Mary Helen Stefaniak, author of The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia
Narrator Gladys Cailiff is eleven years old in 1938 when a new schoolteacher turns Threestep, Georgia, upside down. Miss Grace Spivey is a well-traveled young woman who believes in field trips, Arabian costumes, and reading aloud from her ten-volume set of One Thousand and a One Nights. The real trouble begins when she decides to revive the annual town festival as an exotic Baghdad Bazaar. Miss Spivey and her project transform the lives of everyone around her: Gladys’s older brother Force (with his movie-star looks), their pregnant sister May (a gifted storyteller herself), and especially the Cailiffs’ African American neighbor, young Theo Boykin, whose creative genius becomes the key to a colorful, hidden history of the South.
The fate of a camel driver on the Arabian Peninsula in 1916, the birth of a circus in the wake of Sherman’s army, the role of an enchanted pitcher in a ninth-century war between brothers, the journey of an ingenious young Muslim from his African home to the coastal islands of Georgia—these and other surprising stories come to light as The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia rides a magic carpet from a schoolroom in the South to the banks of the Tigris (and back again) in an entrancing feat of storytelling.
Author bio: Mary Helen Stefaniak’s fiction has twice appeared in New Stories from the South: The Year’sNarrator Gladys Cailiff is eleven years old in 1938 when a new schoolteacher turns Threestep, Georgia, upside down. Miss Grace Spivey is a well-traveled young woman who believes in field trips, Arabian costumes, and reading aloud from her ten-volume set of One Thousand and a 
Best (2000 and 2006), and her first novel, The Turk and My Mother (W. W. Norton), won the 2005 John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in many publications, and her first book, Self Storage and Other Stories, received the Wisconsin Library Association’s 1998 Banta Award, and a novella was shortlisted for the O. Henry Prize. A former commentator on Iowa Public Radio and contributing editor for The Iowa Review, she has taught in M.F.A. programs at Pacific University in Oregon and at the University of Nebraska. She divides her time between Iowa City, where she and her husband John live in a 150-year-old stagecoach inn they recently restored, and Omaha, where she teaches at Creighton University. She grew up in Milwaukee, and quite a bit of The Turk and My Mother is set in Bay View, a Milwaukee neighborhood.
Best (2000 and 2006), and her first novel, The Turk and My Mother (W. W. Norton), won the 2005 John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in many publications, and her first book, Self Storage and Other Stories, received the Wisconsin Library Association’s 1998 Banta Award, and a novella was shortlisted for the O. Henry Prize. A former commentator on Iowa Public Radio and contributing editor for The Iowa Review, she has taught in M.F.A. programs at Pacific University in Oregon and at the University of Nebraska. She divides her time between Iowa City, where she and her husband John live in a 150-year-old stagecoach inn they recently restored, and Omaha, where she teaches at Creighton University. She grew up in Milwaukee, and quite a bit of The Turk and My Mother is set in Bay View, a Milwaukee neighborhood. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Geraldine Monk & Alan Halsey
Geraldine Monk is an English poet from the county of Lancashire. Her poetry was first published in the 1970's and has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies in Britain and the U.S.A. Her main collections of poetry include Interregnum, Creation Books, Noctivagations and Escafeld Hangings both published by West House Books. The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk edited by Scott Thurston appeared in 2007. Her latest collection is Ghost & Other Sonnets, Salt Publishing, 2008.
Alan Halsey was born in London in 1949. His books include Marginalien (Five Seasons 2005), Not Everything Remotely: Selected Poems 1978-2005 (Salt Publishing 2006), Lives of the Poets (Five Seasons 2009) and Term as in Aftermath (Ahadada 2009). His reading of The Text of Shelley's Death has recently been issued on CD by Optic Nerve and his collaboration with Steve McCaffery Paradigm of the Tinctures is now available as an Argotist ebook. He ran The Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye 1979-1995 and is the editor of West House Books.
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