Death of the New West?
Fall 2003
Contributors List

Ai is a native of the American Southwest and presently holds the Mitte Chair in Creative Writing at Southwest Texas State University. In 1999, her collection Vice won the National Book Award for Poetry. Her other volumes are Cruelty (1973), Killing Floor (1978), Sin (1987), and Fate (1991). Her latest volume of poems, Dread, was published by W.W. Norton in April 2003.

Bill Amundson is a Denver-based artist who works in the “Suburban Regionalist” mode, a style devoted to capturing and celebrating the true American scene rather than the idealized version so often pictured in the art of our time. He earned his B.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Fred Baca is a fifteenth-generation descendant of one of the original New Mexican Spanish families. He won a Colorado Council of the Arts fellowship for fiction in 1997 and with that support wrote his first novel, Agua, which is forthcoming from Arte Publico Press. He has recently contributed an essay to Sites of Insight, an anthology of Colorado writers forthcoming from University Press of Colorado.

Claudia Carlson’s photos have appeared in The Cream City Review, Statesman, and Fortnight. Her poetry has been published in Rattapallax, Coracle, Heliotrope, Space & Time, Fantastic Stories, and NYCBigCityLit.com. She is the co-editor, with Jeanne Marie Beaumont, of the anthology The Poets’ Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales, published by Story Line Press in June 2003.

Tom Clark has authored many volumes of poetry, including Empire of Skin (Black Sparrow) and White Thought (Hard Press/The Figures), as well as a number of literary biographies, including Jack Kerouac (Thunder’s Mouth), Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life (North Atlantic), and Edward Dorn: A World of Difference (North Atlantic).

Matthew Cooperman is the author of two collections of poetry, A Sacrificial Zinc (Pleiades/LSU, 2001) and Surge (Kent State, 1999). His recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Verse, LIT, Notre Dame Review, Denver Quarterly, and ecopoetics. In the fall of 2003, he will begin teaching poetry at Colorado State University.

Alan Dean was raised in Fort Collins, then headed East for a Ph.D. before returning home. He works predominantly with large format (4 x 5) photographic negatives.

Gifford Ewing’s photographic work is in the permanent collection of the Denver Art Museum. He takes the majority of his photographs in black and white with a 5x7 Deardorff wooden field camera, using the zone system for exposure. He is presently working on a commission from the National Library of Congress to photograph Denver’s Skyline Park.

Chuck Forsman, a native of western Idaho, has work in the permanent collections of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Denver Art Museum, among many others. “Rightly of wrongly,” he says, “I have always held a working assumption that art and nature are inextricably bound and must have sprung from parallel convulsions. Beauty and honesty are uneasy bedfellows. Still, I am trying to make honest pictures that are also beautiful because the West is still the landscape of hope.”

Joanne Greenberg has authored four collections of short stories and twelve novels, including the 1964 bestseller I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, a widely read first-person account of madness. Since then, several of her novels have featured characters with disabilities — most notably In This Sign, about deaf parents with a hearing child. She teaches at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden. divide is proud to be the first journal to publish her poetry.

Sam Hamill is Founding Editor of Copper Canyon Press and the author of forty books of poetry, translation and essays, including Dumb Luck and Gratitude. He is also Founder/Editor of Poets Against the War.

Poet, essayist, editor, and working rancher Linda Hasselstrom has authored a number of books, including Between Grass and Sky: Where I Live and Work (2002) and Feels Like Far: A Rancher’s Life on the Great Plains (1999). Among her awards are a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry and a South Dakota Arts Council literature fellowship. She conducts retreats for women writers at Windbreak House (www.windbreakhouse.com), located on her family ranch.

Contributing Editor Mark Irwin is the author of four poetry collections: The Halo of Desire (1987), Against the Meanwhile (1988), Quick, Now, Always (1996), and White City (2000). He has also translated two volumes of poetry. His awards include The Nation/Discovery Award, three Pushcart Prizes, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship to Romania.

Kristen Iversen is the author of Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth, winner of the Colorado Book Award for biography and the Barbara Sudler Award for best book on a Western American subject. Her book Shadow Boxing: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction is forthcoming from Prentice Hall. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Memphis. The chapter printed here is from a book-length memoir.

Greg Joder is a Boulder-based photographer seeking to reconnect humanity with nature through photography and videography. He can be contacted at joder@earthnet.net.

Steve Katz has published three books of poetry and eleven books of fiction, including Creamy and Delicious (1970), Florry of Washington Heights (1987), and 43 Fictions (1992). His new novel, Antonello’s Lion, will be out this winter.

Dorianne Laux is the author of three collections of poetry from BOA Editions: Awake (1990), What We Carry (1994), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Smoke (2000). She is also co-author, with Kim Addonizio, of The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (1997). Among her awards are a Pushcart Prize for poetry, two fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She teaches in the University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program.

MacArthur Fellowship recipient Patricia Nelson Limerick has been a leading figure in Western Studies since her first book, The Legacy of Conquest, came out in 1987. Her most recent book is a collection of essays titled Something in the Soil, published by W.W. Norton in 2000.

Contributing Editor David Mason has authored two prize-winning books of poetry, The Buried Houses and The Country I Remember, as well as a collection of essays, The Poetry of Life and the Life of Poetry (1999). He is co-editor of Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism, and, with John Frederick Nims, the 4th edition of Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry. He teaches English at The Colorado College.

José R. Martínez, a native of Colorado, worked in Denver journalism for 15 years and now teaches mythology and literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His fiction won the first Frank Waters Southwest Writing Award in 1994, and his poetry recently received an Artists Award in Literature from the Colorado Council on the Arts.

Ann Miller has published poems in, among others, The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Poem, The Connecticut River Review, and South Dakota Review. She grew up on a ranch in Colorado and presently works for the University of Colorado Libraries. Previously, she was a poverty law attorney in southwestern Colorado.

Contributing Editor Laura Pritchett is the author of Hell’s Bottom, Colorado, winner of the 2001 Milkweed National Fiction Prize and the 2002 PEN USA Award for Fiction. She is presently at work finishing her novel, Sky Bridge, and completing a book of essays about environmental issues and ranching in the West.

Richard Rodriguez is an editor at Pacific News Service and a contributing editor for Harper’s Magazine, U.S. News & World Report, and the Sunday “Opinion” section of the Los Angeles Times. He has published numerous articles in such publications as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Republic. He has also written three books: Brown (2002), Days of Obligation (1992), and Hunger of Memory (1982). Among his awards are a 1997 George Foster Peabody Award and a Frankel Medal from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Reg Saner’s backpacking, back-country skiing, and canyoneering have furnished materials for such volumes as The Four-Cornered Falcon: Essays on the Interior West (1994). His Climbing into the Roots (1975) won the Walt Whitman Award in poetry, and So This is the Map (1981) was selected by Derek Walcott for the National Poetry Series. His latest book, Reaching Keet Seel: Ruin’s Echo & the Anasazi (1998), is his meditative response to ancient Pueblo terrain, dwellings, and culture.

James Tipton lives in Fruita, Colorado, where he keeps bees and writes poems. His most recent collection of poems, Letters from a Stranger, won the 1999 Colorado Book Award in Poetry. His poetry is also included in various anthologies and other works, most recently Aphrodite by Isabel Allende. He is presently at work on a new collection, The Alphabet of Longing.

Todd Walker (1917-1998) worked as a leading advertising, industrial, and magazine photographer in Los Angeles from 1946 to 1970. He then left in favor of his personal artwork and teaching, principally at the University of Arizona in Tucson. His work is housed within more than 40 permanent collections nationally and internationally, including the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, Japan.