Fiction. The colorful characters who populate these stories live in Buffalo, but they will be readily recognizable to everyone. These are blue collar men who never leave the neighborhood and move to large houses in the suburbs. They work in the steel mills, and when those mills close, they do whatever they can to stay afloat on the sea of anger created by the circumstances of their lives. They drink, they fight, they hang out in pool halls waiting for "something to develop." They never achieve the American Dream-in most cases, they don't even buy into it-yet they are in the truest sense heroic. They are ordinary people stumbling through one small disaster after another.

Author City: PROVIDENCE, RI USA

Peter Johnson was born and reared in Buffalo, New York. He teaches creative writing and children's literature at Providence College and is editor of THE BEST OF THE PROSE POEM: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL. His prose poems and fiction have appeared in Field, DENVER QUARTERLY, The Iowa Review, Indiana Review, Quarterly West, North Dakota Quarterly, The Party Train: A Collection of North American Prose Poetry, Beloit Fiction Journal, and other magazines. His books include RANTS AND RAVES: SELECTED AND NEW PROSE POEMS (White Pine Press, 2010), EDUARDO & I (White Pine Press, 2006), I'M A MAN (White Pine Press, 2003) and MIRACLES & MORTIFICATIONS (White Pine Press, 2001), winner of the 2001 James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets.