Contributors

Laurie Dashnau is Associate Professor of English at Houghton College. Her publications include an essay, "A Real Chicken Soup Story," forthcoming in The Wesleyan Advocate, teaching tips forthcoming in a reference book edited by Sheila Seifert, haiku published in Starfish, and a poem, "While Reading TETYC Over Morning Coffee," in Teaching English in the Two-Year College. Laurie Dashnau holds a PHD from Miami University of Ohio. Sandra R. Duguid was born and raised in rural Western New York, outside Batavia. She graduated from Houghton College. She has an M.A. in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. in English from S.U.N.Y./Buffalo, where she wrote her dissertation on the fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe. She has taught literature and creative writing at colleges in the metropolitan area, and is currently Assistant Director of the Academic Support Center at Caldwell College. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies, such as On Turtle's Back: A Biogeographic Anthology of New York State Poetry, and in magazines, such as Modern Poetry Studies, America, Anglican Theological Review, Christianity and Literature, Journal of New Jersey Poets, and West Branch. She was awarded a Fellowship in Poetry from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and as a New Jersey poet, was invited to read her poetry in a division of the program, "Poets Among Us," at a Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. She and her husband, Henry Gerstman, have lived in New Jersey since 1983. Mark Hijleh is Professor of Composition and Conducting at the Greatbach School of Music, Houghton College. He holds a doctoral degree in composition from the Peabody Conservatory, a master's degree in conducting and composition from the Ithaca College School of Music, and a bachelor's degree in composition from William Jewell College. His teachers included such noted artists as Karel Husa, Morris Moshe Cotel, Barney Childs, James Mobberley, and Thomas Benjamin. Dr. Hijleh was named the winner of the 2002 National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS) Vocal Composition Award for his work "O Ignis Spiritus." In 1994, he founded the Christian Fellowship of Art Music Composers, a national non-profit ministry. He studied conducting with Philip Posey, Arnold Epley, and Rodney Winther, and also worked with such noted artists as David Zinman, Erich Leinsdorf, Jorge Mester and Maurice Abravanel through conducting programs of the American Symphony Orchestra League. Mark Hijleh lives with his wife, soprano Kelley Hijleh, daughter Hannah and son Noah in Houghton, New York. Julia Kasdorf was born in Lewistown, Pennsylvania. Her books of poetry include Eve's Striptease (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998) and Sleeping Preacher (1992), which received the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Award for New Writing. She is also the author of the biography Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American (2003) and The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life, 1991-1999 (2001), which won the Book of the Year Award from the Modern Language Association's Conference on Christianity and Literature. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, and Poetry, as well as numerous anthologies, including the 2003 Pushcart collection. Julia Kasdorf was educated at Goshen College and New York University, and she now teaches creative writing at Pennsylvania State University. The Poems used in this issue are republished with permission from Shenandoah, The Journal, Witness, and The Menonite. Laurie Klein's essay "A Meeting of Waters" recently won the New Letters Dorothy Churchill Cappon Nonfiction Award. Her chapbook, Bodies of Water, Bodies of Flesh, won the 2004 Predator Press Competition. Other work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals and anthologies, including: The Southern Review, Mars Hill Review, Potomac Review, Mid-American Review, Ruminate, and others. She works as consulting editor at Rock & Sling: A Journal of Literature, Art and Faith. Ted Murphy lives with his family in Houghton, New York, teaching art, art history, and the history of film at Houghton College where he is Professor of Art. He holds a B.A. from Mount Vernon Nazarene College and an MFA from Ohio State University. Tom Noyes's story "The Straightened Arrow" first appeared in Ascent and is part of his collection manuscript Spooky Action at a Distance and Other Stories which was recently chosen as a finalist for AWP's Grace PaleyPrize in Short Fiction. Tom's first book, Behold Faith and Other Stories, appeared from Dufour in 2003. He currently resides with his wife and daughter in Erie, PA,where he teaches at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College. Terence Paige is Professor of New Testament at Houghton College. He holds a BA from Seattle Pacific University, an MCS and MDiv. from Regent College, and a PhD from the University of Sheffield (England). Robert Siegel is the author of nine books of poetry and fiction, including the Whalesong trilogy, which received the Golden Archer Award and the Matson Award. Paraclete published A Pentacost of Finches: New and Selected Poems in 2006. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and received awards from a number of sources, including Poetry magazine, The Friends of Literature, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught at Dartmouth, Princeton, and Goethe University in Frankfort, and for over twenty years at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he twice directed the graduate creative writing program and is now professor emeritus of English. He is married to the teacher Ann Hill Siegel and lives and writes on the coast of Maine. James Wardwell teaches in the Honors Program at Houghton College. He holds an MDiv from Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary and a Ph.D from the University of Rhode Island. James Zoller is Professor of Writing and Literature at Houghton College where he holds the Van Gordon Chair in Communications and Writing, which has allowed him to the time to complete Living on the Floodplain, a collection of poems to be published in 2007 by WordFarm.