his late immigrant grandmother. Shimomura received his B.A. from the University of Washington, Seattle, and his M.F.A. from Syracuse University. He has had over 125 solo exhibitions of paintings and prints. He has presented his experimental theater pieces at such venues as the Franklin Furnace, New York City, and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Following a long and distinguished career as a faculty member, visiting artist, lecturer, and keynote speaker at numerous prestigious institutions, Shimomura retired in 2004 and started the Shimomura Faculty Research Support Fund, an endowment to foster faculty research in the Department of Art at the University of Kansas, where he was a faculty member since 1969. (more . . . )
Charles Simic is a poet, essayist, and translator. He was born in then-Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. Since 1967, he has published twenty books of his own poetry, seven books of essays, a memoir, and numerous books of translations of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian poetry. He has received many literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems, 1990, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and the 2007 Wallace Stevens Award. Simic was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate of the United States in 2007. He is Emeritus Professor of the University of New Hampshire, where he has taught since 1973. (more . . . )
Nancy Sirkis is a native of New York City. It was at the Rhode Island School of Design where she quickly discovered that photography was her passion. After college, she worked as a photojournalist (a rarity for a woman in the 1950s). Her projects soon expanded from the photographic essay to full-length books. Starting in 1959, she published five books of photography, all about America, its people, and the land. She began her current project of recording American small towns in 2005, when she was an artist in residence at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation’s Arts Colony in Ithaca, New York. (more . . . )
W .D. Snodgrass has had a long and distinguished career as a poet and teacher. He has written eight books of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Heart’s Needle, seven volumes of translations, and a book of essays, In Radical Pursuit. His most recent book is Not for Specialists: New and Collected Poems (BOA 2006). One of the book’s poems is featured in this issue of Stone Canoe, along with an earlier draft, to offer the reader a look at Snodgrass’s revision process. Snodgrass has taught at Syracuse University, Cornell, the University of Rochester, and several other universities. He retired from teaching in 1994 and devotes himself full time to his writing. He and his “fourth, last, and best” wife, writer Kathleen Snodgrass (née Browne), spend six months of each year at their home in Erieville, New York, and six months in Mexico. (more . . . )
Donna Steiner’s essays and poems have been published in The Bellingham Review, Utne Reader, The Sun, and Isotope. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction. Her work has been included in college textbooks and can be found in the anthologies Women on the Verge and Under the Influence. She teaches writing at the State University of New York at Oswego, where she spends a lot of time thinking about snow.
Novica Tadic´ was born in a small village in Montenegro, a country in southeastern Europe, but has lived most of his life in Belgrade, now the capital of Serbia. He is the most respected Serbian poet of his generation and the author of sixteen collections of poetry. Next June, BOA Editions, Ltd., of Rochester, New York, will publish Dark Things, a collection of Tadic´ poems translated by celebrated poet, essayist, and translator Charles Simic. The four poems included in this issue of Stone Canoe are from the forthcoming Dark Things collection. (more . . . )
Yolanda Tooley is a self-educated 35mm film/darkroom photographer. For over 25 years she has worked in her studio overlooking Oneida Lake in Cicero, New York. Her work was selected by art critic Clement Greenberg for inclusion in New York’s Canastota Canal Town Expo. She was awarded First Place Professional Painting and First Place Professional Graphics at the New York State Fair. She has shown her work in many juried shows, including the Everson Museum, Syracuse; WomanMade Gallery, Chicago; Charles Sumner School Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the National Essential Art Exhibition, Cooperstown, New York. She has been selected repeatedly for the Lakeside Statewide Juried Art Exhibition in Oswego, New York, and the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center’s Made in New York exhibition in Auburn, New York.
Gary Trento and his spouse, Jill, who is an artist/printmaker, live in Skaneateles, New York, southwest of Syracuse, in a beautiful 1838 farm house on four acres landscaped with numerous gardens. He has had many solo, group, and juried group shows in places as diverse as the Toronto International Art Fair, Toronto; the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center, Auburn, New York; Rosenfield Gallery, Philadelphia; Everson Museum, Syracuse; and the Royalty Studio, London. He has taught at Syracuse University in the School of Art and Design since graduating from Pratt Institute with an M.F.A. in painting in 1967. He has loved every minute of it. (more . . .)
Elizabeth Twiddy’s first chapbook of poems is Zoo Animals in the Rain (Turtle Ink Press, 2008). She has won, among other awards, The Joyce Carol Oates Award in Poetry from Syracuse University, where she earned her M.F.A. in poetry. Her poems have appeared in POOL, Two Rivers Review, Stone Canoe, The Barefoot Muse, The Pedestal Magazine, and other publications. She teaches adult poetry workshops at the Downtown Writer’s Center through the Syracuse YMCA, and she is currently Visiting Instructor in the Department of English at Le Moyne College. She lives in Syracuse with her partner, the composer Edward Ruchalski, who has set a number of her poems to music for choir and for piano. (more . . . )
Kim Waale returned from the Galichnik Art Colony in Macedonia in August 2008. In August 2007 she participated in Solo con Natura, a residency and exhibition on Isla Santay near Guayquil, Ecuador. Waale was part of the Second Annual Biennale in Shumen, Bulgaria (2006) and the 2005 Harlech Biennale, an international residency/exhibition in Wales. She has received grants and residencies from organizations including the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries such as the A.I.R. Gallery, New York City: the Munson- Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, New York; and the Schweinfurth Memorial Art Center, Auburn, New York. In 2003, she co-authored the book A Due Voci: The Photography of Rita Hammond with Dr. Ann Ryan and Dr. Julie Grossman. Waale is a professor and the director of studio art at Cazenovia College. (more . . . )
Martin Walls, a native of Brighton, England, earned degrees from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and Purdue University. He was chosen as a 2005 Witter Bynner Fellow of the Library of Congress. His third book of poems, The Solvay Process, will be published in 2009 by Tiger Bark Press. His poetry has been published in The Nation, The Ohio Review, Salt Hill, Commonweal, The Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere. His other writing awards include a 1998 Discovery/The Nation prize, a Breadloaf Writers’ Conference scholarship, two community art grants from the Cultural Resources Council of Syracuse and Onondaga County, and several awards from the Syracuse Press Club. Walls is communications manager for the Syracuse Center of Excellence. (more . . . )
Stephanie J. Waterman (Onondaga Nation, turtle clan), earned a B.A. through University College of Syracuse University in 1983 and a Ph.D. in 2004. Her doctoral thesis focused on the Haudenosaunee college experience. She is now an assistant professor in the Educational Leadership programs at the Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development at the University of Rochester. She was named a 2005-06 National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow and received $55,000 to support research during the fellowship period. Stephanie is proud to be the daughter of Ada Jacques, a potter, who was honored in last year’s issue of Stone Canoe.
Emily Wood was born in Syracuse in 1963. She grew up on the shores of Skaneateles Lake and ran cross-country and track at Skaneateles High School. Her great-great-grandfather, John Wilkinson, gave Syracuse its name. She has a B.A. and an M.A. in English literature from Clemson University, which she attended on a cross-country running scholarship. She is a freelance copyeditor now living in Clemson, South Carolina. Besides writing, she enjoys reading, cycling, hiking, backpacking, gardening, and renovating houses. Wood is currently at work on her first novel.
Phil Young is of Cherokee and Scotch-Irish descent, born in Henryetta, Oklahoma, in 1947. He has been awarded a Millay Colony residency, a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant in painting and sculpture, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in sculpture. He is professor of art at Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, where he has lived since 1978. In spite of his Upstate residence, Young states that “the red clay of Oklahoma still runs in my veins.” (more . . . )
Mary Nelson Zadrozny is a fiber artist living in Baldwinsville, New York. She owns Just Imagine Design & Publications which produces quilt patterns/products. Her “Nation of Mourning” Quilt is on display at the TwentseWelle Museum in the Netherlands, as part of a 9/11 Memorial Art Exhibit. Her “ecoBuzz” piece is at the International Quilt Study Center & Museum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, one of eleven finalists in an eco-friendly art quilt competition. She is a member of Studio Art Quilt Associates, the Central New York Art Guild, International Quilt Association, and the American Quilter’s Society. (more . . . )
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