Elder Mountain

Contributors

Bruce E. Baker is Senior Lecturer in United States History at Royal Holloway, University of London.  He is the author of This Mob Will Surely Take My Life: Lynchings in the Carolinas, 1871-1947 and What Reconstruction Meant: Historical Memory in the American South.  His grandfather’s family is from Laclede County, Missouri.

Brian C. Campbell, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Central Arkansas, received his Ph.D. from the University of Georgia Environmental and Ecological Anthropology Program.  He enjoys gardening, camping, and hiking with his family.  His research and service project, Conserving Arkansas’s Agricultural Heritage (CAAH!), focuses on agrobiodiversity conservation in Arkansas (and the Missouri Ozarks) through seed banks, campus and community gardens, ethnographic film-making, and the establishment of public seed exchanges.

Laura Dimmit is a senior creative writing major at Missouri State University – Springfield.  After graduating in May 2012, she will pursue an MFA in poetry.  Her work has appeared in Logos: A Journal of Undergraduate Research, and is forthcoming in Moon City Review.  It has been her experience, so far, that unassuming moments make for the best poetry.

Clara Dyer was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and grew up in nearby Ashtubula.  She earned a B.A. in music education from Kent State and a Masters in English from Arizona State University.  After she retired from thirty-five years teaching in the Phoenix public school system and Scottsdale Community College, she began writing poetry seriously.  She writes every day and has over 700 poems.  This is the first poem she has submitted for publication.

Claudia Emerson has five books of poetry (one forthcoming) from Louisiana State University Press, including Late Wife, which won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.  She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and a Witter Bynner Fellowship through the Library of Congress.  Awarded the Donald Justice Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, she was named a Virginia Woman in History by the Library of Virginia and is also former Poet Laureate of Virginia.  She is Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where she holds the Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry.

Jack Emerson was a native Virginian.  He earned a B.A. in English at Hampden-Sydney College and a Masters of Divinity at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia.  A gifted preacher, he served as Pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, West Plains, Missouri, until his death in 2006.  He is remembered by his wife and children as a loving and dedicated father and a moderate fisherman.  Jack and his younger sister, Claudia, grew up in Chatham, Virginia.

James Fowler teaches literature at the University of Central Arkansas, where he edits the poetry journal Slant.  His stories have appeared in such journals as The Chariton Review, Willow Review, Colere, POMPA, and The Southern Review.  He has a story forthcoming in Paper Nautilus.

Jane Hoogestraat’s chapbook of poetry, Harvesting All Night, won the 2008 Finishing Line Open Competition, and her work has appeared in such journals as Poetry, Southern Review, Southern Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Image.  She is a professor of English at Missouri State University – Springfield, specializing in 20^th Century poetry.

Phillip Howerton is an English instructor at North Arkansas College in Harrison.  His photographs, reviews, poems, and essays have appeared in various journals, such as South Carolina Review, The Journal of Kentucky Studies, Red Rock Review, River Oak Review, Big Muddy, The Chaffin Journal, Plainsongs, The Community College Humanities Review, The Concord Saunterer, The Arkansas Review, and Elder Mountain.  He recently completed his Ph.D. in American literature at the University of Missouri-Columbia with a dissertation entitled The Other Ozarks: A Critical Anthology.

Gordon Johnston was born in Nebraska and grew up on the upper Jacks Fork River.  He holds an MA in English and is library director at Three Rivers College in Poplar Bluff, Missouri.  A songwriter and musician, he also writes a regular column for the SEMO Times in Poplar Bluff and struggles to complete at least one poem per year.

Lora Knight will begin a Masters in English at Missouri State University – Springfield in August, 2011.  As a mother of two toddlers, nursery rhymes and Dr. Seuss are currently her strongest literary influences.  Her poems have appeared in Cave Region Review and Moon City Review.

Angie Macri was born and raised in southern Illinois, where her family has lived for over two hundred years.  Her recent work appears or is forthcoming in Cave Wall, Crab Orchard Review, and Quiddity, among others, and will be included in Best New Poets 2010.  She teaches in Little Rock and has been awarded an individual artist fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council.

Dave Malone is the author of several books of poetry, and his poems have appeared in various literary journals including decomP, Mid Rivers Review, San Pedro River Review, Spindrift, and Word Riot.  His interests include Ozark culture and crime fiction, and he maintains a web presence at davemalone.net.

Edgar D. McKinney is a first-generation college graduate, receiving his bachelor’s degree from Missouri State University-Springfield in 1963 with a major in history.  He received his M.A. in history from Missouri State and his Ph.D.  in history from the University of Missouri-Columbia.  He is particularly interested in all aspects of Ozarks culture, especially in the local aspects of the Civil War, and in the vast cultural and social changes taking place in the Ozarks between 1920 and 1960.  That forty-year period is the subject of his doctoral dissertation, “Images, Realities, and Cultural Transformation in the Missouri Ozarks, 1920-1960.

Lynn Morrow, M.A., Missouri State University, was research historian for the Center for Ozarks Studies, managed the historic preservation consulting firm Kalen and Morrow, and administers Missouri’s national model in public records preservation at the Missouri State Archives.  Lynn has published widely in the Missouri Historical Review, Gateway Heritage, Missouri Folklore Journal, OzarksWatch, Big Muddy, and in other serials, dictionaries, and anthologies.  He co-edited two documentary histories and co-authored Shepherd of the Hills Country: Tourism Transforms the Ozarks, 1880s-1930s, from the University of Arkansas Press.

Allys Page hails from Yukon, Missouri, and is currently an undergraduate majoring in English literature at Missouri State University – Springfield.

Iris Shepard is a fourth year English Ph.D. student at the University of Arkansas with a focus on American literature and community literacy.  Since she is an Arkansas native, the characters in her story and recently completed novel Derby Klan, about a roller derby team that drives the KKK out of invented Whitly, Arkansas, are infused with a rural Southern sensibility.

Bonnie Stepenoff is a professor of history at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau.  She is the author of a number of books, including Big Spring Autumn, Thad Snow:  A Life of Social Reform in the Missouri Bootheel, and Their Father’s Daughters:  Silk Mill Workers in Northeastern Pennsylvania.  She is also a poet, whose work has appeared in Frogpond, The Heron’s Nest, Bellowing Ark, and other literary journals.

Kinsley Stocum is a 2011 graduate of Missouri State University – Springfield where she earned a B.A. in English/Creative Writing.  Her first poem was published in Moon City Review.

Terrell L. Tebbetts holds the Martha Heasley Cox Chair in American Literature at Lyon College.  He has published over three dozen articles on American literature in journals such as Philological Review, South Central Review, College Literature, Southern Literary Journal, The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, Teaching Faulkner and The Faulkner Journal, as well as in books published by the UP of Mississippi, Auburn UP, Greenwood, and the Modern Language Association.  He regularly co-leads the Teaching Faulkner sessions at Ole Miss’s annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference.  He reviews submissions for The Faulkner Journal, Philological Review, and Elder Mountain, and he is guest editor of a special issue of The Faulkner Journal devoted to Faulkner in Contemporary Fiction.

Ashley Underwood has studied Creative Writing at Missouri State University-Springfield and is beginning work on a Masters’s of Teaching.  She lives in Springfield, Missouri, with her husband Mathew and their young son.  As a native Ozarker, she finds this region and its inhabitants to be rich with heart and character.  At present, Ashley is hard at work on a chapbook of poetry as well as a collection of short stories.

Amy Wright Vollmar was born in southern Illinois, and now lives with her family in Springfield, Missouri.  Her poetry has appeared in Elder Mountain, Cave Region Review, and Springhouse Magazine.  When not wandering the woods looking for poems, she is often working with first graders at Phelps Center for Gifted Education in Springfield.  In her classroom she is merely the tallest person covered with paint, glue, and eraser shavings.

Born and reared in Springfield, Missouri, Steve Yates is an M.F.A. graduate from the creative writing program at the University of Arkansas.  His fiction has won two fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission and one from the Arkansas Arts Council.  Portions of his novel Morkan’s Quarry first appeared in Missouri Review, Ontario Review, and South Carolina Review.  A novella-length excerpt was a finalist for the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society William Faulkner/Wisdom Award for the Best Novella.  Yates has published short stories in TriQuarterly, Southwest Review, Turnstile, Western Humanities Review, Laurel Review, Chariton Review, Valley Voices, and many other journals.  He is assistant director/marketing director at University Press of Mississippi in Jackson, and lives in Flowood with his wife, Tammy.