Glimmer Train Stories, #33 - Softcover

JAMES CARLOS BLAKE was born in Mexico and raised in Texas and Florida. His novella "I, Fierro" won the 1991 Quarterly West Novella Competition, and his story "Under the Sierras" won the national Authors in the Park Short-Story Prize in 1993. In addition to the novels The Pistoleer, The Friends of Pancho Villa, In the Rogue Blood (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction), and Red Grass River, he has published a short-fiction collection, Borderlands. He lives in El Paso, Texas, and DeLand, Florida.

SIOBHAN DOWD of International PEN's Writers-in-Prison Committee in London writes this article regularly, alerting readers to the plight of writers around the world.

GEORGE MANNER, born in Louisiana, spent the last eighteen years in Houston before moving recently to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he teaches at Santa Fe Community College. In 1984 he won the PEN Southwest Discover Prize for Poetry. He has published in numerous periodicals and anthologies.

MARGO RABB was born and raised in Queens, New York. She lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she received an MFA from the University of Arizona. Recently she received first prize in the Atlantic Monthly student-writing contest. She has had stories in Seventeen, American Fiction, Witness, Chicago Review, and the Atlantic Monthly, and has broadcast on National Public Radio. "How to Find Love" is from a linked collection of stories she is writing about the narrator and her family during the year after her mother died.

MANUEL MUNOZ received an MFA in fiction from Cornell. His work has appeared in the Mid-American Review and the Chicano Chapbook Series. He was awarded a writing grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, and has completed a novel, The Stormed House.

ROLAND SODOWSKY grew up on a small ranch in western Oklahoma. He teaches creative writing, literature, and fiction-theory courses at Southwest Missouri State University, Springfield. His books include the Associated writing Program's 1988 short-fiction award-winner Things We Lose, Interim in the Desert, and Undue West. His work has appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Epoch, and Studies in Short Fiction, among many others. He received the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines' award for fiction in 1984, a National Endowment for the Arts fiction grant in 1989, and the National Cowboy Hall of Fame award for short fiction in 1991. He served as fiction co-editor of Short Story, a literary magazine, from 1991 to 1995.

SUSAN PERABO is the writer-in-residence at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She holds an MFA from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South, Story, TriQuarterly, the Black Warrior Review, and others. Her first short-story collection, Who I Was Supposed to Be, was recently published by Simon & Schuster.

STEWART O'NAN, known as one of Granta's Twenty Best Young American Novelists, has long been a dedicated short-story reader and writer. In 1993 Tobias Wolff chose his first collection, In the Walled City, for the Drue Heinz Prize. Since then he has published Snow Angels, The Names of the Dead, The Speed Queen, and A World Away, all novels, while continuing to quietly write and publish stories.

KAREN SWENSON's poetry has been widely anthologized. Her own collections include A Daughter's Latitude, The Landlady in Bangkok, A Sense of Direction, East-West, An Attic of Ideals. Her travel writing appears regularly in the New Leader, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, among others.