Contributors

Greg Ames is the author of the novel Buffalo Lockjaw (Hyperion), which won the 2009 Book of the Year Award from the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and has taught creative writing and literature at Brooklyn College and Binghamton University.

Joseph Bathanti’s most recent book is Restoring Sacred Art (Star Cloud Press). In 1976 he moved to North Carolina as a VISTA volunteer to work in prisons, and since then he has taught creative-writing workshops for inmates across the state. His novel Coventry (Novello Festival Press) is set in a fictional North Carolina prison. He lives in Boone, North Carolina, and teaches at Appalachian State University.

David Cook teaches peace studies at the University of Chattanooga and lives in Signal Mountain, Tennessee, with his wife and two children. An essay he wrote about his ninety-two-year-old grandfather will appear in the forthcoming anthology Wondrous: The Life Lessons, Challenges, and Joys of Grandparenting (North Atlantic).

Doug Crandell believes he holds the record for number of grown-up books published with pigs on the cover: two. His newest novel is The Peculiar Boars of Malloy (Northern Illinois University Press). He lives in Douglasville, Georgia.

Brian Doyle lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is inundated by the laundry of three teenagers and finds that the deeper thickets of marriage are more interesting than the open woodlands of serial affairs. His novel, Mink River, is due out in October from Oregon State University Press.

Václav Havel is a Czech playwright, essayist, and politician. He was president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until that country’s dissolution in 1992, then served as president of the newly created Czech Republic until 2003. Before his rise to the presidency, Havel was imprisoned multiple times for dissident activities.

Sy Safransky is editor and publisher of The Sun.

Wayne Scott says he is a typical Oregonian who rides his bicycle nearly everywhere, despite rain, snow, flying gravel, grouchy drivers, insidious leaf blowers, and vanishing bike lanes. A former family therapist, he now teaches social work at Portland State University.

Susan Straight’s seventh novel, Take One Candle Light a Room, will be published in October by Pantheon. Her short stories have received an O. Henry Award and an Edgar Award. She lives with her three daughters in Riverside, California.

John Thorndike bought his farm in Athens, Ohio, in the 1970s, when he was writing and gardening. He enjoys the same activities today, except that he has thirty tomato plants — instead of three thousand — and more time to write. He is the author of The Last of His Mind: A Year in the Shadow of Alzheimer’s (Swallow Press), which the Washington Post named as one of the best books of 2009.

William Carter’s latest book of photographs, Causes and Spirits, is due out this year from Steidl, and four prints from the book are on display through November at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. He lives with his wife in Los Altos Hills, California.

Chuck Conner has been taking photo­graphs for forty years, and his work has been published in Cats, American Photographer, and Countryside. He lives in Spencer, West Virginia.

Jason Dorfman lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.

Chris Ellinger is an engineer who lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Harold Feinstein’s photographs are represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, and the George Eastman House. Bulfinch Press has published six books of his work, including One Hundred Flowers and The Infinite Rose. He lives in Merrimac, Massachusetts.

Noëlle Gaberman lives in Occidental, California. When she was young, she thought her father was in Kool & the Gang because his band covered their song “Celebration.”

Robyn McDaniels lives in Audubon, Minnesota.

Barry Pehlman is a photographer, magician, and personal trainer to his Bernese mountain dog. He lives in Exton, Pennsylvania.

Sandra-Lee Phipps worked for eight years as a photographer for the Village Voice in New York City before moving to Camden, Maine. She is working on a project creating artwork from things found or growing in her backyard, including her children.

Rosie Saraga keeps herself busy battling the second law of thermodynamics — the universal principle of decay. She lives in Corvallis, Oregon.