on Ariel: The Restored Edition by Sylvia Plath

on Mind: A Brief Introduction by John R. Searle

American Theater Watch, 2004–2005

Gerald Weales’s “American Theater Watch” appeared in these pages from 1978 until 2010, and we have also featured on occasion his essays and reviews on topics that have included World War II and the early-career political cartoons of one Theodore Geisel (a.k.a. Dr. Seuss). In addition to his distinguished career as an author and drama specialist, Weales was a longtime professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, from which he retired in 1987; a senior Fulbright scholar at the University of Sri Lanka; and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship.

Culture and Literature: Three Collections of Letters (on A Much Misunderstood Man: Selected Letters of Ambrose Bierce, edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz; The Humane Particulars: The Collected Letters of William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Burke, edited by James H. East; and Letters 1925-1975: Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, edited by Ursula Ludz)

Edward Butscher’s poetry and criticism have appeared in numerous literary journals and publications, including the Saturday Review of Literature, Newsday, and the American Book Review. In 1976 he published the first biography of Sylvia Plath, and in 1988 his biography Conrad Aiken: Poet of White Horse Vale won the Poetry Society of America’s Melville Cane Award.

The Fact of the Room (on Budget Travel through Space and Time by Albert Goldbarth; Controvertibles by Quan Barry; Country of Light by Joseph Stroud; The Coronary Garden by Ann Townsend; Fallen from a Chariot by Kevin Prufer; and First Hand by Linda Bierds)

Judith Kitchen passed away on 6 November 2014, just days after completing work on the essay-review in Spring 2015 Georgia Review. The contributor’s note she supplied read as follows: “Judith Kitchen has three new forthcoming essays—in the Harvard Review, Great River Review, and River Teeth. Her most recent book, The Circus Train, was the lead publication in a new venture—Ovenbird Books, at ovenbirdbooks.org.” To that we respectfully add this brief overview of her writing and teaching career: Kitchen began as a poet, publishing the volume Perennials as the winner of the 1985 Anhinga Press Poetry Prize. She then shifted to prose writing of several sorts, with emphases on essays and reviews. Her four essay volumes are Only the Dance: Essays on Time and Memory (University of South Carolina Press, 1994); Distance and Direction (Graywolf Press, 2002); Half in Shade: Family, Photographs, and Fate (Coffee House Press, 2012); and The Circus Train (Ovenbird Books, 2013)—which appeared first, almost in its entirety, in the Summer 2013 issue of The Georgia Review. In 1998 Kitchen published a critical study, Writing the World: Understanding William Stafford (University of Oregon Press), and in 2002 a novel, The House on Eccles Road (Graywolf Press). She also conceived and edited three important collections of brief nonfiction pieces, all published by W. W. Norton: In Short (1996), In Brief (1999), and Short Takes (2005)—the first two coedited by Mary Paumier Jones. Kitchen also founded State Street Press in the early 1980s, bringing out over the next twenty years seventy-six poetry chapbooks, two pamphlets, five full-length poetry volumes, two collections of translations, and a poetry anthology—the State Street Reader. After teaching for many years at SUNY-Brockport—not all that far from her birthplace of Painted Post, NY—Judith retired and moved with her husband Stan Sanvel Rubin to Port Townsend, WA, from which they founded and co-directed for a decade the Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma. The collection What Persists
Selected Essays on Poetry from The Georgia Review, 1988–2014 was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2015.

Le Serpent Qui Danse

Gerald Majer’s poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in Callaloo, FIELD, The Georgia Review (several times), Puerto del Sol, Quarterly West, Yale Review, and other journals; his creative-nonfiction book The Velvet Lounge was published by Columbia University Press in 2005. Majer teaches literature and creative writing at Stevenson University in Baltimore, Maryland. 

Hwy 1; The Al-Harishma Weapons Market; Observation Post #71; Two Stories Down; Autopsy; Dreams from the Malaria Pills (Barefoot); Tigris River Blues; Scales; Cole’s Guitar; & 9-Line Medevac

Brian Turner is a writer and musician living in Orlando, Florida. He curates The Kiss series at Guernica, soon to be published as an anthology by W.W. Norton & Company (2018). He has published a memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country (W. W. Norton, 2015), two collections of poetry—Here, Bullet (2005) and Phantom Noise (2010), and co-edited The Strangest of Theatres (McSweeney’s/The Poetry Founda-tion, 2013). He is currently at work on a second memoir, “The Wild Delight of Wild Things,” and an album of music, “11 11 (Me, Smiling),” with his group, The Inter-planetary Acoustic Team. His late wife, the poet Ilyse Kusnetz, will have her second collection of poems, Angel Bones, published by Alice James Books in May 2019.

Gravity

Lee K. Abbott is the author of seven collections of short fiction, most recently All Things, All at Once: New & Selected Stories (W. W. Norton, 2006). His work has appeared ten times previously in The Georgia Review and in nearly one hundred other periodicals, including the Atlantic, Harper’s, Epoch, Southern Review, and Boulevard. His work has also been featured in Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Awards: Prize Stories, Best of the West, and the Pushcart Prize. Twice a winner of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, Abbott is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor in English at Ohio State University, where he directs the MFA program in creative writing. “The Final Proof of Fate and Circumstance,” the first of Abbott’s eight stories to appear in GR (Fall 1983), was included in our fortieth-anniversary retrospective (Spring 1986).

Auden; Monday; & Mr. Jackson