Madison Smartt Bell

Highlights from the October 2004 issue

The third issue of the Gingko Tree Review was released on October 28, 2004.

Constance Squires
Bob Schacochis Short Story Award winner
Featured work: No Tourist, fiction

Constance Squires is a fourth-year Ph.D candidate in Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University and Associate Editor of the Cimarron Review. She is the winner of the 2004 Briar Cliff Review Fiction Award and runner-up in the Atlantic Monthly Fiction Contest and the Associated Writing Program's Intro Journals Project 2004. She is the author of a novel, Contact High, which is currently a finalist in the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, and her short fiction has appeared in Bayou, The Arkansas Review, and The Briar Cliff Review.

Madison Smartt Bell
Featured work: Palé O, Palé O, fiction

Madison Smartt Bell is the author of nine novels, including The Washington Square Ensemble (1983), Waiting for the End of the World (1985), Straight Cut (1986), The Year of Silence (1987), Doctor Sleep (1991), Save Me, Joe Louis (1993), Ten Indians (1997), and Soldier's Joy, which received the Lillian Smith Award in 1989. Bell has also published two collections of short stories: Zero db (1987) and Barking Man (1990). His eighth novel, All Soul's Rising, was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award and the 1996 PEN/Faulkner Award and winner of the 1996 Anisfield-Wolf award for the best book of the year dealing with matters of race. A second novel in his Haitian Revolutionary trilogy, Master of the Crossroads, was published by Pantheon in October 2000. The third and final volume of the trilogy, The Stone That the Builder Refused, was published by Pantheon in November 2004.

M.K. Chakrabarti
Featured work: Mrs. Mehta, fiction

M.K. Chakrabarti was raised in Oregon. She now lives in Boston.

Terrance Hayes
Featured work: The Blue Seuss, The Blue Brown; poetry

Terrance Hayes is author of Hip Logic (Penguin 2002), which was a 2001 National Poetry Series winner and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. He received a Whiting Writers Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for his first book of poems, Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press, 1999). Wind in a Box, his third book of poems, is forthcoming from Penguin in March 2006. A native of Columbia, South Carolina, Hayes currently lives with his family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and teaches poetry courses at Carnegie Mellon University.

Debra Spark
Featured work: The Pretty Girl, fiction

Debra Spark is the author of two novels, The Ghost of Bridgetown and Coconuts for the Saint, as well as the editor of the short story collection, Twenty Under Thirty. Her collection, Curious Attractions: Essays on Writing was published in June 2005. She teaches at Colby College.