Contributors

Abhishiktānanda was born in France in 1910. Benedictine monk Henri le Saux moved to India in 1948 as a Christian missionary. His encounter there with Hindu spirituality led him to adopt the life of an Indian holy man and to take the name Abhishiktānanda (“the Bliss of the Anointed One”). Many of his writings attempt to bridge Christian faith and the Hindu philosophy of advaita, or nondualism. He lived his final years as a wandering monk in the hermit caves of Arunachala, a holy mountain in southern India. He died in 1973.

Fred Bahnson is a Food and Society Fellow at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. His writing has appeared in Orion, Wendell Berry & Religion (University Press of Kentucky), and Best American Spiritual Writing 2007 (Mariner Books). He and his family live on an old dairy farm in Brevard, North Carolina.

Ellen Bass is the author of The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press) and Mules of Love (BOA Editions). She lives in Santa Cruz, California, and teaches writing at Pacific University.

Manuel Martinez’s fiction has appeared in the Quarterly and Blackbird. His dream is to live above a pizzeria so that he can fall asleep to the sound of hands slapping fat balls of dough. He lives in Gainesville, Florida.

Al Neipris lives in Mansfield, Massachusetts, with his wife and three dogs. His hobbies include playing piano and finding innovative ways to injure himself while biking, recent examples of which are getting his shoelaces caught in the spokes (long story), and crashing into a tree.

Craig Planting lives with his wife and children in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where his house looks out on former vice president Hubert Humphrey’s grave. Another version of his story in this issue received an honorable mention in the 2007 Dylan Days Creative Writing Contest.

Bruce Holland Rogers lives in Eugene, Oregon, and recently returned from teaching in Budapest for five months. His favorite Hungarian word, sírkert, means “graveyard” but can also be translated as “cry garden.”

Sy Safransky is editor and publisher of The Sun.

Dalia Shevin has self-published two books: The Mystery of the Missing Puzzle Piece (limited edition of one) and, coauthored with Sophie Bady-Kaye, The Best Comics You Have Ever Read In Your Entire Life, Seriously (limited edition of two). She lives in southern Vermont.

Rochelle Smith is a librarian living in northern Idaho who is originally from Trinidad and Tobago. Her essay in this issue won first place in So to Speak’s 2006 nonfiction contest. She is currently working on a piece about black princesses and fairy tales.

Elizabeth Tibbetts’s book In the Well (Bluestem Press) won the 2002 Bluestem Poetry Award. She lives with her husband in Hope, Maine, where she spends much of the summer in their pond, their old dog Daisy swimming circles around her.

Tom Becker is currently documenting the county fairs of northwest Iowa. He lives in Orange City, Iowa.

Lisa Callamaro is a Hollywood agent who lives in Beverly Hills, California.

Radek Cermak lives in Prague, Czech Republic.

Thomas M. Gorman and his brother work together as commercial photographers. He says that someday soon he’ll repent for his contribution to consumer culture by moving to the country and becoming a farmer. He lives in New York City.

Duncan Green lives in Olympia, Washington. He recently got married for the first time, four days after his fifty-third birthday.

Thomas Hyde owned a small community newspaper for a decade before selling it to pursue writing and photography. He lives with his wife on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula.

Joel Jensen’s photographs accompany essays by Linda Grant Niemann in their new book, Railroad Noir: The American West at the End of the Twentieth Century (Indiana University Press). He lives in Ely, Nevada.

Edis Jurĉys is working on his third book of photographs. He lives in Portland, Oregon, and has “green espresso,” a homemade vegetable drink, every morning.

Christy Karpinski teaches photography at Columbia College Chicago and the Evanston Arts Center. She lives in Chicago.

Neil Pankler is a truck, bus, and plow driver who considers his real work to be playing music, making photographs, and hang gliding. He lives in Truckee, California.

Eva Silverman has been playing third base on softball teams since she was eight years old. She lives in Oakland, California.

Cole Thompson has returned to photography after thirty years of earning a living and raising five children. He lives in Laporte, Colorado, where he keeps llamas.

Suzi Q. Varin is a wedding and fine-art photographer who lives with her husband in Austin, Texas.

Gaylon Wampler specializes in natural-resources photography and has taken pictures in more than seventy countries. He lives in Bryan, Texas.