GLIMMER TRAIN: WINTER 2005, Issue 53.

Emotionally moving, literary short stories. A feast of fiction in a handsome book.

Ann Harleman's 1994 collection, Happiness, won the Iowa Short Fiction Award; Best American Short Stories listed the title story among the 100 Distinguished Stories of 1993. A novel, Bitter Lake, was published in 1996 by Southern Methodist University Press. Her work has also appeared in O. Henry Prize Stories, Shenandoah, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Southern Review, American Fiction, Ploughshares, Story, and elsewhere. Among her awards are Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships and the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. She is on the faculties of Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Julie Rose received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was the recipient of a Teaching-Writing Fellowship. A member of the fiction-writing faculty at Vassar College, she lives in Canaan, Connecticut, and is at work on a novel. Julie also holds a PhD in American Literature from NYU, which she tries not to let interfere too much with her writing. She is thrilled to be making her debut as a published writer in Glimmer Train.

Amy Karr was born in Cobleskill, New York to a flautist and a dairy farmer. She has worked as a freelance editor, webmaster for the Knitting Factory, and Assistant Editor of the Hudson Review, and has written reviews for Crushguide and Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas. Her writing is largely inspired by travel in Scotland, Norway, Spain, and the United States. She has a BA in creative writing from Middlebury College and some graduate coursework in Writing as Expressive Therapy.

Kate Kasten teaches English as a Second Language at the University of Iowa. Her stories have appeared in American Literary Review, Northwest Review, and the Somersault Press Side Show fiction anthology. She has co-authored, with Sandra de Helen, a musical-theatre satire of the Nancy Drew mystery series and has completed a novel, a collection of short stories, a book of fairy tales for adults, and a children's book.

Yelizaveta P. Renfro was born in the Soviet Union to a Russian mother and American father. She came to the U.S. when she was three and grew up in Riverside, California. She holds an MFA from George Mason University and is currently working on a PhD at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, So to Speak, and other publications. She lives in Lincoln, Nebraska with her husband, Douglas, and her cat, Chaos.

Kurt Rheinheimer's fiction has appeared in more than forty magazines, ranging from Redbook and Playgirl to Carolina Quarterly and Shenandoah. This is his second appearance in Glimmer Train. Four of his stories have been anthologized in volumes of New Stories from the South: The Year's Best from Algonquin Books. He lives in Roanoke, Virginia with his wife and a varying number of their five sons, and serves as editor of Blue Ridge Country magazine.

George Fahey lives with his wife, Mary, in San Francisco. This is his second appearance among these pages.

Alan Arthur Drew first failed as a painter and then as a singer before trying his hand at writing. He has taught English literature in San Francisco and Istanbul, -Turkey. He completed an MFA in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the spring of 2004, and now lives in Cincinnati with his wife, Miriam, and their eleven-month-old son, Nathaniel.

Jimmy Olsen is a native of Hoffman, Minnesota, and has degrees from St. Cloud State University and the University of Alabama. He's worked as a newspaper reporter, editor, and photographer. A life-long scuba diver (instructor since 1974), he lived five years in the Dominican Republic where he taught English and owned a dive shop. His first novel, Things in Ditches, was published in 2000, to be followed by The Poison Makers from Capra Press.