The Green Room, Summer 1994

Paul Duke began his career as a journalist in 1943 when, as a high school student in Richmond, Virginia, he took a job as an announcer at a local radio station for the princely sum of $30 a week for 50 hours of work, and the work never really let up for the next five decades. As Mr. Duke went on to become successively a reporter for the Associated Press (after a recommendation to the AP’s Richmond bureau by his journalism professor at the University of Richmond), then to AP’s Washington bureau, next to the Wall Street Journal, thence to NEC news, where he covered Capitol Hill for a decade, and finally, to PBS, where he served as moderator for “Washington Week in Review” from 1974 until this past spring. Thus this respected journalistic veteran is well qualified to examine the state of the media in America today, a state in which Mr. Duke finds much that is “wayward” as he told the National Press Club at a lunch honoring him shortly before he retired this past March. Now, with his wife Janet, Mr. Duke has embarked on what he calls “a new adventure” by moving to London, “the incarnation of civility.” But the avid St. Louis Cardinal fan might be tempted to return to the U.S.this fall should the Cardinals make the World Series. That, says the moderator immoderately, “would be worth coming home for.”

Andrew Burstein recently received a Ph. D.in history from the University of Virginia where he has taught Thomas Jefferson’s life and legacy. His writing for academic journals focuses on the culture of letter-writing in the 18th century.Mr. Burstein received his undergraduate degree from Columbia University and subsequently headed a consulting firm active in China and Japan. He now teaches history at Whitman College in eastern Washington state.

Ann Beattie’s association with VQR began in 1975 when, as a lecturer in the English department at the University of Virginia, she volunteered to become a fiction reader for this journal. The following year she published her first selection of short stories, Distortions, and her first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter, and the rest is literary history, as Ms. BEATTIE has since become one of America’s most respected short story writers and novelists. She and her husband, the artist Lincoln Perry, maintain residences in Charlottesville and Maine, and she recently completed a new novel which will be published by Knopf.

Kenneth W. Thompson is an ideal scholar to examine the presidency of John F.Kennedy since for nearly two decades he has served as executive director of the White-Burkett Miller Center of Public Affairs, an institution specializing in studies of the U.S.presidency. A prolific author, Mr.Thompson is also a professor of government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia. He is a former vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation. His many books include Foreign Policies in a World of Change, Ethics in Foreign Policy, Morality in Foreign Policy, and Masters of International Thought.

Dave Smith is director of the MFA program at Louisiana State University and co-editor of The Southern Review. He is the author of 14 collections of poems including Cuba Night. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia and has taught at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Michael Mott has published six collections of poetry, four novels, and the bestselling biography The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton which Harcourt Brace recently reissued. He is working on a Selected Poems.

Elizabeth Dodd is a member of the faculty at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas.

This spring Algonquin Books published three novellas by Robert Morgan in a single volume entitled Hinterland. Good Measure, his collection of essays, interviews, and notes on poetry also appeared recently from Louisiana. His VQR poems are from a new collection entitled Photons; others have appeared in Poetry, Atlantic, and Shenandoah.

Michael Mcfee’s most recent books are Sad Girl Sitting on a Running Board (1991), and To See, a collaboration with photographer Elizabeth Matheson (also 1991). MR.McFEE teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Steven Kronen’s poems have recently appeared in Poetry, Yellow Silk, and River Styx. His collection, Empirical Evidence, was published by Georgia in the fall of 1992

John James Whalen works as a printer at a small college in northeastern Washington.

Mark Halliday’s second book of poems, Tasker, published by Massachusetts in 1992, won the Juniper prize.

Author, teacher, and poet, Reed Whittemore is a professor emeritus of English from the University of Maryland. He has also taught at the University of the South and was chairman of the English department at Carleton College. His many poetry prizes include the Harriet Monroe Prize of Poetry magazine and VQR’s Emily Clark Balch Prize for which he was the winner in 1962.Mr.Whittemore has served as a consultant in poetry for the Library of Congress and literary editor of The New Republic. His most recent book Six Literary Lives: The Shared Impiety of Adams, London, Sinclair, Williams, Dos Passos & Tate was published by Missouri last year.

HELEN BAROLINI’s recent work has appeared in Southwest Review and Writer’s Forum. Her newest book is a collection of essays entitled Chiaroscuro. An Italian American, she is working on a book about American women in Italy.

T. Alan Broughton is the author of four books of poetry, two limited editions of poetry, and one limited edition of short stories. His novels include Hobb’s Daughter, The Horsemaster, and A Family Gathering. Among his books of poetry are Preparing to Be Happy, Dreams Before Sleep, and Far From Home. Mr.Broughton is also a recipient of the VQR’s Emily Clark Balch Award (1974) and the Sonora Review First Prize for Fiction (1987). He is a professor of English at the University of Vermont and director of the Writers Workshop Program there.

Morris Freedman, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Maryland, is a native New Yorker whose essays have appeared in such journals as Commentary and the American Scholar. He finds retirement both troublesome and delightful and presents an account of it in his essay “Retirement Blues” for Commentary.

Ellen Cooney has published two novels, Small Town Girl (1983) and All the Way Home (1984), and her short stories have appeared in such journals as American Voice and the New Yorker. She is working on a novel entitled Mrs.Moscharelli. She is a part time lecturer at both MIT and Radcliffe College, and she has received an award from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation.

Sydney Lea’s essay about “Beeson’s Partridge” will appear in a collection entitled Hunting the Whole Way Home which will be published by New England as the lead book on its fall list. The volume, Mr. Lea writes, “deals with vanishing New England wildness, the philosophic implications of hunting, the training of gun dogs, the meanings and limits of literary ‘theory’, and the connections of all these things and the author’s professional and domestic life.” The collection includes “A Winter Grouse,” originally published in VQR, and subsequently in Houghton Mifflin’s 1992 version of Best American Sports Writing. Mr.Lea lives with his wife and family in New England, specifically at the “Fish Pond” in Newbury, Vermont.

Delsa Winer is a recipient of the 1993 Hackney Literary Award, receiving first place in its annual national short story contest. She is also a recipient of the Fellowship for Fiction awarded by the Massachusetts Council on the Arts. Her stories have appeared in such journals as Fiction, Ascent, and Confrontation. She was a 1993 semifinalist for the Iowa Short Fiction Awards.

Patrick Samway, S. J., the literary editor of America, is the author of Faulkner “Intruder in the Dust”: A Critical Study of the Typescripts and coeditor with Michel Gresset of a volume of critical essays on Faulkner. Father Samway is also the editor of Walker Percy: Signposts in a Strange Land and the coeditor with Ben Forkner of four collections of Southern anthologies.

A former New York Times correspondent in London, Paris, and Berlin, Martin Ochs also served as editor of the Chattanooga Times from 1958 to 1970.As such, his was one of the voices calling for the South to abide by the law of the land as set down by the Supreme Court in the Brown Case of 1954.Mr.Ochs later spent more than a decade teaching journalism at the American University in Cairo, where he also received a PhD in journalism. He is the author of a book about the Third World press.

W. D. Ehrhart served as a Marine in Vietnam during the 1960’s and has since become a poet and writer. His newest collection of poems, The Distance We Travel, was published last year by Adastra Press, and his latest prose narrative, Busted, is forthcoming from Massachusetts.

Tennant S. McWilliams is a member of the history faculty at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he has also served as an administrator.