CONTRIBUTOR NOTEs

Marilou Awiakta is a Cherokee/Appalachian writer who grew up on a reservation for atoms, not Indians: Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Her family has lived in the southern Appalachian Mountains for more than seven generations, and her perspective is a fusion of three heritages: Cherokee, Appalachian, and the high-tech world. A storyteller as well, her work has been featured on three PBS programs. Author of Abiding Appalachia: Where Mountain and Atom Meet and Rising Fawn and the Fire Mystery, Awiakta received the Distinguished Tennessee Writer Award in 1989. Her book Selu was a Quality Paperback Book Club Selection in 1994. Her audiotape of Selu, with Joy Harjo, was nominated for a Grammy in the Spoken Word category in 1996. She lives with her family in Memphis, Tennessee.

Laura Kate Berkowitz is an environmentalist and teacher in North Carolina.

Wendell Berry is an essayist, novelist, and poet, the author of more than thirty books. Throughout his career, Berry has received various awards and honors, including the award for writing from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Lannan Foundation Award for nonfiction, as well as the T.S. Eliot Award. Berry lives and works in his native Kentucky with his wife, Tanya Berry, and their children and grandchildren.

Joyce Blunk, who was born on the Iowa prairie and holds an MFA from the University of Iowa, has lived in the North Carolina mountains for the past 28 years. Her paintings and box sculptures have been exhibited in Europe (France, Germany, and Ireland), Asia (Taiwan and the Republic of China), and North America (Canada, Mexico, and throughout the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii). Grants and fellowships she has received include three North Carolina Arts Council Visual Artist Fellowships and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. She has had foreign residency fellowships in Austria, Ireland, France, and Germany. Her home and studio are in Asheville, North Carolina.

Christopher Camuto is the author of A Fly Fisherman's Blue Ridge and Another Country: Journeying Toward the Cherokee Mountains. He is a contributing editor and the book-review columnist for Gray's Sporting Journal and writes the "Watersheds" column for Trout magazine. He teaches frequently as a visiting professor of English at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.

Jim Clark was born in Byrdstown, Tennessee, and educated at Vanderbilt University, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and the University of Denver. His two books of poems are Dancing on Canaan's Ruins and Handiwork, and he recently edited Fable in the Blood: The Selected Poems of Byron Herbert Reece. A CD of poems and Appalachian folk music, Buried Land, was released in August 2003. His work has appeared in journals such as The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Asheville Poetry Review, and Appalachian Heritage. He lives in Wilson, North Carolina, where he is Writer in Residence at Barton College, director of the Barton College Creative Writing Symposium, and an editor of the literary journal Crucible.

Thomas Rain Crowe was born in 1949 and is a poet, translator, editor, publisher, recording artist and author of eleven books of original and translated works. During the 1970's he lived in France, was editor of Beatitude magazine and press in San Francisco, where he was co-founder and Director of the San Francisco International Poetry Festival. In the 1980's he was founding editor of Katuah Journal: A Bioregional Journal of the Southern Appalachians, and founded New Native Press. In 1994 he founded Fern Hill Records (a recording label devoted exclusively to the collaboration of poetry and music) and his spoken-word and music band The Boatrockers. In 1998 his books The Laugharne Poems (which was written at the Dylan Thomas Boat House in Laugharne, Wales, with the permission of the Welsh government) was published in Wales, his ground-breaking anthology of contemporary Celtic language poets Writing The Wind: A Celtic Resurgence (The New Celtic Poetry), and his first volume of translations of the poems of the 14^th century Persian poet Hafiz, In Wineseller's Street, were released. He has also translated the works of Yvan Goll, Guillevic, Hughes-Alain Dal, and Marc Ichall. Following six years as Editor-at-Large for the Asheville Poetry Review, he is currently writing a memoir in the style of Thoreau's Walden based on four years of self-sufficient living in the wilderness environment in the woods of western North Carolina from 1979 to 1982. He currently resides in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. His literary archives have been purchased by and are collected at the Duke University Special Collections Library in Durham, North Carolina.

Jeff Davis is a native and longtime resident of Asheville, North Carolina. He spent several years as an apprentice to master mask-makers in British Columbia among the Kwakiutl peoplesÑreturning to western North Carolina to teach anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Asheville. Since then, he has started a computer graphics business and continues to write poetry.

Michael Davitt is regarded as one of the leading Irish-language poets of his generation. His work has been described as ground-breaking in its blending of Gaelic tradition with an innovation of language and form. Influenced by the Beats, he is the author of many books including the Oomph of Quicksilver and has won many literary prizes in Ireland. He was the founding editor of the literary journal INNTI, which revolutionized the whole literary scene of Ireland in the 1970's.

Keith Flynn is the founder and managing editor of The Asheville Poetry Review, which was established in 1994. He studied at Mars Hill College and the University of North CarolinaÑAsheville, winning the Sandburg Prize for Poetry in 1985. He moved to Nashville, Tennessee in 1987 and formed the nationally acclaimed rock band, Crystal Zoo, which has produced three albums: Swimming Through Lake Eerie (1992), Pouch (1995), and Nervous Splendor (2001). Serving as lyricist and lead singer, Flynn was twice awarded the Emerging Songwriter Prize from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) in 1991 and 1992. His poems have appeared in scores of journals and anthologies around the world, including The Carolina Quarterly, The Colorado Review, The Cuirt Journal (Ireland), Defined Providence, New Millennium Writing, Word and Witness: 100 Years of North Carolina Poetry, Poetry Wales, Earth and Soul: The Kostroma Anthology (Russia), Rattle, and The Southern Poetry Review. He is author of two previous collections of poetry: The Talking Drum (Metropolis Communications, 1991) and The Book of Monsters (Urthona Press, 1994). In 1996, second editions of his first two books were published and Flynn was awarded the Paumanok Poetry Prize. He lives with his wife, Aimee, in Marshall, North Carolina. His recent collection is The Lost Sea published by Iris Press.

Yvan Goll was born in 1891 in St. Die in the Vosges and studied at Strasbourg and Berlin. He founded his own publishing company, the Rhein Verlag, which printed the works of many poets and Joyce in elaborate editions designed by Picasso, Chagall, Braque and Leger among others. Goll was in touch with William Carlos Williams and became an expatriate in 1939, coming to New York City where he founded the magazine Hemispheres. Prominent among Goll's 50 volumes of poetry, drama, fiction, essays and criticism written in German, French, and English are the Lackawanna Elegies, Jean Sans Terre and Traumkraut, the latter written during visions induced by his illness, leukemia. He died in France in 1950.

Sam Gray, educated at Rice University and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (AB and MA is history), has worked in Southern Appalachian regional history for the past 26 years as teacher, museum curator, and cultural journalist. He has published in The Southern Review, Katuah Bioregional Journal, and the Wesleyan Review, and directed museum projects on Mountain Agriculture, Southeastern Native American Belief Systems, the History of Mountain Roads, and Regional Education. He is currently Director of Mountain Gateway Museum (Old Fort), a regional branch of the North Carolina Museum of History.

Hafiz (1326-1390), the Persian Sufi poet, is a towering figure in Islamic literatureÑand in spiritual attainment as well. Known for his profound mystical wisdom combined with a sublime sensuousness, Hafiz was the supreme master of a poetic form known as the ghazal, an ode or song consisting of rhymed couplets celebrating divine love. Following in the footsteps of Jalaleddin Rumi, whom most would consider the creator of the Sufi mystic poet tradition and who was a Perfect Master who lived a century earlier (during the thirteenth century), Hafiz continues the "path of love" poetic tradition through his own century, leaving his legacy for such mystic Sufi poets as Yunus Emre and then, in the fifteenth century, Kabir.

Will Harlan is editor of Blue Ridge Outdoors magazine and a competitive trail runner. His work has been published in several Southeastern magazines and newspapers, including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Creative Loafing, and Smoky Mountain News. He lives next to Pisgah National Forest near Asheville, North Carolina with his wife and tail-chasing dog.

Ellesa Clay High was born in 1948 and raised on the suburban edge of Louisville, Kentucky, but has lived her adult life in Appalachia. She received her Ph.D. from Ohio University in 1981 and has since taught creative writing, Appalachian literature, and American Indian literature in the English Department at West Virginia University. High's fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and scholarly work have appeared in many magazines and anthologies over the years, and she has received numerous awards, including an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award and a James Still Fellowship in Appalachian Studies. Her best-known work, Past Titan Rock, provides a unique portrait of mountain life in the Red River Gorge of Kentucky and received the Appalachian Award in 1983. Today, High has "hunkered down" on an old farm in Preston County, West Virginia, with her son and wolfdogs. For the last several years, she has been listening to, collecting, and writing her own material about the Eastern Woodland tribes of Appalachia.

John Lane is a poet, playwright, essayist, and novelist who is a native of Spartanburg, South Carolina. He is a professor of English and Filmic Studies at Wofford College. He is editor and publisher of Holocene Press, and his books include Quarries, Body Poems, and Against Information.

Gearoid Mac Lochlainn was born and raised and continues to live in Belfast, N. Ireland. He is the author of Babylon Gaeilgeoir (1977), Na Scealaithe (1999), and Stream of Tongues (2001), which won the prestigious Hartnett Award in Ireland and, in 2003, the Butler Award from the Irish American Cultural Institute here in the U.S. In addition to the awards, bursaries and accolades for his work as a poet writing in his native Irish language, he received a special award from the President of Ireland Mary McAleese. He has worked for Radio Ulster, the Arts Council of Ireland, and gives workshops in creative writing and is a headliner for arts, literary and music festivals. He is also a musician and a member of the Irish language reggae band Breag.

Meschach McLachlan is one of western North Carolina's youngest poets. By age 14, he had published in several literary journals, and won an award from the North Carolina Poetry Society in 1994. His first volume of poetry, Seizures of the Sun, was published in 1996 by New Native Press and was reviewed by Fred Chappell. After living in New York for a few years, he currently lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Thomas Meyer lives in full view of the Nantahalas. He is the Assistant Director of the Jargon Society, Inc. and has recently published a long poem called Coromandel (Skanky Possum Press, Austin, Texas). He is also the author of At Dusk Iridescent.

Joe Napora is a poet and essayist who now lives in Ashland, Kentucky. He has been active in Central American civil rights movements, and in successful efforts to save the Ohio Serpent Mound. A celebrated poet, his books include Portable Shelter, tHERE, Bloom/Blood, Poetry in the Middle, Snaketrain, Freightrain, and his translation of The Walum Olum. The poems in this issue are from a longer manuscript titled sWORDS. He is the editor and founder of Bullhead, a literary magazine.

Mark Olencki is president of Olencki Graphics, Inc., a 25-year-old commercial photo/graphics digital design firm in Spartanburg, South Carolina. His commercial work has appeared in numerous annual reports, books, magazines, newspapers, and specialty business publications in the Southeast. Mark graduated magna cum laude from Wofford College in studio art and lectured in studio arts at the college from 1977-79. He has exhibited his award-winning fine arts photography in juried competitions and one-man/group shows throughout the region. His photographs are included in the permanent collection of the State of South Carolina, as well as the private collections of many corporations and individuals. His graphic designs and photography have been featured in all sixteen books of the Hub City Writers Project and two books produced by the Spartanburg Chamber of Commerce. In 2000, he was selected by the Arts Partnership to be one of three photographers to participate in an arts exchange program with Spartanburg's sister city, Winterthur, Switzerland. A native of Newark, New Jersey, Mark resides with his wife, Diana, their ten year old son, Weston, and two cats and two dogs in a 1911 Arts and Craft bungalow in historic Hampton Heights, Spartanburg's oldest downtown neighborhood.

Ted Pope lives in Morganton, North Carolina. He is a spoken-word poet and leader of Somos Dias Del Muertos, a music-poetry band. His work is featured on a 1994 Fern Hill Records release, Live at the Green Door, and has been published in Nexus and the Asheville Poetry Review. His first book, rEdlipsticK, is forthcoming from New Native Press.

Ron Rash, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer and educator, is the first John A. Parris Jr. and Dorothy Luxton Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University. Rash, who comes to Western from the University of South Carolina where he served as visiting writer in the graduate creative writing program, has received numerous awards for his poetry and fiction, including the recently announced Appalachian Writers Association's Book of the Year Award for his novel One Foot in Eden.

Janisse Ray is author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (Milkweed Editions, 1999), which won several awards (Southern Book Critics Circle Award For Nonfiction, Southeast Booksellers Award For Nonfiction, American Book Award, Southern Environmental Law Center Award) and was selected as the book every Georgian should read by the Georgia Center for the Book. Born in Baxley, Georgia, Ray is a writer and naturalist as well as a commentator for NPR's Living on Earth.

Gabriel Rosenstock was born in Kilfinane, County Limerick, Ireland in 1949. He was converted from English to Irish at University College Cork, and became fully initiated in the Kerry Gaeltacht. He is former chairman of Poetry Ireland/Eigse Eireann, an honorary life member of the Irish Translators' Association and a member of the Irish Writers' Union. His published books include Portrait of the Artist as an Abominable Snowman (Forest Books); Oraisti (Clo Iar-Chonnachta); and Cold Moon (Brandon, 1993). Among the authors he has translated into Irish are Alarcon, Heaney, Roggeman and Grass. He is a poet, playwright, children's author, broadcaster and journalist, and his first collection Susanne sa Seomra Folctha (1979) was described by Sean O Riordain in the Irish Times as "Satanic." He is one of the most prolific poets and translators in Ireland writing in any language. He currently lives in Dublin.

Ron Rosenstock was born in Monticello, New York, took degrees in history at Boston University and photography at Goddard College, and taught photography for thirty years at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. He has had solo exhibits of his photography at the Jewish Community Center Gallery in Worcester, the Schabes Gallery in Chicago, the Center for Contemporary Arts in Abilene, Texas, and the Waterfront Gallery in Westport, County Mayo, Ireland, among many other places. He has also participated in group exhibits at the Lavitt Gallery in Cork, Ireland, the Neikrug Gallery in New York City, the Gay Head Gallery in Martha's Vinyard, and others. His works are in the permanent collections of numerous places that include the Fogg Art Museum of Harvard University, the International Center of Photography in New York City, MIT, and the University of Arizona at Tucson. His books include The Light of Ireland (Silver Stand Press), and his photographs and articles have appeared in such magazines as View Camera, the Literary Review, and Worth.

Chris Rosser is a singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer living in Asheville, North Carolina. He has produced numerous CD projects in his recording studio for other singer-songwriters, and independently released three recordings of his own. He studied jazz piano and recording at the University of Miami School of Music, and later received a grant to study North Indian classical music with Ali Akbar Khan. In 2003 he was awarded a North Carolina Arts Council Songwriter Fellowship award.

Michael Wren Steele is a native of Alabama, has studied at Auburn University, Goddard College, the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University and lived in Italy (where he worked as an assistant to Ezra Pound), San Francisco, New Orleans, Santa Fe, Cambridge, Mass., and Athens, Ga. He is the co-founder of the School of Vedic Studies in Santa Fe, and has worked for the Department of Mental Health in Massachusetts, as a lecturer of neuroscience at Princeton, as well as a researcher for the Center For Aging Control. His work has been published in a variety of journals and magazines over the years. He is the author of such books as Sophia and Bring Forth, and has read his work all across the U.S. and Europe. He currently lives in Otto, North Carolina in the Southern Appalachian foothills.

Moira Sweeney is an Irish photographic artist. She currently works with a traditional Leica film camera photographing the natural world and also people in their everyday environments. Her work has appeared in quality poetry magazines and she exhibits regularly.

Ken Wainio lived in San Francisco for twenty-five years before moving north to Glenhaven, CA. A poet, playwright, and novelist, his work has appeared in City Lights Review, The Aegean Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Furious Fiction and Nexus, as well as various publications in France. His books include Letters From Al-Kemi, Two Lives, Crossroads of the Other, which was introduced by Philip Lamantia, and Starfuck, a novel published by New Native Press, which was one of the first E-books to be produced and distributed in the U.S., and which includes chapters set in the mountains of Appalachia.

Nan Watkins was born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, studied music and German literature at the University of Munich and the Academy of Music in Vienna and has degrees in those subjects from Oberlin College and John Hopkins University. As a translator over the last thirty years, she has published various works, including pieces by Karen Struck, Klaus Reichert, and Claire Goll in such publications as Dimensions, Asheville Poetry Review, Nexus and Oxygen. As a musician and composer, she is an active electronic keyboard performer and organist, is an original member of the poetry and music band The Boatrockers, and has appeared on four recordings, including a solo album of original compositions, The Laugharne Poems, released by Fern Hill Records in 1995. She has served as copy editor for a number of publications and publishers, including New Native Press and the Asheville Poetry Review. Her non-fiction book on an around-the-world journey taken in 1999 titled East Toward Dawn was published by Seal Press / Avalon Books in 2002. She currently lives in Tuckasegee, North Carolina.

Jonathan Williams was born in Asheville, North Carolina, has spent much of his life on Skywinding Farm near Highlands, and once listed his occupations as "poet, publisher, designer, essayist, iconographer." He was educated at St. Albans School, Princeton University, and Black Mountain College, and also studied art and design at the Institute of Design in Chicago. He has been strongly identified with the Black Mountain group of poets, and although often critical of the American middle class, he delights in mountain speech and traditions, frequently quoting hill folk in his poems and essays. He founded Jargon Press in 1951 with the mission, as he says, "To keep afloat the Ark of Culture in these dark and tacky times!" He went on to become one of the most active small publishers in the United States, publishing such writers as Charles Olson, Kenneth Patchen, Denise Levertov, Paul Metcalf, and others. His more than fifty books include An Ear In Bartram's Tree (1969), Blues and Roots/Rue and Bluets (1971), The Loco Logodaedalus In Situ (1972), and Elite/Elate Poems (1979). He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry, numerous grants from the NEA, honorary degrees, and the 1977 North Carolina Award in Fine Arts.

L.M. Young is the author of The Train to Port Arthur and Other Stories. She is winner of the Patricia Painton Scholarship for study at the Paris Writers Workshop and her short stories have been published in several literary journals, including Big Muddy: A Journal of Culture, History and Literature and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.

Credits for Works Previously Published