The Green Room, Summer 2003

With this issue, summer 2003, an era comes to an end at the Virginia Quarterly Review, the era being the span of the current editor’s editorship. It has been a long and rewarding tenure, but the time comes to retire and move on. As this era ends, it seems only appropriate to open the issue with an article on quarterlies and the future of reading with one of the most esteemed quarterly editors in the country, namely George Core who heads the Sewanee Review, the oldest such journal in the country. He has some original and conclusive thoughts about where these journals have been and where they are going.

A native of Lexington, KY, George Core earned a graduate degree from the University of North Carolina and was senior editor at the University of Georgia Press before going to the “Little Mountain” in Tennessee. He has served as editor of the Sewanee Review for 30 years.

For many years, Robert Erwin edited books in the humanities and the social sciences—at the University of Chicago, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania. For even longer, he has written essays on history and culture—the majority of them collected in The Great Language Panic (1990) and American Products (2002). Erwin’s essay on “The Enron Factor in American Life” began when he listened to friends and neighbors puzzle over the current business slump. Their unswerving ideological allegiance to capitalism contrasted dramatically with their lack of even rudimentary understanding about such things as the difference between a company’s revenue and its earnings.

George Garrett is a writer for all reasons. The Hoyns Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia, he is the author of 33 books and the editor of 19 others. He is now serving as Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia. He is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Deborah M. Prum’s short stories have appeared in several publications including Folio, Literary Leo, The Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. She is the author of Rats, Bulls and Flying Machines, a humorous and anecdotal history of the Renaissance for young adults.

Daniel J. Meador is James Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. A native of Alabama, he attended the Citadel and received a B.S. degree from Auburn University, a J.D. degree from the University of Alabama, and an L.L.M. from Harvard. During the Korean War, he served as an officer in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps of the Army. He is a former law clerk to Justice Hugo L. Black on the U.S. Supreme Court. At Virginia, he received the Thomas Jefferson Award, the Raven Award, and the Alumni Association Distinguished Professor Award. He is the author or coauthor of nine books on law-related subjects. He has also published two novels, His Father’s House and Unforgotten.

Murray Dunlap was recently awarded a teaching fellowship at the University of California where he will work toward a master’s degree in creative writing. His short fiction and book reviews have been published in various journals and newspapers, and last year, one of his short stories won an award and was published in a local Charlottesville publication.

Jesse Bier is a professor at the University of Montana at Missoula. He is a former Fulbright professor at the Universities of Lyon and Clermont in France, and a visiting professor at the University of Paris, Sorbonne. Thus he is no stranger to the Parisian way of life. He has received many honors and fellowships including the Distinguished Scholar Award at the University of Montana, and he has received various awards for his poetry and for American humor. His publications through the years include collections of short stories, collections of poetry, essays published in various journals, and even two novels.

Michael Nelson is best known to readers of VQR for his recent articles on Robert Caro, Garrison Keillor, Frank Sinatra, Ward Just, and C. S. Lewis. He is known in the political science community for books that he has published on the American presidency, national elections, and higher education for publishers such as Johns Hopkins, Duke, and the Brookings Institution. He is a professor of political science at Rhodes College and his most recent book is Governing Gambling: Politics and Policy in State, Tribe, and Nation, with coauthor John Lyman Mason.

John Balaban is the author of Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems which was nominated for the National Book Award and was the winner of the William Carlos Williams Prize for the Poetry Society of America. He is Poet-in-Residence at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

Deborah Slicer is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Montana.

Charles Harper Webb teaches at California State University, Long Beach. His latest book of poems, Tulip Farms and Leper Colonies, was published in 2001 by BOA Editions, Ltd. In 2002, the University of Iowa published Stand Up Poetry: An Expanded Anthology edited by WEBB. He has received grants and fellowships from the Whiting and Guggenheim Foundations.

Floyd Skloot is the author of three novels, four collections of poetry, and two essay collections. His most recent book, In the Shadow of Memory (Nebraska) was chosen by Barnes & Noble as a “Discover Great New Writers Book” for the summer 2003 and as a Book Sense 76 recommendation, and essays from the book have appeared in Best American Essays and Best American Science Writing 2000 and received the 2002 Shipley Award from Creative Nonfiction magazine and a Pushcart Prize. He lives in rural Oregon.

Sharon Lieter is the author of a collection of poems and a critical book on Russian literature. She lives in Palmyra, Virginia.

Peter Pereira is a family physician in Seattle and a founding editor of Floating Bridge Press. He won a 1997 “Discovery” / The Nation award, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Poetry East, Crab Creek Review, and North Dakota Quarterly. He won the 2002 Hayden Carruth Award and Copper Canyon Press will publish his book, Saying the World, in 2003—4.

Hank Lazer is a professor of English and assistant vice-president for Academic Affairs at the University of Alabama. His two-volume collection of critical writings on contemporary poetry, Opposing Poetries, was published by Northwestern University Press in 1996, and his seventh collection of poems, Days, was published last year by Lavender Ink.

Kenneth W. Thompson is Newman Professor of Politics and Director Emeritus of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. Currently he is responsible for the forums program at the Center and continues to teach both graduate and undergraduate courses in the Department of Politics. He is the author of 21 major works and editor or contributor to some 250 additional works. His major interest is in normative approaches to international relations and in particular, norms and politics and ethics of foreign policy.

Robert Hildt’s short fiction has been published in Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Kenyan, Antioch, Chicago, Mid American, and other reviews and journals. One piece received Honorable Mention in The O. Henry Awards. One novel is presently on hold and another is in progress.

Patricia Foster is the author of All the Lost Girls: Confessions of a Southern Daughter which won the PEN/Jerard Fund Award. She is editor of Minding the Body and Sister-To-Sister, and coeditor of The Healing Circle. Her stories and essays have appeared in such reviews as Gettysburg, Iowa, Ohio and other quarterlies and journals. She is an associate professor in the MFA Program at the University of Iowa.

A retired professor of history at the University of Virginia, Hans A. Schmitt is no stranger to the writing of it. Among his numerous books are the Path to European Union, from the Marshall Plan to the Common Market, which was published by LSU in the 1960’s and has since become one of the critical works in studying how Europe moved from war to peace. He is also the recipient of a Fulbright Award to Luxembourg.

David Lee Rubin is Professor Emeritus of French at the University of Virginia. His 1991 volume, A Pact with Silence: Art and Thought in the Fables of Jean de La Fontaine, has been reprinted by Proquest, and The Shape of Change, a collection of essays in his honor, recently appeared in New York and Amsterdam at Rodopi Editions. He teaches Great Books in the University Seminar Program and is the publisher of Rookwood Press.

Jan Barry is a poet, journalist, author of A Citizen’s Guide to Grassroots Campaigns, and coeditor of Winning Hearts and Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans and a sequel (with W. D. Ehrhart) Demilitarized Zones: Veterans After Vietnam.

A native of Bangladesh, M. Sajjad Yusuf is now an American citizen who is a member of the Research and Information Services at the University of Virginia Library.

Sanford Pinsker has been contributing to VQR more often than any other contributor over the years. Now he reviews the book of discussion of lyrical poetry by Gregory Orr. Pinsker is in his last years of teaching at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania, when he will retire to Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Richard O’Mara is hardly unacquainted with the life of H. I. Mencken. He has served many years as a Baltimore Sun correspondent in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, and London, as well as the paper’s Foreign Editor for 12 years. There could be few better qualified journalists to discuss the life of Baltimore’s most famous journalist.

John Milton Cooper, Jr., is the E. Gordon Fox Professor of American Institutions at the University of Wisconsin, who has specialized in World War I and II and the Cold War. He published Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations last year and is now working on a one-volume biography of Wilson.

CORRECTION: On the cover of the spring issue under Fiction, the author Matthew Volmer was incorrectly listed as Mark.

COVER PICTURE: Designed by David Gies

COVER CREDITS: Thomas McDaniel, Cadmus Professional Communications