LARRY HEINEMANN NEVER EXPECTED TO BE A WRITER. In Black Virgin Mountain, his most recent publication (2005) , he tells us, “I came to writing.. . .because I had a story to tell—a story that simply would not be denied and wasn’t going away anytime soon.” That story began publicly in 1977 with Close Quarters, a novel in … Read more

MICHEAL JAYME IS A NATIVE OF EL MONTE. A graduate of the University of California, Riverside, his early work was collected in 1996 as Look Back and Laugh for the Chicano Chapbook Series, edited by Gary Soto. The following year he began publishing under the surname “Jaime-Becerra” and shortly thereafter a limited-edition collection of prose poems, entitled The Estrellitas Off … Read more

A NATIVE OF IVANHOE, VIRGINIA, David Huddle served as an enlisted man in the Army during the Vietnam War. After returning to the United States, he completed his undergraduate education at the University of Virginia. He went on to attain additional degrees from Hollins University and Columbia University. Of his education he says, “I couldn’t have … Read more

According to psychologist Robert Moore, “When the cultural and intellectual history of our time is written, Robert Bly will be recognized as the catalyst for a sweeping cultural revolution.” As a groundbreaking poet, editor, translator, storyteller, and father of what he has called “the expressive men’s movement,” Bly remains one of the significant American artists … Read more

Amy Tan has said that Louis B. Jones possesses, “one of the best minds of our generation.” This is high praise, but Jones is certainly a writer of uncommon skill and care, for whom the importance of writing lies in the everyday practice of art rather than the relentless pursuit of fame. He states that … Read more

Kate Daniels has described Gerald Stern as a “post-nuclear, multicultural Whitman for the millennium—the United States’ one and only truly global poet.” He may have had little choice in the matter. Born in 1925 to Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine and Poland, he grew up in an ethnically diverse Pittsburgh, where he became friends with the … Read more