T H E H A M I L T O N S T O N E R E V I E W
Issue # 20 Winter-Spring 2010
Virgens de Guadalupe by Lynda Schor
Table of Contents
Poetry
Elaine Sexton
Jaded
Richard Stolorow
Slugger
Fiction
Jocelyn Lieu
From the Fire (novel excerpt)
Beverly Gologorsky
Imaginary Friends (novel excerpt)
Nonfiction
Contributors' Notes
Sherisse Alvarez is currently at work on her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Hunter College. Her work has appeared in Palimpsest: Yale Literary and Arts Magazine, Daylight Magazine, Becoming: Young Ideas on Gender, Identity, and Sexuality, Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology and other publications. She is particularly interested in working across disciplines; this has led her to study yogic and buddhist philosophies and explore the ways in which the body and language intersect in artmaking. She is in the process of writing a memoir, Parting, about the Cuban revolution, exile, loss, and desire. Sherisse lives in New York City and can be reached at sherissealvarez@gmail.com
CL Bledsoe is the author of two poetry collections, _____(Want/Need) and Anthem. A third collection, Riceland, is forthcoming later this year. A chapbook, Goodbye to Noise, is available only at www.righthandpointing.com/bledsoe. A minichap, Texas, is forthcoming from Mud Luscious Press. His story, "Leaving the Garden," was selected as a Notable Story of 2008 for Story South's Million Writer's Award. He is an editor for Ghoti Magazine http://www.ghotimag.com. He blogs at Murder Your Darlings, http://clbledsoe.blogspot.com He also writes a flash fiction serial called "The Idealists" which appears every two weeks at http://www.troubadour21.com/category/series/idealists/
Clyde L. Borg was born February 17, 1935 at New York, NY. BA and MA from Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ. Served as high school teacher and administrator for thirty eight years. Retired and works part time in adult education and as a mentor to new teachers. Married with six children and seven grandchildren. Has been writing essays and poetry since 1998, is presentlyworking on his MFA at Colorado State.
Matthew DeBord lives in Los Angeles. In addition to writing poetry, he
covers the auto industry for Slate.com's The Big Money, where he
writes the Shifting Gears blog. He has also written two books on wine,
The New York Book of Wine and Wine Country USA, both from Rizzoli.
Elizabeth Dodd’s latest book, In the Mind’s Eye: Essays across the Animate World, won the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment’s Best Book Award in 2009. She is the author of two collections of poetry, most recently Archetypal Light. She teaches at Kansas State University.
Jack Dowling, a graduate of The Cooper Union, Dowling spent most of his life as a painter. More recently he has taken up the short story and finds writing the most mysterious branch of the creative arts.
Chris Echaurre lives in New York with his partner Anthony, caring for their two children, Dominick and Maria. A graduate of New York University’s Creative Writing program, his story “Valentine” can be found at Blithe House Quarterly (http://www.blithe.com/bhq2.1/valentine.htm). He is currently working on a novel, and collaborating with Stacy Alldrege on a book chronicling her experiences as a dog behavioral specialist. For more information, please contact cechaurre@hotmail.com.
Steve Ely writes poems, short stories and when he can face it again, novels. Poems from his disgracefully unpublished books, Fifty, JerUSAlem, justified and the compleat eater can be found in dozens of print and online venues, including Dogmatika, 3am, Laura Hird, Magma, Lilies and Cannonballs Review, Beat the Dust, Word Riot, Citizen 32, and Literary Chaos. Ely is currently unfurling from his most recent chrysalid form and beginning to work on the-book-length-poem-to-end-all-book-length-poems: Englaland.
Susan Firer 's most recent book is Milwaukee Does Strange Things to People: New
& Selected Poems 1979-2007. She received the 2009 Lorine Niedecker Poetry Award and is Milwaukee's current Poet Laureate.
Beverly Gologorsky 's 1999 novel, The Things We Do to Make It Home, became an instant classic with its heartfelt rendering of the lives of Vietnam vets' families. To celebrate the 10th anniversary of this ground-breaking novel, Seven Stories Press has reissued it in a new edition. A longtime activist, she has written for the New York Times, the Nation, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and her essays are included in widely read anthologies on war and friendship. The Things We Do to Make It Home was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a Los Angeles Times Best Fiction selection, and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award finalist.
Jeff Gundy’s fifth book of poems, Spoken among the Trees (Akron, 2007), won the Society of Midland Authors Poetry Award. Other new work is in Kenyon Review, Image, Cincinnati Review, Georgia Review, and Poetry Salzburg Review. He was a 2008 Fulbright lecturer at the University of Salzburg, and teaches at Bluffton University in Ohio.
Jim Hazard lives in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin. He has published stories in The Mississippi Review, Exquisite Corpse, Evergreen Review, and others. He has recently begun to write poems again after a 20 year hiatus.
Jane Hilberry teaches Creative Writing and literature at Colorado College.
She has published poems in The Hudson Review, The Women's Review of Books,
Virginia Quarterly Review and elsewhere. Her books include Body Painting (Red Hen Press) and This Awkward Art: Poems by a Father and Daughter (Mayapple Press), co-authored with her father Conrad Hilberry.
Christine Holland says: "I've been writing poetry since grade school, have an MFA from the Bennington College Writing Seminars, and my $-work is in marketing, most recently for a software company in Palo Alto, CA. My poems have been published in Bellowing Ark, Isotope, and Manzanita Quarterly."
Christina Holzhauser was raised in a town of 85 along the Missouri river. Since leaving home she’s worked as a ranch hand on a dude ranch, a pee collector at a nuclear plant, a histology technician, an archaeologist, and an expert hiking boot fitter. While living in a cabin with no running water in Fairbanks, Alaska, she earned her MFA in Nonfiction as well as the right to say she’s put on her coat to use the outhouse in the middle of the night, seen the northern lights, and watched the sun never set. Currently, she lives in Columbia, Missouri with her wife and four cats, and teaches English at Lincoln University. They are expecting their first child. Her work has appeared in journals such as: Ducts, Lost Magazine, 40Below, and Antipodes. She writes a blog which attempts to give readers the dirty truth about the struggles of a same sex couple trying to have a baby: http://avasdifference.blogspot.com/
Randall Horton is the author of the poetry collections The Definition of Place, and the The Lingua Franca of Ninth Street, both fromMain Street Rag. He is the co-editor of Fingernails Across the Chalkboard Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDs from the Black Diaspora (Third World Press, 2007). Randall also has a MFA in poetry from Chicago State University and a PhD in English/Creative Writing from SUNY Albany. He teaches at the University of New Haven where he is learning to slow it down and enjoy the ride. You can check out his website and blog at this address: www.randallhorton.com.
Ingrid Hughes was born in London in 1945. She grew up in Greece, Saigon, and Singapore, as well as the United States. Since she was twenty she has lived in New York, where she brought up two children and now teaches English to immigrants and native New Yorkers at the City University of New York. Her poems and stories have appeared in a number of magazines.
George Kalamaras has published ten books of poetry, including five chapbooks. Recent titles are Gold Carp Jack Fruit Mirrors (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2008), Something Beautiful Is Always Wearing the Trees, with paintings by Alvaro Cardona-Hine (Stockport Flats, 2009), and The Recumbent Galaxy (C&R Press, 2010), co-authored with Cardona-Hine and winner of the C&R Press Open Competition.
Sybil Kollar's poetry collection Water Speaking to Stone was published by Pivot Press, and her work has been published in numerous literary magazines. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies including A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women, Story Line Press and Party Train: American Prose Poems, New Rivers Press. She is a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and has written text for a song-cycle for mezzo-soprano and flute composed by Donna Kelly Eastman that was included in the Society of Composers, Inc. CD Series. She won the first Chris O'Malley Fiction Award from the University of Wisconsin and the CCS Fiction Prize, New York City. She's been a recipient of writing residencies in Germany, Scotland and Spain, and is presently working on a short fiction collection.
Karen Kovacik directs the creative writing program at Indiana Univ. Purdue Univ. Indianapolis. She's currently at work on a new collection with the working title Vérité. Her poems and translations have appeared in APR, Boston Review, Crazyhorse, Massachusetts Review, West Branch, and elsewhere.
Mercedes Lawry writes: "I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA and have lived in Seattle over thirty years. I’ve published poetry in such journals as Poetry, Rhino, Nimrod, Poetry East, Seattle Review, and others. My chapbook, There Are Crows in My Blood, was published by Pudding House Press. I’ve also published some fiction as well as stories and poems for children. Among the honors I’ve received are awards from the Seattle Arts Commission, Hugo House, and Artist Trust. And, I’ve been a Jack Straw Writer and held a residency at Hedgebrook. Currently I am the Director of Communications at the Museum of History & Industry.
Jocelyn Lieu is the author of a 9/11 memoir What Isn’t There: Inside a Season of Change (Nation Books, 2007) and a collection of stories, Potential Weapons (Graywolf Press, 2004), published in France with the title Discordances (Éditions Phébus, 2007). Her work has appeared in 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11, Charlie Chan Is Dead, the Asian Pacific American Review, and the Denver Quarterly, among other anthologies and journals.
Alison Luterman lives and works in Oakland, California. Her two books of poetry are: The Largest Possible Life, (Cleveland State University Press, 2001), and See How We Almost Fly, (Pearl Editions, 2010). Her poems have appeared in The Sun, The Brooklyn Review, Slipstream, Ping Pong, The Comstock Review, Kalliope, Hamilton Stone Review, Poetry East, and other journals, as well as many anthologies. Two of her poems have been seen on busses and trains in San Francisco and in Portland, Oregon as part of the Poetry in Motion program. She also write plays: Saying Kaddish With My Sister, Oasis, A Night in Jail, Hot Water, The Toilet Stall, Freak, and The Recruiter. A teaching artist with California Poet-in-the-Schools, she also teaches through the Poetry out Loud program and at the Writing Salon in Berkeley and performs improvised spoken word with the dance theatre ensemble Wing It!
David Mason’s books include The Country I Remember, Arrivals, and the verse novel, Ludlow, now in a second edition. His memoir, News from the Village, will be published in 2010. His next book will be a collection of essays, Two Minds of a Western Poet.
Jim McGarrah’s poems, essays, and stories have appeared most recently in After Shocks: Poems of Recovery, Avatar Review, Bayou Magazine, The Café Review, Connecticut Review, Elixir Magazine, and North American Review. His play, Split Second Timing, received a Kennedy Center ACTF Award in 2001. He is the author of two award-winning books of poetry, Running the Voodoo Down and When the Stars Go Dark, a memoir of the Vietnam War entitled A Temporary Sort of Peace and the novel Going Postal. McGarrah has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and a finalist twice in the James Hearst Poetry Contest. He is editor, along with Tom Watson, of Home Again: Essays and Memoirs from Indiana. McGarrah’s literary blog, book ordering information, and some selected writings may be accessed at this link: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/306452.Jim_McGarrah
Meg Morley grew up in Provo, Utah where she now attends Brigham Young University studying English with a creative writing emphasis. Her recent travels include Namibia for a summer and Latvia for eighteen months. She completed the Top of Utah Marathon and the New York Marathon, and continues to run on a nearly daily basis. She has spent many hours in violin lessons and orchestra rehearsals, and lately has picked up the drums. She’s an avid, somewhat obsessive blogger, and ridiculously close to beating the first level of Mario.
Miguel Antonio Ortiz was born in Bayamon, Puerto Rico. He grew up in the South Bronx, and is a graduate of the High School of Music & Art and the City College of New York. He was an editor of Hanging Loose magazine and Publications Director at Teachers & Writers Collaborative.
Christine Rhein is the author of Wild Flight, winner of the Walt McDonald First Book Prize in Poetry (Texas Tech University Press, 2008). Her work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review and has been selected for Poetry Daily, Best New Poets 2007, and The Writer’s Almanac. A former automotive engineer, Christine lives in Brighton, Michigan with her husband and two sons. Visit her website at ChristineRhein.com.
Elaine Sexton is the author of two collections of poetry, Sleuth and Causeway, both with New Issues (Western Michigan University). Her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in American Poetry Review, Art in America, Poetry, O! the Oprah magazine and elsewhere.
Sean Singer’s first book Discography won the 2001 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, selected by W.S. Merwin, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is also the recipient of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a Ph.D. student in American Studies at Rutgers-Newark. He lives in Harlem, New York City.
Joseph Somoza was born in Spain, grew up in New Jersey and Chicago, and has lived in New Mexico the past 36 years. He retired from college teaching 15 years ago to devote more time to writing in his back yard. He has published several books of poetry, most recently Shock of White Hair (Sin Fronteras Press, 2007). He lives in Las Cruces with wife Jill, a painter.
Peter Stenson is currently wrkin on his MFA at Colorado State University. His work has been published in Eureka, Summit Avenue Review, and The American Drivel Review. He can be reached at Petercstenson@yahoo.com
Born in Buffalo in 1930, Bert Stern now lives in Somerville, MA. Steerage, his most recent collection, was recently published by Ibbetson Street Press. Bert is co-editor of Off the Grid Press, which publishes collections by poets over sixty.
Richard Stolorow says, “I have been an English teacher, bartender, concierge, handyman, book clerk and gardener, living in the midwest, the southwest, and now in Rhode Island. I have enjoyed seeing several of my stories and poems in various literary magazines.”
Chase Twichell is the author of six books of poetry, the most recent of which is Dog Langage (Copper Canyon, 2005). Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New & Selected Poems is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in April 2010.
Mark Young lives on the Tropic of Capricorn in Australia. His most recent books are Pelican Dreaming: Poems 1959-2008 (Meritage Press, 2008), Lunch Poems (Soapbox Press, 2008), More from Series Magritte (Moria Books, 2009), & the e-chap Terracotta Worriers (ungovernable press, 2009). The complete Genji Monogatari, to be published by Otoliths, will be launched a lot further south, in Auckland, New Zealand, on 31 March.
Harriet Zinnes, named by the writer Eric Miles Williamson "one of the best poets of her generation," is Professor Emerita of English of the City University of New York. Her many books include Light Light or the Curvature of the Earth (poems) (2009),Whither Nonstopping(poems), Drawing on the Wall (poems), My, Haven't the Flowers Been? (poems), Entropisms (prose poems), Lover (short stories), The Radiant Absurdity of Desire (short stories), Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts (criticism), and Blood and Feathers (translations of the French poetry of Jacques Prevert). She is contributing editor of The Hollins Critic and a contributing writer as art critic of The New York Arts Magazine.