N. S. Köenings was born in Belgium in 1970. She lives and works in Bloomington, Indiana. The story published here is, in slightly altered form, also the opening chapter of her novel-in-progress.
Chieh Chieng is currently completing his MFA in fiction at the University of California, Irvine.
Originally from West Virginia—where she grew up in a town called Sod, attended Marshall University, and then worked four years as a newspaper reporter—Lisa Graley current lives in Lafayette, Louisiana. She has an MFA from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where she now teaches American literature, modern fiction, and creative writing as an adjunct. She tries to spend at least two hours every day writing fiction.
Cate McGowan graduated from brief-residency MFA program at Spalding University in May 2003. She lives in Atlanta where she continues to write and learn to fly with her boyfriend and three cats, Gracie, Floyd, and Bocephus.
Zoë Griffith-Jones’s writing career has encompassed journalism, advertising, personal essays, and poetry. Her work has appeared in Tiny Lights. She is currently a private investigator in Sonoma County, California, and writes about the people she encounters, who are, indeed, stranger than fiction. This is her first published poem.
Laurence de Looze has published fiction, essays, and translations in the Antioch Review, the Ontario Review, Carolina Quarterly, Northwest Review, Exile, MSS, and other journals. A native of Oregon, he now lives and teaches in Canada.
Mika Tanner has an MA in Asian American Studies from UCLA and is currently earning her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. "Lists" is her first short story accepted for publication.
Quinn Dalton graduated from the MFA Writing Program in fiction at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. Her first novel, High Strung, is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books in July 2003, with a collection of short stories, Bullet-Proof Girl, to follow in 2004. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in literary magazines such as StoryQuarterly, Mangrove, Cottonwood, Emrys Journal, ACM (Another Chicago Magazine), the Baltimore Review, and the Kenyon Review. She is the winner of the Pearl 2002 Fiction Prize for her short story, "Back on Earth." She lives with her husband and daughter in Greensboro.
Disappearing Ingenue: The Misadventures of Eleanor Stoddard is Melissa Pritchard’s fifth book. It is her third collection of short stories, following The Instinct for Bliss (Zoland Books, 1995) and Spirit Seizures (University of Georgia Press, 1987). She has also authored two novels: Phoenix (Cane Hill Press, 1991) and Selene of the Spirits (Ontario Review Press, 1998). Her numerous honors for Spirit Seizures include the Flannery O’Connor Award, Carl Sandburg Award, James Phelan Award, and an honorary citation from the PEN/Nelson Algren Award. Instinct for Bliss was a PEN West finalist and received the 1996 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for fiction by an American woman. In 1998, Pritchard was awarded a Howard Foundation Fellowship from Brown University to complete the Ingenue collection of stories. Presently, she is an Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Arizona State University. She is also on the faculty at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky.
