Robert McDowell

Robert McDowell is the founder and executive director of STORY LINE PRESS. The mission of the press is to advance works that tell a story, works that fit into the "new formalism" and new narrative movements in poetry. The new formalists work in a traditional poetic framework, such as sonnets, formal rhyme schemes or blank verse. New narrative poets are interested in telling a story in verse.

Robert is also a poet and critic. His books include Sound and Form in Modern Poetry (with Harvey Gross, University of Michigan Press, 1996); The Reaper Essays (with Mark Jarman, Story Line Press 1996); The Pact, a poem published in limited edition by Aralia Press, 1996; The Diviners, a 71-page narrative poem published in 1995 by Peterloo Poets of England; Quiet Money, poems published in 1987 by Henry Holt & Co.; History, Hardware, & Romance, a fine art book published by Indiana State University and New Harmony Art Gallery in Indiana; and At the House of The Tin Man, a chapbook of 23 poems selected in an open national competition in 1983, published by The Chowder Press in Massachusetts.

Previously, he worked as an associate editor at CTB McGraw-Hill; a Ghostwriter for "Kids N Sports," a nationally syndicated column, Coordinator of the University of Southern California’s Reading Series, a writer-in-residence, and Assistant Professor of English at Indiana State (now the University of Southern Indiana. His formal education includes an MFA from Columbia University’s Graduate Writing Program and a BA from the University of California in Writing & Literature.

Story Line Press: www.storylinepress.com

His newest book, On Foot In Flames was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. www.pitt.edu/~press

Jeff Wallach

Jeff Wallach is a rarity. He is a creative writer who makes an incredibly satisfactory living by commercial writing. And he specializes in commercial writing on topics he loves: golf, travel, outdoor recreation, and the environment. His first book, Beyond The Fairway: Zen Lessons, Insights, and Inner Attitudes of Golf was published by Bantam in 1995. Blue Heron published What The River Says: Whitewater Journeys Along The Inner Frontier in 1996. He has written over 300 articles, essays, and reviews for Outside, Sierra, Travel Holiday, E Magazine, Men’s Health, Rodale’s Scuba Diving, Money, Town and Country, Sunset, Lear’s, Diversion, Trilogy, Golf Digest, Golf Magazine, Golf Illustrated, National Golfer, Links, Discover, Popular Science, etc. He is an editor of America’s Greatest Resorts and a contributing writer of Petersen’s Golfing.

Jeff has taught writing at Milton Academy, Lewis & Clark College, and the Oregon Graduate Institute. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in English from Vassar College and a Master’s in Writing from Brown University.

Golf and outdoor recreation are ODD areas of interest for a New Yorker. He went west to Oregon, stayed a while, then returned to live for years on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Luckily, some kind of major cataclysmic epiphany rocked him to his soul and brought him back to Portland where he bought a house and settled down.

While still living in New York he spent a season as a whitewater river guide on Idaho’s River Of No Return, which is how he came to write What The River Says. The book is "a river-guide’s summer of inner exploration and discovery. It is a journey to challenge both the body and the spirit, revealing to those who test the river’s steep descent, their own ragged edges, and finally, their focused center.