The Green Room, Summer 2000

In this, the 200th anniversary of his election as the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson has not had a very good year. What with Sally Hemings and all that, he has once again become the subject of controversy. Yet, as Esmond Wright concludes in his VQR essay, Jefferson “of all the “new men” (i.e. Washington, Franklin, Hamilton) . . . remains the most significant figure.” A native of Great Britain, Mr. Wright held a Common-wealth Fund Fellowship at the University of Virginia from 1938 to 1940. “Hitler and his henchmen in Italy and Japan,” he notes, “effectively curbed my postgraduate studies, and I spent the war in the Middle East and the Balkans from 1940 to 1946. In 1946, I was demobilized as a lieutenant-colonel.” After the war, Mr. Wright became a prominent British historian and along with Frank Thistlethwaite, also a Commonwealth Fellow and the founding president of the University of East Anglia, Mr. Wright founded the British Association for American Studies in 1957. He served for a time as secretary and then as chairman. In 1969 when he was a member of Parliament, Mr. Wright was invited to deliver the address in Cabell Hall marking the 150th year of the founding of Mr. Jefferson’s University. He is now an emeritus historian who resides in York-shire.

Lewis P. Simpson is Boyd Professor and William A.Read Professor of English Literature, emeritus, at Louisiana State University. His numerous books include The Brazen Face of History: Studies in the Literary Consciousness in America; Mind in the American Civil War: A Meditation on Lost Causes; and The Fable of the Southern Writer. His study entitled The Dispossessed Garden: Pastoral and History in Southern Literature was recently republished in Tokyo in Japanese translation. He is a founding Fellow of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and is a former editor, and presently consulting editor, of the Southern Review.

Nahid Rachlin is the author of three published novels, Foreigner (Norton), Married to a Stranger (Dutton), and The Heart’s Desire (City Lights), as well as a short story collection, Veils (City Lights). Her individual stories have appeared in many magazines including New Letters, Shenandoah, Redbook, City Lights Journal, and North Atlantic Review. Several of her stories have been reprinted in anthologies. She is a recipient of a Doubleday-Columbia Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. She teaches Creative Writing at the New School University. All her books are currently in print in paperback editions.

Jeffrey Meyers has devoted much of his career to examining and writing about the lives of American and British literary figures. He has published biographies of {Catherine Mansfield, Wyndham Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Lowell, D. H. Lawrence, and Joseph Conrad as well as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edgar Allan Poe. He has also turned his eye to Hollywood, bringing out biographies of Humphrey Bogart and Gaiy Cooper.

Stephen Minot’s short stories have appeared in a wide range of magazines, including The Atlantic, Harper’s, Playboy, VQR, Paris Review and Sewanee Review among others. Two of his stories were included in the O. Henry Prize Stories collection and three in The Best American Short Stories. His books include Chill of Dusk, Ghost Images, and Surviving the Flood,all novels, and two short story collections, Crossings and most recently, Bending Time. He is also the author of Three Genres, a college textbook now in its 6th edition. He and his wife, Virginia S. Minot, migrate regularly between California and Maine.

A native of South Carolina, David Havird is now chair of the department of English at Centenary College of Louisiana. After a hiatus of almost two decades which includes seven years of graduate study at the University of Virginia, he returned to poetry during a sabbatical in 1995. New poems of his have recently appeared in Seneca Review, Texas Review, and Verse. In his undergraduate days as a student at the University of South Carolina, he became a friend of James Dickey, the subject of his VQR essay.

Henry Taylor is professor of literature and co-director of the graduate program in creative writing at American University. His books of poems include The Flying Change, which received the 1986 Pulitzer Prize, Understanding Fiction. Poems J986—J996 and Brief Candles: 101 Clerihews, which Louisiana published this spring.”The Dining Room at Springdale” is part of Crooked Run, a collection in progress, of longer narrative poems set along the banks of a small stream in Loudoun County, Virginia.

Ron Rash is a winner of a 1894 National Endowment for the Arts Literary Fellowship. His poems have been published in New England Review, Southern Review, Georgia Review and new work is forthcoming in The Yale Review and Prairie Schooner. His new book of poems, Among the Believers was published this spring by Iris Press.

R. T. Smith is the editor of Shenandoah magazine, a publication of Washington & Lee University that recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. His most recent collections of poetry are Trespasser and Split the Lark: Selected Poems.

Sidney Burris’s poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, The Best American Poetry and other journals and anthologies. His first book of poems, A Day at the Races, published in 1989, won the Utah Poetry Prize, and his second collection, Doing Lucretus, has just been published by Louisiana. He has also written a book of criticism on the poetry of Seamus Heaney.

E. M. Schorb is the author of a new collection Murderer’s Day, winner of the Verna Emery Poetry Prize. It was his third collection, the other two being 50 Poems and The Poor Boy. His first novel, Scenario for Scorsese was published by Denlinger’s Publishers, Ltd.on April 26.His work has appeared in Yale Review, Southern Review, Sewanee Review, The American Scholar, and various other journals.

Michael Narducci lives in Southern California and currently teaches creative writing and American Literature at the Idllywild Arts Academy. He grew up in Campbell, Ohio, and went on to play football at Harvard University, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1997.He recently received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia, and his work has appeared in Texas Review and Gadfly Magazine.

Hilary Mastebs’ collection of essays, In Montague’s Tower, has just been published by the University of Missouri Press. One of them, “Collections,” appeared in VQR. He lives in Pittsburgh and teaches at Carnegie-Mellon University.

Mabk Wisniewskl holds an MA degree in English from the University of California at Davis (1991) and a law degree from Georgetown University (1984). He has taught creative writing at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Keystone College in Pennsylvania, and since 1993, he has been teaching fiction writing correspondence courses for the University of California at Berkeley. An avid fan of thoroughbred racing, he visits Belmont Park and Saratoga once a season apiece.

An associate professor of English/writing at Briar Cliff College and editor of The Briar Cliff Review. Tricia Cubbans-Sheehan has had stories published in Calyx, Frontiers:, Puerto del Sol, Kalliope, Wisconsin Review, South Dakota Review;, and other journals. Her fiction won first and third prize in the Iowa Literary Contest and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Recently, she won the Headwaters Literary Competition sponsored by New Rivers Press for her collection, The Balers and Other Storie, which will be forthcoming.

A resident of Hallowell, Maine, Tom Yori has published stories in Phoebe, Remington Review, Maine Review;, Fiction, and Kansas (Quarterly and Sou’wester. The latter journal nominated him for a 1996 Pushcart Prize.

Perez Zagobin is Joseph C. Wilson Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Rochester, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and now a Fellow of the Shannon Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Virginia. A historian who is also interested in philosophy, he is the author of numerous books of which the latest is Francis Bacon (Princeton).

August A. Imholtz , JR. is a former president of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America and the author of many articles on Carroll published in the United States, Great Britain, and Russia. He studied Latin and Greek at Washington University in St. Louis, at the University of Göttingen in German, and at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. For the past 25 years, he has worked as an editor with Congressional Information Service.

Morris Freedman is a native New Yorker who received his Ph. D.from Columbia University. He is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Maryland, and writes frequently on education and literature.

W. D. Ehrhart is a research fellow in American Studies at the University of Wales, Swansea, U.K.His most recent books are Ordinary Lives: Platoon 1005 and the Vietnam War; Retrieving Bones: Stories and Poems of the Korean War (with Philip K.Jason); and Beautiful Wreckage: New and Selected Poems, all of them published in 1999.

Front Cover Credits:

Picture—Heather Burns
Design—Heather Burns and Thomas McDaniel

Inside Front Cover Ad Credits:

Picture—Stephanie Gross
Design—Janna Gies and Thomas McDaniel