Darnell Arnoult is a published fiction writer and poet. Her work has appeared in a variety of journals including Southwest Review, Southern Exposure, Asheville Poetry Review, Sandhills Review, Brightleaf: A Southern Review of Books, Sow's Ear, and Now and Then Magazine. Ms. Arnoult coaches individuals and groups in writing fiction, poetry, and non fiction, and currently teaches creative writing through the Duke University Continuing Education Short Course Program and the Duke Writers Workshop. She also offers courses through the MTSU Office of Continuing Studies and Public Service. She has been teaching creative writing for over ten years. Ms. Arnoult holds a BA in American Studies with a concentration in Southern Folklore from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MA in English and Creative Writing from North Carolina State University. She now lives in McMinnville, TN with her husband and their four horses. She is at work on her first novel.

 

Adrian Blevins was born in Abingdon, Virginia in 1964, and has lived and worked in or around the Appalachian mountains ever sense.  She has a BA from Virginia Intermont College, a MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College and a MA in fiction writing from Hollins University.  In September she was awarded a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award in poetry, and will use the grant money to complete her first full-length collection, The Brass Girl Brouhaha, and begin a second book of poems.  She is the author of The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes, a Bright Hill Press award-winning chapbook, and has published poems in The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and many other magazines and journals.  She teaches part-time at Roanoke College.

 

David Cecelski is the Lehman Brady Joint Chair Professor in Documentary and American Studies at Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill.  Many of the oral history interviews he has conducted are published in the Raleigh News and Observer.  Cecelski co-edited Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy and has authored several award winning books, including The Waterman's Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina and Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina, and the Fate of Black Schools in the South.

 

Michael Chitwood was born and raised in the foothills of the Virginia Blue Ridge.  Currently, he works as a free-lance writer and teaches part-time at The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Poetry, Ohio Review, The New Republic, Threepenny Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Oxford American and numerous others.  He has published three books of poetry, Salt Works, Whet (Ohio Review Press) and The Weave Room (The University of Chicago Press).  Chitwood's essays are collected in Hitting Below the Bible Belt (Down Home Press).  He is also a regular commentator for radio station WUNC-FM and publishes book reviews and articles in the Greensboro News & Record, the Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News & Observer.  He is a graduate of Emory & Henry College (B.A.) and the University of Virginia (M.F.A.).  Chitwood's new book of poems, Gospel Road Going, will be published by Tyron Publishing Company in March 2002.

 

Carl Dennis, who first taught at Warren Wilson in 1987, won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his eighth collection of poems, "Practical Gods." Selections from that book appear in this issue of The Nantahala Review. An essay by Dennis, "The Voice of Authority," is included in "Poets Teaching Poets Self and the World," the anthology of the MFA program's poetry faculty essays, edited by Gregory Orr and program founder Ellen Bryant Voigt. He has poems in the forthcoming faculty poetry anthology "Hammer and Blaze: A Gathering of Contemporary American Poets," edited by Voigt and Heather McHugh. His first book of criticism, "Poetry as Persuasion," was published in 2001. Dennis, who also teaches at the State University of New York at Buffalo, received the 2000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, awarded by Poetry magazine.

 

Kentucky writer Silas House's first novel, Clay's Quilt, received rave national reviews and was an independent booksellers Booksense pick. The paperback edition is now in its third printing. In addition to his fiction, House is a frequent contributor to NPR's "All Things Considered" and a contributing writer for Nashville's alternative country magazine No Depression. His second novel, The Parchment of Leaves, has just been published by Algonquin Books.

 

Michael McFee was born in Asheville and raised in Arden in south Buncombe County.  He has published six books of poetry, most recently Earthly (Carnegie Mellon, 2001).  A longtime resident of Durham, he teaches at UNC-Chapel Hill.

 

Wayne Messer was born and raised in the Florida Panhandle, halfway between the Okefenokee Swamp and the barrier beaches and marshes of the Gulf of Mexico.  He lived one decade in New Hampshire and most of another in North Carolina.  He is currently Assistant Professor of Psychology at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, where he just bought a house.  He wonders should he be living so far away from a large body of salt water, but figures that there are other numerous and keen advantages to being in this small college town, the self-declared "Folk Arts and Crafts Capital of Kentucky".  Besides, for an academic, there's always summers.

 

Sarah Morris is a writer who lives in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia where she teaches in the public high school. About "Burying Opal" she says, "My family has been in West Virginia for many generations, and I have begun translating some of our family stories into narratives.'Burying Opal' is based on events in my mother's childhood, and is my first attempt at creative narrative."

 

James Owens, originally from the coalfields of Dickenson County, Va., completed an MFA in creative writing at the University of Alabama this spring and is looking for a way of moving back home. Some of his poems have appeared recently in Wind, The Pedestal, Switched-On Gutenberg, and 3^rd Muse. He edits the Sow's Ear Poetry Review.

 

Amanda Rogers is a junior at Pikeville College in Pike County, KY, where she

is majoring in both education and English.  She has lived in Eastern Kentucky all her life, and hopes to work in education in Kentucky, either in the public high schools or at the college level.

 

Ron Rash has published three books of poetry, the most recent being Raising the Dead from Iris Press (www.irisbooks.com). His novel will appear next fall from Novella Press.

 

John Scarlata is originally from Long Island, New York. He was educated in engineering, industrial arts and fine arts in New York, Colorado, and California during the 1960's and 70's. He has been teaching and practicing photography for the past twenty five years here in the Southern Appalachians of North Carolina and Virginia. His work is included in numerous public and private collections including R.J. Reynolds, The North Carolina Arts Council, Greenville County Museum of Art, The Dayton Art Institute. Exhibitions of his photographs have included, Philadelphia College of Art, California Institute of Art, Brooks Institute of Photography, Virginia Intermont  College, Ohio University at Chillicothe, The Light Factory, North Carolina Center for Creative Photography, Asheville Art Museum, John is presently an Associate Professor at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina

 

Sam Wang was born in China and grew up in Hong Kong. He received an MFA with a concentration in photography and a minor in painting in 1966 from the University of Iowa. He then joined the art faculty in the School of Architecture at Clemson University. Clemson was one of the earliest universities in the South to offer photography as fine art. Currently Sam teaches photography and "art with computer" at Clemson, and participates in overseeing a new MFA in Digital Production Arts program, preparing students for the film animation industry. Two years ago he was awarded the title of Alumni Distinguished Professor of Art by Clemson University in recognition of his teaching and research. His work is in numerous collections across the country.