Rachael Perry, a native of Michigan, finished her first collection of stories, How to Fly, while working at a library in Düsseldorf, Germany. Her stories are greatly influenced by her experiences in small Midwestern towns, where everybody knows somebody who knows somebody, and the natural splendor of all four seasons and freshwater lakes shapes character like the glaciers once shaped this land.

Her stories have appeared in StoryQuarterly, River City, Hayden’s Ferry Review, South Dakota Review, Elysian Fields Quarterly: The Baseball Review and other places, and she has been nominated twice for Pushcart prizes. She received her Bachelor of Arts in journalism from Michigan State University, where she proudly contributed to The State News and helped the newspaper earn two consecutive Pacemaker awards-one while serving as Editor-in-Chief. She also earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University, where she taught undergraduate workshops, served as Technical Editor for the Mid-American Review, and was a recipient of the Devine Fellowship.

“This rainbow of stories (in How to Fly) will dazzle you.” - Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of Q Road

Jeff Vande Zande's poetry and short stories have appeared in over fifty small press magazines and journals, including College English, Passages North, Controlled Burn, The MacGuffin, and Fugue. Two of his poems were nominated for the 1999 Pushcart Prize, and poet Jim Daniels nominated his work for a 2003 Pushcart. In June of 2001, March Street Press released his chapbook of poems entitled Transient. In 2002, Partisan Press released his Last Name First, First Name Last. March of 2003 saw the release of his chapbook of poems, Tornado Warning (March Street Press). And, in 2004, Bottom Dog Press released a full-length collection of his, Emergency Stopping and Other Stories. Just recently, March Street Press also accepted a chapbook of three of his stories entitled The Bridge. All three stories take place around Michigan's Mackinac Bridge.

In the last couple of years, Jeff has begun to explore longer forms with his fiction. A year ago he completed a novel manuscript entitled All the Difference, and over the summer of 2004 he completed a novella entitled Threatened Species. He is seeking publishers for both works.

"Emergency Stopping & Other Stories is a complex, deeply moving collection. Vande Zande's powers of observation and empathy, his eye for the revealing detail, the feeling of raw authenticity his dialogue creates, all make this a memorable collection that should be read, and reread."
--Jim Daniels

Patricia Clark grew up in Tacoma, Washington, later graduating from the University of Washington with a B.A. in Economics. Her other degrees include an MFA from the University of Montana, where she studied with Richard Hugo and Madeline DeFrees, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Houston. Patricia is the author of North of Wondering, which won the first book award from Women in Literature Press and was published in 1999 (reissued in 2003, it is now available from Michigan State University Press). She is also the co-editor of Worlds in Our Words: An Anthology of Contemporary American Women Writers, published by Blair Press/Prentice-Hall in 1997. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Slate, Stand, and the Poets Against the War anthology (Nation Books). In 2003, she received a grant from ArtServe Michigan and was also awarded a residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annaghmakerrig, Ireland. Other awards include The Mississippi Review Poetry Award (1996), the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America (1990), an award from the Fine Lines/Oil of Olay Contest co-sponsored by the Poetry Society of America (2004), and residencies at The MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Arts, and the Ragdale Foundation.

She teaches creative writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, where she is Professor in the Department of Writing and the university's poet-in-residence. In her role at GVSU, Patricia coordinates the fall Poetry Night readings which have featured Billy Collins, Robert Hass, Naomi Shihab Nye, Rita Dove, and Charles Wright. She is also the director of GVSU's Writing in Ireland program, which brings students to Trinity College, Dublin and Queens University, Belfast.

"Wondering is a small town in Montana. In Patricia Clark's North of Wondering, with its ambitious allusion to Robert Frost's first collection North of Boston, place, culture, and climate intersect with reasoning and emotions to map the contours of wondering, as if the word itself were a small town, or a particular region, somewhere, that she wanted us to experience in all its complexity, from the nuances of questioning to marveling“ - Mary Stewart Hammond

Readings by the winners of MSU's annual literary prizes. Staff of the Red Cedar Review literary journal will emcee.

The Michigan Writers Series is co-sponsored by Schuler Books & Music.