The Green Room, Winter 1998

Lord Acton and Sir Richard Southern were Englishmen of different centuries and different religious denominations—the one Catholic, the other Protestant—but they shared a common calling and became among the most respected historians of their respective times. Each is discussed in a separate VQR essay by an American Anglophile historian.

Perez Zagorin is Joseph C. Wilson Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Rochester, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Shannon Center for Advanced Studies, and Visiting Scholar in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia. His latest book, a study of Francis Bacon, will be published in the spring by Princeton University Press.

William Palmer teaches history at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, and is the author of two books and numerous articles on early modern England and Ireland. His essay on Sir Richard whom he interviewed at his home in Oxford, where the medievalist lives in retirement, is the result of a long interest in Oxford historians.

Trenton Lee Stewart is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has published stories in The Beloit Fiction journal, The Wisconsin Review, Twice Removed, and elsewhere. He has also twice been one of the 10 winners in Story’s annual short-short fiction contest.

Leslie W. Dunbar is well qualified to discuss the question of “The Final New South.” He served first as research director of the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, the South’s oldest bi-racial organization, and then became the S.R.C.’s executive director in the early 1960’s. He later became the executive director of the Field Foundation in New York. Now retired, he lives in Durham, North Carolina.

A member of the English faculty at the University of Memphis, Thomas Russell has published fiction and poetry in such journals as The Georgia Review and Southwest Review. He is a winner of the Pen Syndicated Fiction Award and recently was named the winner of Quarterly West’s novella competition for his novella, “Riding With the Magi.” He received his Ph. D. degree from the University of Kansas.

Leonard Kriegel’s latest VQR essay is part of a collection published this winter by Beacon Press and entitled Flying Solo: Reimagining Manhood, Courage, and Loss. A native New Yorker, Mr. Kriegel has written seven other books and is now working on a novel. His essays have appeared in a variety of journals including The Sewanee Review and The American Scholar.

Andrea Dupree lives in Denver, Colorado, where she has co-founded Lighthouse Writers, an organization that seeks to bring creative writing workshops to the corporate world and the community. She earned her M.F.A. in fiction at Emerson College in Boston, where she also taught writing at Northeastern University and edited an international physics journal.

Ricardo Pau-llosa will publish his fourth collection of poems this year with Carnegie-Mellon Press, the publisher of his previous volume, Cuba, in 1993. His poems have appeared recently in American Poetry Review Tri-quarterly, and Kenyon Review. He is a professor of English at Miami-Dade Community College, Kendall Campus.

Catherine Sasanov’s collection of poems, Traditions of Bread and Violence, has just been published by Four Way Books.

Mary Helen Detmer is making her debut as a VQR poet, having studied with VQR’s poetry consultant, Gregory Orr. She lives on the Lawn at the University of Virginia.

An engineering professor at Cleveland State University, John Donoghue completed an M.F.A. degree at Warren Wilson College in 1992. His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, Willow Springs, and Four Way Reader #2.

A native of Dublin, Ireland, Eamon Grennan now teaches at Vassar College. His previous books include So It Goes (Graywolf, 1995), As If It Matters (Graywolf 1992), and What Light There Is and Other Poems (North Point Press, 1989). His translation, Leopard: Selected Poems, was published last year by Princeton.

David Baker teaches at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. His book, Meter in English: A Critical Engagement has just been published by the University of Arkansas Press. His VQR poems are from his forthcoming collection, The Truth about Small Towns. His fourth collection, After the Reunion, appeared from Arkansas in 1994.

Phyllis Stowell teaches at St. Mary’s College in its Master of Fine Arts program and lives in Berkeley, California.

Peter Henry is a graduate of the University of Virginia and the University of Oregon’s M.F.A. program. His poems have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Cutbank, and Black Warrior Review.

Heather Burns is a director of the Charlottesville Writing Center, and her poems have appeared in Nimrod, Southern Poetry Review, and New Virginia Review.

Peter J. Steinberger lives in Portland, Oregon, where he performs on occasion, and sometimes for pay, as a jazz pianist. He is also the Robert H. and Blanche Day Ellis Professor of Political Science and Humanities at Reed College. His most recent book is The Concept of Political Judgment (1993).

Marlin Barton is from the Black Belt region of Alabama. His stories have appeared in such journals as The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review and Shenandoah. One of his stories was included in the 1994 O. Henry collection.

Andrew Burstein is the author of The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist (1995), a serious examination of Jefferson’s self-cultivation, and the forthcoming Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America’s Romantic Self-image. He did not vote in the election of 1800.

Corey Flintoff is a reporter for National Public Radio and a native of Alaska. “The Fairy Whip” is his first story to be accepted for publication.

One of America’s most distinguished historians, Merrill D. Peterson began his teaching career at Brandeis University after receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard. He became the Thomas Jefferson Professor of History at the University of Virginia in 1962, a professorship he held until his retirement in 1987. Mr. Peterson also served as chairman of the Corcoran Department of History (1966—72) and dean of Virginia’s faculty (1981—85). His classic work, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind, published in 1960, won both the Bancroft Prize and the Gold Medal of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association in 1961.His other books include The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (1988), and Lincoln in American Memory (1994). He was also the editor of The Writings of Thomas Jefferson published by the Library of America.

Stephen Railton teaches American literature at the University of Virginia. He is currently working on a book about Mark Twain entitled Being Somebody: Clemen’s Career As Mark Twain and a Twain website (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton).

A former representative in Congress from Louisiana (1959—63) and a commentator on Lousiana politics, Harold McSween holds a doctorate in jurisprudence from Louisiana State (1950). While majoring in English there as an undergraduate in the 1940’s, he took a sophomore course under Cleanth Brooks, 20 years after he was christened in the First Methodist Church, Alexandria, Louisiana, by the Rev. Cleanth Brooks, Sr.

A classical historian, J. A. S. Evans teaches at the University of Vancouver. He was recently appointed a Whitehead professor at the American School of Classical Studies for 1998—99.His latest book is The Age of Justinian published by Routledge in 1996.

A freelance writer now residing in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Hugh Murray is a native of New Orleans, where he was active in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950’s and ‘60’s.

Sanford Pinsker is Shadek Professor of Humanities at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania. His latest book, Worrying About Race, 1985—95: Reflections During a Troubled Time was published in 1996 by Whitston Publishing.

Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr. is professor of American literature at the University of Mississippi in Oxford and author of Three Catholic Writers of the Modern South and The Art and Vision of Flannery O’Connor.

Cover picture credit: Fiske Kimball Fine Arts Library Picture Postcard Collection.