Biographies
  Sam Abrams is currently Professor of Language and Literature in the College of Liberal Arts of the Rochester Institute of Technology, has smoked doobie{*} for 45 years. At various times: Fulbright Professor of American Literature in the University of Athens; Senior Member of the American School of Classical Studies, Athens; Workshop Leader, St. Mark's Poetry Project; Member, Stone Academy, Organic Farming Commune, Enfield, New Hampshire; Coordinator, Poets' Caravan of Angry Arts Against the War in Vietnam; jailed (with Dr. Benjamin Spock, Grace Paley et al.) for civil disobedience. His publications include: The Post American Cultural Congress, Bobbs-Merrill, 1974; Barbara, Olympia Press, 1968; The Neglected Walt Whitman, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993; The Old Pothead Poems (chaplet), Backwoods Broadsides 1999.
  Stephen Bett has had two books of poetry published--Cruise Control (Ekstasis Editions, 1996) and Lucy Kent and other poems (Longspoon Press, 1983)--and his work has also appeared in over 60 journals in Canada, the US, England, Australia, and Finland, as well as in two anthologies, and on radio. He teaches English at Langara College in Vancouver, B.C.
  Hal Bohner
  Ira Cohen
  Todd Colby is a poet, lyricist, vocalist and actor. He has published three books of poetry Ripsnort (1994), Cush (1995), and Riot in the Charm Factory: New and Selected Writings (2000) all published by Soft Skull Press (Softskull.com.). His poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies, most recently: Verses that Hurt (St. Martin's Press, 1997). Todd has performed his poetry on PBS, MTV and Canada's Much Music Network. He has produced many collaborative books and paintings with the artist David Lantow. A limited edition book of lithographs and poems titled Blown (Evil Clown Books), which they collaborated on, can be seen in the Brooklyn Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art special collections libraries. Their serialized graphic novel The Action Adventure Series (Evil Clown Books) is available by request. Todd has taught poetry workshops and co-coordinated the Wednesday Night Reading Series with Jo Ann Wasserman at The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in New York City. He was the lyricist and vocalist for the little known but legendary New York band Drunken Boat. He is the cofounder with Jordan Trachtenberg of the Poemfone (212-631-4234). He is a founding member (with Marianne Vitale and Michael Portnoy) of the performance group The Yogurt Boys. Currently he is the poetry editor for Food and Water Journal.
  Nancy Victoria Davis
  Maggie Dubris is the author of the long poem, WillieWorld (Cuz Editions, 1998), which will be coming out as a short film directed by Scott Saunders in the fall of 2000. She is a guitarist/songwriter for the NYC band Homer Erotic, and is currently working on a full length screenplay, The First
Strange Adventure of the Bird, with her writing partner Felicity Seidel.
  Steve Evans teaches poetry, poetics, and critical theory at the University of Maine. Recent criticism has appeared in Aerial, Poetry Project Newsletter, Crayon, Poetics Journal, Shark and in his e-mail review column Notes to Poetry, archived on the ARRAS web-site.
David Gitin wrote poetry in the early sixties encouraged by Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, and John Wieners. Equally attracted to music, he wrote jazz criticism, and participated in concerts by John Cage, David Tudor, among others. In San Francisco, later in the sixties, he cofounded Poets Theatre which specialized in multimedia presentations (and began poetry programs on KPFA in Berkeley). After moving to Monterey, he spent 19 years as a jazz disc jockey at KAZU. His books include This Once: New & Selected Poems 1965-1978 and Fire Dance (1989), both from Blue Wind Press. Recently, his work was featured on MSNBC online and in Poets & Writers Of Monterey Bay, an anthology from Quarry West.
  Amy Hollowell is an American poet and journalist who has lived in Paris for nearly two decades. Her writing has appeared in a variety of publications, including Miscellaneous Breakfast, Pharos, Shambhala Sun, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Bearing Witness and the International Herald Tribune, where she works as an editor.
  RhondaK writes from the ruins of previous lives in NYC, Philly, North Carolina, and various Florida incarnations and unfortunately does not suffer from performance anxiety in area of her life. In NYC she was known as the literary librarian. In Tampa Bay she is frighteningly notorious for using literature and poetry in well-attended and talked about events. She lives with Oskar the Luv Pug who has been admonished to believe nothing he hears about her. It is all fiction. She has published a variety of odd things under a plethora of even odder names. Currently she is the co-editrix of NakedPoetry.com.
 

Ward Kelley

Nominated for the 1999 Pushcart; completed an interview with Israeli poet Elisha Porat (1996 winner of the Prime Minister Prize for Literature) for ACM, Another Chicago Magazine; poems have appeared in Rattle, Sunstone, Spillway, Porcupine Literary Magazine, Pif, Big Bridge, 2River View, Oblique, Offcourse, Potpourri, and Skylark. Featured poet in the e-zines Seeker, England's Poetry Life & Times, and Canada's Pyrowords.

  A. R. Lamb lives in Cornwall, U.K. Writes as trancedly as possible, with practical help from various carbon compounds. New fiction presently at electronpress.com., Unlikely Stories, Gravity, In Posse Review, Rose & Thorn. Many little poems at ariga.com. Other zines (poetry) include Disquieting Muses, Swansong, Perimeter, Shadyvale. Early experimental fictions published by John Calder and in anthologies and magazines; winner of a few piffling awards. Most recent paper publication In Many Ways Frogs, a joint poetic volume (with P. N. Newman, published by Abraxas). Ongoing project, an unusual synthesis of music and poetry: first recording, Bark of a Stray Dog, now available (music and voices by Lamb, words by Newman). Sculptor by trade.
  Norman Lock's fiction appears in major literary reviews, in print and online, throughout North America, Europe, and Australia. He received The Paris Review's Aga Kahn Prize in 1979. His plays have been staged internationally. The Los Angeles Times voted The House of Correction among the ten best plays of 1988 and (for its revival) 1994. It was called the best new play of the 1996 Edinburgh Theatre Festival. A film adaptation was recently completed. The Body Shop, produced by the American Film Institute, was screened in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Toronto. Women in Hiding, The Shining Man, The Primate House, and Let's Make Money were broadcast by WDR, Germany's largest national radio station. Also published in the Czech Republic and Belgium, The City of Radiant Objects is from a book-length collection of linked stories "A History of the Imagination." Lock received a 1999 fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Lock lives in the southern tip of the New Jersey peninsula with his wife and two children.
  Kimberly Lyons is the author of Abracadabra (Granary Books, 2000), available at SPD. She'll be reading in the Boston Poetry Conference in July 2000.
  Kate Lutzner Kate Lutzner received the Robert Frost Poetry Prize while a senior at Kenyon College. Her poetry has appeared in The Antioch Review, Mudlark, The Squaw Review, Disquieting Muses, PoetryMagazine.com and Stirring, where she is guest editor for the July, 2000 edition. She has poems forthcoming at The 2RiverView and Rattle. She received her JD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is now working at the Discovery Channel. She lives in Washington, DC.

 

Drawing courtesy of
Micah Ballard

George Mattingly was thrust into the world in 1950 in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. His childhood on farms and in small towns in Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa was imprinted with toxic inks on materials of dubious archival value, faded, fading, and many of the places and persons already gone. He went to high school in New Hampshire (Phillips Exeter, where the late great Fred Tremallo's love of language and literature was shared with him). After expulsion from prep school (what can one say, this was the 60s!), he had the great good luck to NOT attend Harvard, Yale, Columbia, or Stanford, instead landing at the University of Iowa, where he studied with Ted Berrigan, Anselm Hollo and Jack Marshall (experiences which are recommended but no longer possible). While testing substances and avoiding any useful academic pedigree, he started the literary magazine Search For Tomorrow, and the literary publishing house Blue Wind Press. Briefly book designer for Dick Higgins's Vermont-based Something Else Press, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the dead of night in 1974. He currently makes a living as a graphic designer in Berkeley, where he lives with his wife of 800 years (Lucy Farber) and sons Keith (14) and Dylan (9). He is faculty advisor for the New College of California's Prosodia magazine, and a monthly columnist for MSNBC. An avid tennis player, he spends whatever time his hats and house and kids leave him listening to jazz (particularly high-crunch-factor jazz guitar), drinking Rhône wines, watching baseball, and wishing he were snorkeling on the Hana coast in lieu of staring at pixels.

Columns on MSNBC:
http://msnbc.com/news/370841.asp

http://msnbc.com/news/375596.asp.

Poetry:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/392489.asp

http://www.mbay.net/~faparker/george3.htm.

George Mattingly's books include Darling Bender (1971), Breathing Space (1975), and the forthcoming Driven.

  Michael McClure
  Murat Nemet-Nejat came to the United States from Turkey in 1959. He is a poet, essayist, translator of Turkish poetry and antique oriental carpet dealer. He lives in Hoboken, N.J. with his wife and two children. Murat Nemet-Nejat's poetry and essays have appeared in magazines, including World, The Exquisite Corpse, Talisman, and Little Magazine. His book publications include: Questions of Accent, in Thus Spake The Corpse (An Exquisite Corpse Reader, 1988-1999), Black Sparrow Press (Santa Rosa, 1999); The Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies, Sun & Moon Press (Los Angeles, 1997); I, Orhan Veli, Hanging Loose Press (New York, 1989); The Bridge, Martin Brian & OíKeeffe (London, 1977. His essay, The Peripheral Space of Photography, will be published by the Green Integer Series of Sun & Moon Press this year. He is also preparing a 20th century anthology of Turkish poetry to be published by Talisman Press in 2001.
Pat Nolan, born in Montreal, Quebec near the mid-point of the last century, resides along the Russian River in the redwood wilds of North California. Writing and reading poetry are his primary literary occupations. His poems, and translations from the French, have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Thus Spake The Corpse, Vol. I and Poems For The Millenium, Vol. I. Recent favorite reading: Modern Japanese Tanka and The Clouds Should Know Me By Now, Poems by Chinese Hermit Monks. He has recently privately published a very limited edition four-volume work of poetry, prose, journals, and interviews titled Made In The Shade.

 
Frank Parker is a printer and poet who lives in Monterey, CA. He maintains a growing anthology of poetry at Frank's Home, and enjoys hiking and backpacking the High Sierra.
  Wanda Phipps
  Janine Pommy Vega is the author of fifteen books. Mad Dogs of Trieste has just been published by Black Sparrow. Her travel book, Tracking the Serpent, is available from City Lights. This summer she will be teaching at Naropa, and performing her poetry on tour in Italy.
  Michael Rothenberg
  Lina ramona Vitkauskas has received an Honorable Mention for STORY Magazine's Carson McCullers Prize for the Short Story (1999), placed as a quarterfinalist in the New Century Writer's Short Story and Novel Excerpts Awards (1999), and first in the DES Journal Competition (1996-Fiction). Her fiction has been placed upon ShortStory.org, and will be featured as an Editor's Pick on Web Del Sol. Fiction in The Wisconsin Review is also forthcoming. Her poetry has been published in The Poet (at age 11), The Outlet, milk, Mudlark, and now Big Bridge. More poetry forthcoming in Posse Review, JACK Magazine, and the RAINN (Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network) supported anthology, Survivor Poetry. She is a Chicago native, Lithuanian-bred, and now playing in theatres near you.
  Eddie Watkins: Born and raised in a small Delaware town, I have now, after numerous stops across the country, settled in Philadelphia, PA, a confirmed urbanite continuously tugged by nature. Academically trained as an engineer, I soon abandoned that track for a more unorthodox and precarious, yet stable, path. My primary poetic obsessions and inspirations are spiritual immanence, sheer aesthetic beauty, the conjunction of opposites, vegetal and animal birth and growth, and digestion.