The Green Room, Spring 1993

Like abolition in antebellum America, abortion today is an issue about which few U. S. adults are neutral. While the conflict between freedom of choice and right to life has not resulted in a civil war, it has disrupted communities, destroyed relationships, and dragged on for decades (at least since Roe v. Wade in 1973) in the courts. For native New Yorker Leonard Kriegel, abortion has been a subject of concern since his childhood days when, from his living room window, he watched young women in a courtyard below awaiting an appointment in his Bronx apartment building for an illegal operation. And “the face beneath the window” has remained with Mr. Kriegel ever since.

The author of seven books, Mr. Kriegel’s most recent volume is Falling into Life (North Point 1991), a collection of autobiographical essays about living with the aftereffects of polio by which he was crippled at age 11. He is also working on a new novel and a collection of stories. Mr. Kriegel’s writing has brought him a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Fellowship, and, most recently, a Rifkind Fellowship. He has also been the recipient of three different Fulbrights to lecture abroad, and his essays have appeared in a variety of journals including Sewanee Review and American Scholar. Michael Kelsay is a student of the wellknown short story writer (and 1990 Balch Prize Winner for Fiction) Robert Olen Butler, who recommended his story “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” to VQR. Mr. Kelsay is a 34-year old Kentuckian now living in Lake Charles, Louisiana where he attends and teaches at McNeese State University, but, he notes, “most of my adult life I spent in Lexington, where I learned more than half of what I know and where I was encouraged by kith and kin. “

A scholar of varied interests ranging from The Three Romes to a two-volume biography of Shakespeare, Russell Fraser is also an avid sports fan, particularly a fan of the great American pastime, and what every redblooded American boy’s fancy turns to in springtime, namely baseball. A native of Brooklyn, Mr. Fraser is now the Austin Warren Professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Michigan. He also has a home in Hawaii. He is the author of 14 books and numerous essays including his autumn 1991 VQR essay on Peru.

Equally prolific in literary output and equally passionate about baseball is Louis D. Rubin, Jr., who is also a familiar name to readers of this journal, his most recent VQR essay on T. S. Eliot having appeared in July 1992. In his current contribution, Mr. Rubin harks back to his boyhood days in the early 1930’s when his lifelong affair with baseball began. Mr. Rubin is professor emeritus of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the founder of the Algonquin Press of Chapel Hill.

William Stafford has served as poetry consultant for The Library of Congress as well as a lecturer on literature and writing for the U. S. Information Service in countries around the world ranging from Austria to Thailand. His collections of poetry include Stories That Could Be True, A Glass Face in the Rain, An Oregon Message, and Passwords. He is also the author of two prose books on writing, both published by Michigan, You Must Revise Your Life, and Writing the Australian Crawl.

Robert Morgan is a professor of English at Cornell and directs its M. F. A. program. His most recent collection, Selected Poems, was published by Wesleyan.

Floyd Skloot will publish his first fulllength collection of poems, Music Appreciation, this fall in the University of Central Florida Press Contemporary Poetry Series. An essay about baseball and illness will appear in The Gettysburg Review this year. His first novel, Pilgrim’s Harbor, will also be published this year by Story Line Press, which has accepted his second novel.

J. C. Todd has a new work appearing in Sow’s Ear, Potato Eyes, and Footwork: The Paterson Literary Review. Last year she was a fellow at the Hambridge Center in the Georgia Smokies.

Audrey Bohanan received her M. F. A. degree from Vermont College in 1988 and is a resident of South Berwick, Maine.

The editor of The Jacaranda Review, UCLA’s journal of the arts, Bruce Kijewski is also poetry editor for The Voyager Company, publishers of interactive software, CD’s, laser disks, and electronic books. His poems have appeared in Antioch Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, and other magazines.

John McKernan is a professor of English at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, and has had poems recently in Cumberland Poetry Review, Poetry East, and Hebron Review.

Marianne Boruch directs the creative writing program at Purdue University. Her most recent collection of poems, Descendant, was published by Wesleyan.

Dabney Stuart has had two books published by Louisiana recently, the first being Narcissus Dreaming, a collection of poems which appeared in 1990, and, the second, Sweet Lucy Wine, a short story collection published last year. Mr. Stuart continues to teach at Washington & Lee University, and his latest VQR poem will appear in Light Years: New and Selected Poems, also to be published by Louisiana later this year.

A true aficionado of Spain, David T. Gies is the chairman of the department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Theater and Politics in 19th-century Spain published by Cambridge in 1988 and, most recently, of Loramanticismo, a collection of articles published in Madrid last year.

Carol Ascher is the author of The Flood, a novel, and Simone de Beauvoir: A Life of Freedom as well as co-editor of Between Women: Biographers, Novelists, Critics, Teachers and Artists Write About Women.

She has received four PEN/NEA Syndicated Short Fiction Awards, and her stories have appeared in such journals as The American Voice, Literary Review, and Women’s Quarterly Review.

A native of Loudoun County, Virginia, where he spent his horsehood days, and where he now resides, Henry Taylor is a professor of literature at American University in Washington. He is also a well- known poet and a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1986. His books of poetry include The Horseshow at Midnight, Breakings, and The Flying Change, for which he received the Pulitzer.

A member of the faculty of the American Civilization Department at Brown University, Ann Harleman recently completed a novel, The Later Lives of Daughters. Her VQR story, “Happiness, “is the title story of a collection that was recently awarded the Iowa Short Fiction Prize and will be published by Iowa in March 1994.

Sarah H. O’Connor’s memoir about her father, O. B. Hardison, is largely set in her childhood home of Chapel Hill, but Mrs. O’Connor herself now resides in Virginia, specifically in Staunton. She received an M. F. A. degree from the University of Virginia in 1990, and she is the author of two books, The Nine Month Journey, and The Wisely Dragon (a children’s book). She teaches English at James Madison University in Harrisonburg. She is the second oldest of the Hardison clan and has three children of her own.

Although his prime interest is poetry, John Alspaugh is also a fiction writer. His 1981 book of poetry, Everything Dark is a Doorway was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. MR. ALSPAUGH has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and served as editor for Richmond Arts Magazine. In 1987 he received the New Virginia Review Prize for Short Fiction, judged by Richard Bausch.

Janice Carlisle is professor and chair of the department of English at Tulane University. Her most recent publications include John Stuart Mill and the Writing of Character (1991) and an essay on George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss in Studies in the Literary Imagination which also appeared in 1991.

Hugh Murray has taught at Dillard and Southern Universities in New Orleans, and at the University of Leipzig. He has also tutored at the University of Edinburgh. He has published articles on sports in The Journal of Social History, The Journal of Sport History, The British Journal of Sport History, and The Sociology of Sport Journal. His articles on other subjects have appeared in such journals as The Nation, Science $ Society, The American Scholar, and Phylon.

Walter Harding served as secretary of The Thoreau Society for 50 years before retiring in 1992. He is the distinguished professor of American Literature emeritus at SUNY in Geneseo, New York and author of a biography entitled The Days of Henry Thoreau published by Princeton in 1982.

Paul Roazen, a professor of social and political science at York University in Toronto served as editor of Helene Deutsch’s The Therapeutic Process, the Self, and Female Psychology: Collected Psychoanalytic Papers.

Like the subject of his essay review, Dylan Thomas, Richard Jones is a native of Wales. He currently makes his home in London, where he takes a keen interest in British politics as well as literature. He is a former BBC correspondent, the author of several novels, and a prolific essayist.

With the appearance of the essay review in this issue, Hank Lazer has now contributed poems, essays, and reviews to the VQR for three decades. In 1992 he published two books of poetry, DoubleSpace: Poems 19711989 (Seque Books, which includes a number of poems previously published in VQR), and Inter(IR)ruptions (Generator Press). He is assistant dean for humanities and fine arts at the University of Alabama, where he has taught in the English department since 1977.