blackbird online journal spring 2002 vol.1 no. 1
poetry gallery features

A joint venture of the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and New Virginia Review, Inc.

 

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EDITORIAL STAFF

(Left to right) Front row: Mary Flinn, Susan Settlemyre Williams, Anna Journey, Gregory Donovan; Second row: Sallie Lupton Jennings, Mary Lee Allen, Sharon Lutz, Michele Poulos; Third row: Lenore Gay, Jesse Ulmer, Jeff Lodge; Back row: Scott Spangler, Elizabeth Bickford, M. A. Keller. (Not pictured: Ginny Crane, Kathryn Dick, Juan Leon, Amy Pilkington)

Gregory Donovan, senior editor, has won many awards for his writing, including the Robert Penn Warren Award from New England Writers (judged by Rosanna Warren), as well as grants from the Virginia Commission for the Arts and fellowships from the Ucross Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Donovan’s poetry collection, Calling His Children Home, won the Devins Award from University of Missouri Press, and his work has been published and anthologized widely, recently appearing in Commonwealth: Contemporary Poetry of Virginia from the University of Virgina Press. Donovan also has been writer-in-residence for the Chautauqua Institution and the Glasgow Artists and Writers Workshop in Scotland, and this summer he will join the Viginia Commonwealth University program which takes visual artists and writers to Lima and Cuzco, Peru.

Mary Flinn, senior editor, has been the Director of New Virginia Review, Inc., since 1985 and is the editor, with George Garrett, of Elvis in Oz, New Writing from the Hollins College Creative Writing Program (1992). She also facilitated the editing of The Gazer Within by Larry Levis (2001), and she has served as the Poetry and Fiction editor of 64 Magazine and as editor of New Virginia Review. She has participated on editors’ panels, as a literature fellowship judge for numerous art councils, and as a review panelist for the National Endowment and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. She was the first recipient of the Theresa Pollack Award for Words presented by Richmond Magazine.

M. A. Keller, online editor, is a technologist and writing instructor for Virginia Commonwealth University’s Department of English. His poetry has appeared in The Southern Review, New Virginia Review, Runes, and other publications. He has taught courses in multimodal and New Media writing and has presented in the computers and writing community on issues of technology and writing pedagogy, creative and informational hypertext, and New Media.

Jeff Lodge, online editor, is the author of the novel Where This Lake Is (1997) and fiction, poetry, and essays in GSU Review, Persona, Pleiades, Squib, and other publications. He coordinates the graduate programs in the Virginia Commonwealth University Department of English, where he teaches writing and literature. He also reviews fiction and nonfiction for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Anna Journey, associate editor, has received the 2005 Sycamore Review Wabash Prize for Poetry, the Academy of American Poets’ Catherine and Joan Byrne Poetry Prize, VCU’s Graduate Poetry Award, and an Editors’ Choice selection for Mid-American Review’s James Wright Poetry Award. Journey has also been nominated for a Ruth Lilly Fellowship. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in such journals as Cimarron Review, DIAGRAM, FIELD, Gulf Coast, Mid-American Review, Shenandoah, and Sycamore Review. Her critical work appears in Blackbird.

Susan Settlemyre Williams, Blackbird book review editor and associate literary editor, holds an MFA in poetry from VCU. Her poems have been published in River City, Shenandoah, Barrow Street, The Cream City Review, DIAGRAM, storySouth, and other journals. She has also published book reviews, both in Review Revue and regularly in Blackbird. Her book-length manuscript Ashes in Midair has been a finalist in several recent competitions, and one of her poems was named the winner of the 2006 Diner poetry contest. She is retired from the practice of real estate law.

Elizabeth Bickford, intern, is a first-year MA student in writing & rhetoric at Virginia Commonwealth University. She received her BA in English from the University of Richmond.

Ginny Crane, intern, is a senior at Virginia Commonwealth University, majoring in English.

Kathryn Dick, intern, is a first-year MA student in writing & rhetoric at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Juan Leon, intern, is a senior at Virginia Commonwealth University, majoring in English and Philosophy.

Sharon Lutz, intern, is finishing her last semester at Virginia Commonwealth University, graduating in May with a BA in International Studies.

Amy Pilkington, intern, is a first-year MA student in writing & rhetoric at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Michele Poulos, intern, is a first-year MFA student in fiction at Virginia Commonwealth University. She completed her BFA at New York University in Tisch School of the Arts. Her work has been nominated for Scribner’s Best New American Voices anthology, and she was recently awarded VCU’s David Baldacci Fiction Fellowship for 2006-2007.

Scott Spangler, intern, is a second-year MA student in literature at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Jesse Ulmer, intern, is a first year MA student in literature at Virginia Commonwealth University. He was recently awarded the 2006 J. Edwin Whitesell Award for an essay titled “‘Spinal Attributes:’ Nineteenth-Century Pedagogy and Whitman’s Cultural Programme in Democratic Vistas.”

Mary Lee Allen, volunteer, is Secretary for the Center for Palladian Studies in America. She holds a Master of Humanities degree from the University of Richmond and an MA in Art History from Virginia Commonwealth University and is retired from the Assistant Directorship of Gunston Hall, a historic house museum. She studies poetry writing.

Lenore Gay, volunteer, holds an MS in Sociology and an MS in Rehabilitation Counseling from Virginia Commonwealth University. She is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Rehabilitation Counseling at VCU. The Virginia Center for Creative Arts has awarded her two writing fellowships. In 2003 Beacon Press published her essay “Mistresses of Magic” in the anthology In Praise of Our Teachers. In 2005 her story “The Hobo” won first prize in Style Weekly’s annual fiction contest.

Sallie Lupton Jennings, volunteer, studied literature at Antioch College and has an MA in Psychology from New School for Social Research. Retired from vocational rehabilitation counseling and photography, she studied playwriting with William Packard at HB Studios in New York and won a one-act play contest with a staged reading at the Barksdale Theater in Richmond, Virginia, in 2002. She recently published her first poems in the Quaker journal, What Canst Thou Say?