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The Green Room, Summer 1992


ISSUE:  Summer 1992

With the collapse of communism, with the rolling back of the Iron Curtain and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, American diplomats look to “fresh woods and pastures new” with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension. President Bush proclaims a “New World Order,” but the world seems neither new nor orderly and in some places it borders on chaos. Examining where America should be going and where it has been in recent years are two scholars in international relations—Greg Russell and James A. Nathan.

Mr. Russell is an assistant professor of. political science at the University of Oklahoma. He received his Ph. D. degree from Louisiana State University and is the author of Hans ]. Morgenthau and the Ethics of American Statecraft published by LSU Press in 1990. His articles on the philosophy of realism and moral choice in the American diplomatic tradition have appeared in numerous publications. He is now completing a manuscript on the political ethics and diplomacy of John Quincy Adams.

Mr. Nathan is the Khalid bin Sultan Eminent Scholar in Political Science and International Policy at Auburn University at Montgomery. His professorship was endowed by a former Saudi chief of staff, a son of the defense minister, and a nephew of the king. His benefactor studied at the Air War College in Montgomery and also picked up a degree from AUM. Mr. Nathan previously taught at the University of Delaware and is a former member of the United States Foreign Service as well as a former scholar-in-residence in the Naval War College. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a former consultant to the Strategic Research Center and the Department of the Army and was a Fulbright Scholar in Australia during 1987. He is the co-author of Foreign Policy Making and the American Political System, first published by Little, Brown in 1983 and republished in a second revised edition in 1987. He has written widely on international relations including two previous articles for VQR on the foreign policies of Presidents Carter and Reagan, respectively.

Mariflo Stephens was a newspaper reporter in Virginia, Florida, and New Jersey for 10 years before she began writing fiction. A native of Wytheville, Virginia, she received her B.S. in English in 1973 from James Madison University, and she later received an M.F.A. from the University of Virginia’s creative writing program in 1988. While an M.F.A. candidate at Virginia, she was awarded the English Department’s Thomas Griffis prize for the short story. Her fiction has appeared in such publications as The Gamut, The Writer’s Eye, The Walden Review, and Iowa Woman. She lives in Charlottesville with her husband and two daughters and writes as a free-lance writer for such publications as The Washington Post, The Charlottesville Observer, and Albemarle Magazine. She is making her debut as a VQR fiction writer.

Louis D. Rubin, Jr. is widely regarded as the dean of Southern literary criticism, but his keen critical eye is by no means limited to the area south of the Mason-Dixon Line. His latest VQR essay on T.S. Eliot is ample proof of that, A professor emeritus of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Mr. Rubin also taught at Johns Hopkins University and Hollins College. He is the founder of Algonquin Press of Chapel Hill and the author of essays and books almost too numerous to mention. Among his books are The Golden Weather, a novel, The Faraway Country: Writers of the Modern South, George W. Cable: the Life and Times of a Southern Heretic, and William Eliot Shoots a Bear: Essays on the Southern Literary Imagination. Mr. Rubin has also been the editor of other works including Southern Renaissance: Literature of the Modern South (with Robert D. Jacobs), and The Lasting South (with James J. Kilpatrick).

Stanley Plumly is a member of the English Department at the University of Maryland in College Park. His most recent collection, The Boy on the Step, was recently published by Ecco Press.

A member of the English department at Arizona State University, Jeannine Savard has recently published poems in The Southern Review, and The Denver Quarterly.

Jane Mead has poems forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Antioch Review, American Poetry Review, and Pequod. A poem of hers that originally appeared in VQR was chosen for Best American Poetry of 1990. She currently teaches at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco.

Sandford Lyne teaches poetry writing to teachers and children through the John F. Kennedy Center Arts-in-Education Program in Washington, D.C. and the Inner Writer Program, also in Washington. Most recently, Claycomb Press published his fable for adults and children, The Lion and the Boy.

Naomi Thiers is a free-lance writer and teacher of English as a second language in Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in The Colorado Review, The Antietam Review, The Panhandler, and other journals. Her book, Only the Raw Hands Are Heaven, will be published this year by the Washington Writer’s Publishing House.

Brooks Haxton is a member of the faculty at Sarah Lawrence College and also teaches at the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program in Writing outside Asheville. His most recent collection, Traveling Company, was published by Knopf in 1989.

Dionisio D. Martinez was born in Cuba. His manuscript, “History As a Second Language,” received the 1992 Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry, and will be published by OSU Press later this year.

Ellen Bryant Voigt is a past winner of VQR’s Emily Clark Balch Prize for poetry. Her latest poem is from her new collection, The Two Trees, due out this year from Norton.

Patricia Rowe Willrich received both her B.A. and M.A. degrees from Stanford University and has also studied literature at the University of Virginia and Princeton University. She is a board member of the Associates of the Stanford University Libraries and a lecturer on contemporary American fiction writers, including Saul Bellow, Truman Capote, Ann Beattie, and the subject of her previous VQR essay, Wallace Stegner. Her latest contribution resulted not only from studying the novels of Ann Tyler, but also from a series of personal interviews with the Baltimore novelist.

Lex Williford has published stories in The Southern Review, Story Quarterly, Quarterly West, and Kansas Quarterly; the last of these received a Special Mention in Pushcart Prizes XV: Best of the Small Presses, 1990—1991, as well as the 1988/1989 Kansas Quarterly/Kansas Arts Commission First Award Story. His short story, “Pendergast’s Daughter,” appears this summer in Norton’s Flash Fiction. A graduate of the M.F.A. program at the University of Arkansas, Mr. Williford has also received fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Blue Mountain Center. He teaches fiction writing at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.

Although she now lives in San Francisco, Frances Mayes continues to write about her native Georgia. She has also written about her alma mater, Randolph Macon Women’s College in Lynchburg, her account of which appeared under the title “Ten Thousand Rules to Live By” in the VQR for Autumn 1989. Other memoir/essays of hers have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Frontiers: Women in the American South, and Ironwood. She is both a poet and a member of the faculty at San Francisco State University.

Rachel Pastan is a graduate of Harvard College. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Mademoiselle, The Mississippi Review, and The Georgia Review, and has been reprinted in Editor’s Choice, 1987. She received her M. F. A. from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and currently lives in Boston.

Richard D. Altick is the Regents’ Professor of English, Emeritus, at Ohio State University. His most recent book, The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel, has won Phi Beta Kappa’s Christian Gauss award for the outstanding work on literary history or criticism published in 1991. (Publisher: The OSU Press.)

Daniel L. Zins is an associate professor in the liberal arts department of The Atlanta College of Art. He received his Ph. D. in American Studies from Emory University in 1978 and has published a number of essays and reviews on issues involving nuclear weapons. He is working on a book entitled Exploding the Canon: Rethinking the English Department in an Age of Mass Death.

Jeffrey Meyers has published biographies of Katharine Mansfield, Wyndham Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Lowell and his circle, D.H. Lawrence, and Joseph Conrad. His life of Edgar Allan Poe will be published by Scribner’s later this year. He is now working on a biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Richard H. King received his Ph. D. degree in history from the University of Virginia, and he is now a member of the faculty at the University of Nottingham in England.

Robert A. Signer, now a free-lance writer in Northern Virginia, was the last city editor of the old Chicago Daily News. He reviewed books on and off for the last two decades for Chicago newspapers and also worked for The Washington Post and USA Today. He holds degrees from the City College of New York, Northwestern University, and New York University.

Harold Fromm is the author of Academic Capitalism and Literary Value published by Georgia last fall. His essays on various subjects have appeared in such journals as The American Scholar, Georgia Review, and New Literary History. He now appears almost regularly in The Hudson Review, where he has done some retrospective essays on Michael Holroyd, Sylvia Plath, and (due this summer) Robert Graves and Laura Riding.

THE VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW Staige D.BlackfordEditor GregoryOrrPoetry Consultant

Advisory Editors Edward L. Ayers Lorna Martens Richard M. Rorty J. C. Levenson G. Edward White Patricia Meyer Spacks Kenneth W. Thompson Charlee Pawlina, Business Manager

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