Bios
Keith Abbott was born in Tacoma, Washington, grew up in the Northwest, lived in California for 28 years and now resides with his wife Lani in Longmont, Colorado. Currently he is on the faculty of the Writing and Poetics Department & Visual Arts Department at Naropa University, where he teaches MFA workshops and Asian calligraphy. Stew Albert is an almost-nice Jewish boy who grew up in Brooklyn between World War II and the Cold War. Many of us remember hiding under desks during practice nuclear attacks, but Stew remembers the brass pail in his vestibule filled with white sand in case the Japanese bombed his house and there was a fire. Yes, Stew grew up very bored in Brooklyn-and got out in a hurry. His was the unspectacular childhood of a not-especially-promising kid. He wasn't good at punch ball, spelling, math, geography, or kick-the-can; although he did have some surprising skill swinging a stick at a 'spaldeen.' He wasn't particularly popular nor was he disliked - he was invisibly normal. He did, however, have one very distinguishing characteristic: he was, and still is, a very blond Jew. Stew frequently daydreamed about outlaws and tough guys, as did his father, who worked as a city clerk for fifty years. By all rights, Stew should have followed in his old man's footsteps. But instead, we find a young man stoned and hanging-out, in bed with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, shvitzing in the Luxor Turkish Baths with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, drunk in Santiago, Chile with Phil Ochs and blasted with Allen Ginsberg on a manic drive through San Francisco's hills. An alert CIA agent would have easily recognized our former loser on an Algerian beach acid-tripping with Timothy Leary. Can this childhood mediocrity-outstanding only for his hair color-be the same guy showing off his Chicago riot head wounds to William S. Burroughs? Can it be him amidst the chaotic siege on the Pentagon in 1967, giving a speech to the 82nd Airborne about the Lone Ranger? How did this putz kid reinvent himself? Instead of taking a civil service test, he started taking his daydreams seriously. But why? It must have been the sixties-that brief period of time when everything seemed possible and the future was up for grabs . . . You can learn more about Stew at Stew Albert's Yippie Reading Room.
Carson Arnold is a young music writer living in the woods of Vermont. His weekly columns began at16 years old as a home-schooler when he founded his first music magazine Track. Since then, he has freelanced for assorted magazines and liner notes, and has gathered a rousing audience with H(ear), a music journal, which circulates through a long email list and can be read online: http://www.longhousepoetry.com/hear.html. His writing concentrates on all sides of music, interviews, and journalism. Send him your own music for review, he accepts promos for life! Someday he hopes to compile an anthology of the unknown troubadour songwriters of today. To subscribe to H(ear) for free, please send an email to: poetry@sover.net. He'd like to hear from you.. Petra Backonja lives in Madison, Wisconsin. She has work in Aught, Word For/Word, Generator and forthcoming in Phoebe. Brent Bechtel is a writer, editor, critic, and musician. His work has been published at the muse apprentice guild in the form of a serialized column (Quantum Connectivity), as well as poetry. He has also published poems at Fine Print Mag. Jennifer Birkett lives in San Francisco on top of Twin Peaks and has worked as a massage therapist for 20 years. She edits the Hartford Street Zen Center newsletter, gardens and dances for fun in hip hop clubs. Scott Brennan lives in Miami, Florida. A visual artist as well as a poet, he attended Truman State University and the University of Florida. Recent work has appeared in Sewanee Review, Chicago Review, and The Christian Science Monitor. He has poetry forthcoming in South Carolina Review and the Miami Sun Post. Arthur Davis Broughton says: My still life images are symbolic and personal in nature In my darker works I like to investigate the relationship of modern humankind in the light of ancient religions. This often creates conflict. One such image is the problem of Hell. Simply stated the theory goes, How can heaven be the perfect place it is said to be if those in Heaven are aware that there are people no more worthy of damnation than themselves (it is only by the grace of god that any are in heaven as we are all sinners) being eternally tortured in Hell. Even the most heinous of crimes surely do not deserve eternal Damnation. Hopefully these images will be interesting even without the explanations that caused me to create them. You can see more at www.wcnet.org/~katrac. I would enjoy hearing from you if you are intrigued or offended by these images please email me at katrac@wcnet.org. Thanks for looking. Terri Carrion was conceived in Venezuela, born in New York, raised in Los Angeles and currently lives in Hollywood, Florida. Terri is also director of the program for Creative Writing in Dublin, Ireland, presented by Florida International University’s Creative Writing Program, July 12th — Aug 12th 2004 at Trinity College in Dublin With poets Campbell McGrath, Denise Duhamel & Nick Carbo. Visit the website for detailed information and an application.
Ira Cohen can be studied extensively at his Big Bridge tribute page. Del Ray Cross lives in San Francisco where he looks up to the top of Grace Cathedral from his closet (office) window. He’s got stuff in a couple chapbooks from Pressed Wafer (including Cinema Yosemite) and in a couple postcard books from Poetry Espresso ( with Stephanie Young and Cassie Lewis). Nancy Victoria Davis Alison McParlin Davis-Murphy was born in New York City and grew up in Greenwich Village. She graduated from Barnard College of Columbia University in New York City, Musician's Institute in Los Angeles, and in 2001 she received her Master's degree in Psychology from Phillips Graduate Institute in Los Angeles. An avid photographer, guitarist, and pianist, she currently lives in California with her husband and six cats, and is working on her semiautobiography titled The Naked Ballerina: Diary of a Professional Tease. Denise Duhamel is the author of 13 books and chapbooks, the most recent of which is Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001.) An assistant professor at Florida International University in Miami, she co-edited, with Nick Carbo, Sweet Jesus: Poems about the Ultimate Icon (The Anthology Press, 2002.) Amanda Eicher, a poet and artist, has lived and worked in San Francisco for the past four years, with intermittent stints in New York and Philadelphia. She primarily makes works based on lines, time and geometry, which often take the form of sculptures and drawings. She loves to be contacted at amandaissix@earthlink.net. Stephen Ellis has lived over the last dozen years sequentially, on the Connecticut River in northern Vermont, on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, in the Northern Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula, and on the southeastern coast of Maine. In the early 1990s he co-edited, with Stephen Dignazio, the little magazine :that:. From 1994 through the present he has directed publications at Oasis Press, and is the founder of a related organization, the Mercy Seat Collective, a vibration orchestra of elective affinities whose members are aware of everything but their membership. Publication history: poems and critical writings in & the websites ReadMe and alterra. Pamphlets White Gravity (PNY) and Interface (Jensen/Daniels), along with a larger collection, The Long and Short of It (Spuyten Duyvil), came out in 1999. He currently lives in an Ohio trace just west of Marietta, in North America's only tropical rainforest clime, a dozen doors down from a Hopewell burial mound. Jane Falk was a member of Stephanie Mines' Noe Valley Poets Workshop. Ira Cohen published her Ckrowww poems in his Starstreams Poetry Series in Kathmandu, Nepal. She recently completed a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies at Ohio State University with interests in Zen and American poetry of the 1950's. She lives in Akron, Ohio, and teaches English composition at the University of Akron. Vincent Ferrini was born in 1913 - a Cancer with the Moon in Pisces - to Italian immigrants in Saugus, Massachusetts. At the age of two, the family moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, where his father worked at one of the High Towered factories. A sister, Yolanda, died in her high chair when the stove exploded. Ferrini graduated from the Lynn Public School system in 1932, and he continued to educate himself at the Lynn Public Library while unemployed. Ferrini worked on the WPA Teachers’ Project from 1935–1940 during the Great Depression. In that period, he helped raise two daughters and one son, Sheila, Deirdre, and Owen. The youngest, Deirdre, died at sixteen. In 1941, he was working at the General Electric plant in Lynn as a bench hand, assembling airplane parts and other piecemeal projects, until his involvement with the Communist Party made it impossible for him to continue working there. He moved his family north to Gloucester and has remained there since.
Ferrini’s first book of poems, No Smoke, was published in 1941. It details the difficult situations encountered by those in Lynn during the Depression. He could only get it published by substituting fictional names for the actual. Ferrini supported himself after leaving General Electric by crafting picture frames with his hands in his own shop. He has published more than thirty books of poetry and numerous plays. His autobiography, Hermit of the Clouds, written in 1977, has been translated into Japanese. Between 1979 and 1991, Know Fish was published by the University of Connecticut Library, in four volumes.
Ferrini has been called everything from the last proletarian poet to a mystic wiseguy, but he officially bears the title Poet Laureate of Gloucester. The American Poetry Recovery Series, a branch of the University of Illinois Press, will publish selected poems that span Ferrini’s long career as The Whole Song in 2004.
Vernon Frazer has written eight books of poetry and three books of fiction. His work has appeared in Big Bridge, First Intensity, Jack Magazine, Lost and Found Times, Moria, Miami SunPost, Muse Apprentice Guild, Sidereality, Xstream and many other literary magazines. He is married and lives most of the year in South Florida. Gloria Frym's most recent book of poems, Homeless at Home (Creative Arts Book Company), won an American Book Award in 2002. She is the author of two critically acclaimed collections of short stories--Distance No Object (City Lights Books), and How I Learned (Coffee House Press)--as well as several volumes of poetry. She teaches at California College of the Arts (formerly CCAC). She will serve as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California, in Spring 2004. Tova Gabrielle says: Non-fiction, Poetry, and Memoir have been published in The Phoenix; Twins Magazine ; Moxie ; Newtopia; Divorce Magazine; Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society's 120 Stories; 2 River View Presently pursuing ceramics, it seems I'm best employed as a shaman, but I can't find a job opening. I am certain that I was not born to increase the gross national product.
I retired early from being a Psychotherapist/ Substance Abuse Counselor. Survived being a twin in a family of two sets of twin girls. Survived myself so far, but what else could I do, as everywhere I go, there I am.
Gwynne Garfinkle lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in such publications as How2, Exquisite Corpse, Clean Sheets, Muse Apprentice Guild, can we have our ball back?, Shampoo, and Gynomite: Fearless, Feminist Porn. Tony Guzman is the Associate Editor of the Miami SunPost and its Critic at Large. A graduate of Queens College, New York, and the University of Chicago, he’s also the editor of the SunPost’s monthly arts journal, Mad Love. Kimberly Harrison is a poet and true spirit of the world. Paul Hardacre was born in Brisbane, Australia, in 1974. He is the Managing Editor of papertiger media (www.papertigermedia.com), which, In 2002, was awarded ‘the Johnno Award’ by the Queensland Writers Centre, for ‘outstanding contribution to writers and writing in Queensland’. Paul is also the Contributing Queensland Editor for the South Australian poetry journal, Sidewalk, and was recently appointed as an editorial correspondent for Cordite (www.cordite.org.au). He has published poetry in Meanjin, Blue Dog: Australian Poetry, Fulcrum (USA), filling Station (Canada), vallum (Canada), and the recent Short Fuse: The Global Anthology of New Fusion Poetry (Rattapallax, New York, 2002) and (Some from) DIAGRAM: An Anthology of Text, Art, and Schematic (Del Sol Press, Washington D.C., 2003). His first collection of poetry, The Year Nothing, was recently published by HeadworX (Wellington, NZ). His unpublished manuscript, Love in the place of rats, was recently shortlisted for the 2003 Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. Jonathan Hayes: After several wet salmon seasons in Alaska while working in a cannery, and hoboing along the Columbia River of Washington, until joining fruit tramps and migrant workers in the red delicious apple orchard, and then driving a John Deere tractor before sunrise on slippery-dewed grass of agrarian reform, the factotum ceased. Now a barnacle-covered hermit crab scurrying from class to sea lettuce in the tide pool of San Francisco State University, by the not-always peaceful Pacific littoral. Janie Heath grew up in a small town in Texas. She always, as a child, wanted to grow up to be a writer but she became influenced by all sorts of trendy theories and decided to be a filmmaker instead. She worked as a newspaper reporter in her home town and then for a film production company in Houston. She went to NYU film school where she learned that she did not like telling other people what to do. She prefers writing because she can do it all by herself and it costs barely anything compared to films. Also she loves language even more than light. She was, for a time, a music industry publicist in London but she didn't like letting other people get to be the artist all the time. Other reviews by Tom Hibbard can be read on-line at 'Jacket' issue 21 and 'Milk' issue 4. His most recent book of poetry is 'gessom', a chapter of which appears on-line at 'Jack' magazine. Halvard Johnson has a taxman who doesn't snicker when he identifies himself as a writer/teacher, even though the amount of money he's made from writing is roughly equivalent to the amount of money he's found on sidewalks and in parking lots. Back in the late 60s, he was walking along the Rio Grande with someone who suggested he send a manuscript to someone. And over the next ten years or so four slim volumes were published. These you can find online at http://capa.conncoll.edu . He's written a a new book in collaboration with Jim Cervantes, due out from Red Hen Press and known as Changing the Subject. If all goes well, there'll be a slew of others. Britta Kallevang says: whatever comes; that is the motion she set for the day. it is blue and
very
hot. insects have taken over the lawn. it seems that should be enoughJonathan Kane was born in Miami Beach, Florida in 1957. He studied art at the University of Florida and San Francisco Art Institute. The artist currently resides in Naples, FL, with his dog Otis. He can be contacted at jonathankane@comcast.net. Larry Kearney was born in Brooklyn in 1943. His mother was from Glasgow and his father from Galway. He attended Brooklyn Technical High School and Harpur College, and began publishing in San Francisco in 1964—Fifteen Poems (White Rabbit Press). He lived with his wife and son in Bolinas from ’67 to ’81, and the books from that period include Dead Poem, Earthquake, Five and Kidnapped. Since ’81 he has lived in Larkspur and books include, Oz and Damaged Architecture, Streaming, The Only Available Substance/Please Keep My Word (w. Sarah Menefee), The Glue Factory, Culture, The Wake of the Ferry, Universe and fifty-four others still in the computer.
His published prose works include Whiskey’s Children, A Bar on Every Corner, and Finding God When You Don’t Believe—a trilogy on alcoholism.
Cralan Kelder lives in Amsterdam, where he works with wordsinhere, as an editor for Versal magazine. Wordsinhere hosts a monthly music & poetry evening called The Open Stanza. Please send him an email at cralan@wordsinhere.com if you are passing through that little country, and would like your 20 minutes of fame (we have added 5 minutes to the traditional 15, so everybody’s that much richer). Syrie Kovitz started photographing when she was 12 years old, self-portraits by the age of 13. Inspired by such artists as Julia Margaret Cameron and Francesca Woodman, as well as the pre-Rephaelite romantic feeling, she strived to create images that the world could not provide for her. She now resides in the Smoky Mountains of the Appalachians and continues to create dream images using all manual cameras and processes/ She is a fourth generation photographer who finds a bliss that is unattainable anywhere else but in her darkroom. Paul Krassner is the author of Murder At the Conpiracy Convention and Other American Absurdities mark s. kuhar is a poet and editor of Deep Cleveland Oracle. Joel Lipman's "The Singer" was initially published in Mercury Vapor Lamp. Andrew Lundwall is a poet and editor of Poetic Inhalation. Erin McCluskey graduated from Beloit College with a BA in art and a minor in Asian Studies, and from the California College of the Arts (formally the California College of Arts and Crafts) with an MFA in writing. Her work has been published in Five Fingers Review, Puerto del Sol, and Fiction Attic. She lives in Brooklyn, NY where she works for a historic preservation advocacy group and writes as often as she can. She is at work on a collection of interrelated short stories. Lewis MacAdams is the author of a dozen books and tapes of poetry, and his poems have appeared in many anthologies over the last twenty-five years. A new collection of his work, The River, Books 1-2, came out at the end of ’98 from Blue Press. In February, 2001, Simon & Schuster/Free Press published his Birth of The Cool, a cultural history of the idea of cool. As a journalist, in the early 80’s, he was the American correspondent for the popular French magazine Actuel. From 1980 to 1982, he was the editor of WET, "the Magazine of Gourmet Bathing and Beyond," a Los-Angeles-based, internationally-circulated bi-monthly of the avant-garde. Since the mid-80’s he has been a contributing editor of the L.A. Weekly. He writes regularly on culture and ecology for Rolling Stone, the L.A. Weekly. Men’s Journal. L.A. Times, and Los Angeles Magazine.
In 1985, he founded Friends of The Los Angeles River, a "40 year art work" to bring the Los Angeles River back to life. In the years since, FoLAR has become the River’s most important and influential advocate. Among FolAR’s many projects are an annual river clean-up, the "Gran Limpieza," which brings 2500 people down to the river to clean up every Spring; an on-going series of onferences and planning workshops dealing with every aspect of the river. Two of its current major goals are to create a Los Angeles River Conservancy to oversee restoration of the river, and a River Watch program to improve the River’s water quality and target polluters. In 1991, he received the San Fernando Valley Audubon Society’s annual Conservation Award.
George Manka lives and works in Amsterdam. After completing a BA in English Literature at Sydney University he studied in France at the Université Paul Valéry (Montpellier) graduating with a Diplôme d'Études Approfondies in Commonwealth Literature. Besides playing from time to time in a blues band, George studies and translates modern French and German poetry, notably Henri Michaux, René Char, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Ingeborg Bachmann. Estee Mazor is an MFA student at Florida International University. Her work has appeared in Vox and in the online magazine, Gulfstreaming. Born in Chicago in the Year of the Dog 1946, Sarah Menefee left Reno, Nevada in 1978 for San Francisco, where she has lived and worked since. Her published books include I'm Not Thousandfurs and The Blood About the Heart (both from Curbstone Press), and several chapbooks, the latest being Like the Diamond (Calliope) and You Have No Name (Grand Quiskadee). She has been a homeless and antihunger activist, and is a founding member of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America. You can see her poetry at their web site at www.lrna.org. David Meltzer is the author of (some say) too many books of poetry. The most recent collection is No Eyes: Lester Young (Black Sparrow Press, 2002). Forthcoming: Beat Thing (La Alameda Press). In the interim also put together San Francisco Beats: Talking with the Poets (City Lights Books) and co-edit Shuffle Boil, a magazine on music, with Steve Dickison. During the 60s wrote erotica, actually devoted 1969 to writing 10 books which I classify as agit-smut. Orf was reprinted by Masquerade Books, 1993; The Agency Trilogy was reprinted by Richard Kasak Books, 1994; Under, a new fiction was published by Rhinoceros Books, 1995. Have edited many theme-driven anthologies; the most current is Reading Jazz (Mercury House, 1995) and am completing a companion volume, Writing Jazz, to be published later this year by Mercury House. Teach in the graduate Poetics and undergraduate Humanities programs at New College of California. Keep waiting for the guys from Publishers Clearing House to keep their promise to knock on my door (don't have a bell) and make me a millionaire. Elizabeth Miller is a Miami native. She was born on Homestead Air force Base in 1971. She is currently earning her MFA in creative writing from Florida International University where she works on Gulf Stream magazine and does Yoga to try to keep sane. A lifelong nonacademic, Rodney Nelson has worked as licensed psychiatric technician, copy editor, and librarian. His poems and narratives have seen print often enough. He made a cameo appearance in the fifty-fourth edition of Who's Who in America. Now Nelson seems to be finding new life in the ezines. Pat Nolan’s most recent book is The Nolan Anthology of Poetry, Volume II; The Modern Era, a sampling of half a dozen unpublished manuscripts currently overburdening his file cabinet, from Fell Swoop Press, New Orleans. He has also published a very limited, Japanese side-sewn chapbook of a tanka sequence entitled Thin Wings from Empty Head Press, Monte Rio. He hasn’t changed his address in the last thirty years. Stephen Oliver, born 1950, grew in Brooklyn-west, Wellington, New Zealand. Author of twelve titles of poetry, including: Night of Warehouses: Poems 1978-2000, HeadworX Publishers, 2001. One year Magazine Journalism course, Wellington Polytechnic. Radio NZ Broadcasting School. Casual Radio Actor. Lived in Paris, Vienna, London, San Francisco, Greece and Israel. Signed on with the radio ship, "The Voice of Peace" broadcasting in the Mediterranean out of Jaffa. Free lanced as production voice, newsreader, announcer, voice actor, journalist, copy and features writer. Poems widely represented in New Zealand, Australia, Ireland, USA, UK, South Africa, Canada, etc. Recently published, DEADLY POLLEN, a poetry chapbook, Word Riot Press, (USA), 2003, and, BALLADS, SATIRE & SALT - A Book of Diversions [with illustrations by Matt Ottley] Greywacke Press, 2003. Recently completed, a recording of poems titled: KING HIT - Selected Readings written and read by Stephen Oliver to original music composed by Matt Ottley, for international release. Stephen is a transtasman poet and writer who lives in Sydney. Kirby Olson teaches philosophy and literature at State University of New York at Delhi. He is the author of Comedy after Postmodernism: Rereading Comedy from Edward Lear to Charles Willeford (Texas Tech U. Press, 2001) and Gregory Corso: Doubting Thomist (Southern Illinois University Press 2002). He is married to the Finnish poet Riikka Olson. Jonathan Penton forged Unlikely Stories in the fires of Mount Doom, and poured into it all his hatred, cruelty, and will to dominate. As physical tokens of spiritual evil go, it's actually pretty useless, but has been known to cause eyestrain. Michael Perkins Michael Perkins has been at the forefront of serious American erotic writing for three decades. His early erotic novels issued by the legendary avant-garde California publisher Essex House won praise from Samuel R. Delany, Thomas M. Disch, Philip Jose Farmer, Norman Spinrad, Harlan Ellison, Marilyn Hacker and many others. His classic 1968 novel Evil Companions was reprinted in 1992 by Rhinoceros with an introduction by Samuel R. Delany. His novel, Dark Matter (Titan) appeared in the U.K. in 1996. He has published a dozen novels, including the million-copy bestselling novelization of Deep Throat. Michael Perkins is recognized as the world's leading expert on modern erotic literature. His weekly book reviews in Screw have been influential in establishing erotic writing as a valid literary genre. Many were collected in The Good Parts (Richard Kasak Books, 1994). His groundbreaking critical survey, The Secret Record: Modern Erotic Literature, first published by William Morrow in 1976, is available in paperback from Rhinoceros. He is the editor of several anthologies of erotic writing, including Coming Up: The World's Best Erotic Writing (1996). His work appears in The Mammoth Book of Erotica and The Mammoth Book of International Erotica, as well as in The Nation, Paper; American Book Review, Gauntlet, Mother Jones, High Times, The Notre Dame Review, Spectator, and Masquerade Erotic Journal.
Mark Phillips works at the intersection of narrative and Internet technology. Since 1999 he's been "Cyberbard" for SmartMonsters, a San Francisco company exploring multiuser role-playing games as literature. His work "TriadCity" is home to thousands of participants from around the world. Over the last year, excerpts from Mark's experimental blog (http://www.markphillips.com/blog/index.html) have appeared regularly in Comrades, the SoMa Literary Review, Physik Garden, Inkburns, and other online literary zines. For the month of November, 2002, The Blue Moon Review featured Mark as their first-ever "Guest Blogger". Wanda Phipps is a poet, journalist, dramaturg and translator. She is the author of the CD-Rom, Zither Mood (Faux Press), and the books Lunch Poems (Boog Literature), Your Last Illusion or Break Up Sonnets (Situations) and After the Mishap (Faux Press). She’s also the co-author of Shanar: The Dedication of a Buryat Shaman (Parabola). Her poems have appeared in over sixty journals including Agni, Exquisite Corpse, The World, Hanging Loose, Long Shot, and the webzines How2, readme, milkmag, Jack, $lavery: Cyberzine of the Arts, Isibongo, The East Village, Shampoo and Brooklyn Review Online. India Radfar's second book of poems, The Desire to Meet With the Beautiful, has just come out on Tender Buttons Press. I often think of Anna Akhmatova. I read her because I feel close to her as a writer. Octavio Paz I read because he makes me jealous, as does Pablo Neruda. Coming out of that tradition, Cecilia Vicuna is probably the poet I admire most who is writing today. (You can e-mail me at indiaradfar@usa.net) Francis Raven is editorial assistant at the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. He has recently had two chapbooks published through Broken Boulder Press entitled Notestalk and Notationing, and his work may also be viewed online in the electronic chapbook 'Do Not Add Up.' Other works have appeared or are slated for publication in 'Pindeldyboz', 'Monkey Bicycle', 'Mudlark', 'Fulcrum Annual', 'Rain Taxi', 'Pavement Saw', 'Poethia', 'Beehive', 'Gestalten', 'Untitled', 'The In Posse Review', 'The East Village', 'The New Colonist', and 'Taint'. Randy Roark is the author of Dissolve: Screenplays to the Films of Stan Brakhage (featured on the cover of Small Press Distrubition’s catalog for Spring-Summer 2003), Jean Cocteau: The First Half (a DVD which opened Hofstra University’s Jean Cocteau Film Festival in October 2003), and Mona Lisa's Veil: New and Selected Poems, 1979-2001. For more information, contact www.randyroark.com. Bob Rosenthal, who studied poetry under Paul Carroll, Ted Berrigan, Joel Oppenhiemer, Bernadette Mayer, and Alice Notley, is a poet and a writer who has co-written and produced five plays. His 1970's Cleaning Up New York was regarded as a cult classic. His latest collection of poetry is Viburnum (White Fields Press, Tennessee). He has taught workshops at The Poetry Project, Snug Harbor, and the Naropa Institute. He worked as Allen Ginsberg's secretary for 20 years until Allen’s death and currently is a Trustee of the Allen Ginsberg Trust. Bob is also an adjunct Professor of English at New York Technical College. He is currently writing his account on the business of Allen Ginsberg and has written three other books of poetry, Morning Poems, (Yellow Press, Chicago, 1972), Rude Awakenings, (Yellow Press, Chicago. 1976) and Eleven Psalms (1999). He is married and has two sons.] Jerome Rothenberg's A Book of Witness, his twelfth book of poems from New Directions, was published in spring of 2003. His latest assemblages are Poems for the Millennium, co-edited with Pierre Joris, and A Book of the Book, co-edited with Steven Clay. Other scheduled works include the collected poems of Pablo Picasso, also with Joris, and his own Writing Through: Selected Translations and Variations from Wesleyan. He and Joris are co-editors of the new series, Poets for the Millennium, from the University of California Press, the first two volumes of which (María Sabina and André Breton) have just been published. The poems in this issue of Big Bridge will appear in 25 Caprichos (Kadle Books, Tenerife, Spain) and A Book of Concealments (Chax Press, Tucson). Michael Rothenberg Michael Ruby’s first book of poems, At an Intersection, was published by Alef Books in New York at the end of last year. His long poem “Wave Talk” appeared this past winter in syllogism in Berkeley, and another long poem, “Sic Fatur Lacrimans,” appeared in e-zine Poethia this summer. Other poems are coming out this year in Lost & Found Times in Columbus and in e-zines Mudlark, xStream, Aught, La Petite Zine, Sidereality and Shampoo. He recently completed a short trilogy in prose and poetry on “varieties of unconscious experience”—Dreams of the 1990s, Fleeting Memories and Inner Voices Heard Before Sleep, and he’s working on a new book of poetry, American Songbook, based on phrases from songs throughout the 20th century. He lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and works as a journalist.
Harris Schiff is a post-globalist utopian poet currently living in The East Village after raising two sons, Logan 21 and Jesse 19 in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Before he moved out of the East Village 21 years ago, he was associated with The St. Mark's Poetry Project in the 60's, 70's and 80's. During that time he served in various capacities, running the weekly open readings, board member, co-coordinator, workshop instructor and editor of The World. Harris' first publication was in the legendary mag Open Space in San Francisco 1963. His books include Secret Clouds, I should run for cover but I’m right here, In the Heart of the Empire and Yo-Yo’s with Money (with Ted Berrigan). Harris’ work is widely anthologized. He has received grants from CCLM, the NEA and NYFFA, read his poems at venues across the United States and in Europe, and, in 1996 established the pioneer e-zine website $lavery – Cyberzine of the Arts which can be accessed at http://www.cyberpoems.com. Email him at harris@cyberpoems.com. Ed Sanders achieved fame in the countercultural world of the 1960s as poet, magazine founder, and leading force of The Fugs, a satirical folk-rock band. Later, he achieved national recognition for his 1971 book, The Family, a study of mass murderer Charles Manson and his followers that critic Robert Christgau called "excellent" and "terrifying." His poetry has been likened in its energy and ambition to William Blake, Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, blending slang, neologisms, classical Greek, and Egyptian hieroglyphs. He has also written novels, short stories and song lyrics. His most recent work is 1968: A History in Verse (1997), a book-length poem tracing the events of that year. Lynda Schor’s newest collection of short fiction, The Body Parts Shop, will be published by the Fiction Collective Two (FC2) in 2005. Another new collection, Adventures in Capitalism, will soon be published by Unicorn Press. Earlier published books of short fiction are Appetites (recently republished) and True Love & Real Romance. Her stories and articles have appeared in Redbook, Ms., Mademoiselle, Playboy, GQ, Fiction,The Village Voice, Cream City Review, Literal Latte, Confrontation, and other periodicals. Her story“Still the Top Banana” (published in Witness) was nominated for an O’Henry Award, and her story “Mapplethorpe Briefs” (published in Quarter after Eight) won First Prizefor Prose. She has won a Baltimore CityArts grant for fiction, and two Maryland State Arts Council grants for fiction. She is fictioneditor for the online literary magazine Salt River Review. For nearly twenty years, Schor has taught fiction writing at the Eugene Lang College of the New School University in New York City. Michael Schumacher is a respected journalist whose other books include Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg and Crossroads: The Life and Music of Eric Clapton. He lives with his family in Wisconsin. Sandra Simonds grew up in Los Angeles, CA and received her MFA at the University of Montana in 2003. She now hangs out in Oakland, CA and does various things here and there. Some of the places her poems have appeared are Barrow Street, Phoebe, and the Colorado Review. Her poems are forthcoming in the Seneca Review. She is currently working on a poetry manuscript called "8 motionless clouds." Peter Sheridan is an able-bodied young author who is many things to many men, and feck all to most women. He has been an auditor, and free-lance gardener, a fruit market oddity, a barman, a numbers runner, a drug dealer, an intrepid explorer and currently a librarian. His one wish is to be unemployed and/or for Sarah Ingersoll to love him unselfishly. He lives and writes and makes music in Dublin, Ireland and wants to move to New York to live like a king." Alan Sondheim Alan Sondheim's books include the anthology Being on Line: Net Subjectivity (Lusitania, 1996), Disorders of the Real (Station Hill, 1988), and .echo (alt-X digital arts, 2001). His videos and films have been shown internationally. Sondheim co-moderates several email lists, including Cybermind, Cyberculture, and Wryting. For the past decade, he has been working on an "Internet Text," a continuous meditation on philosophy, psychology, language, body, and virtuality. Sondheim lives in Brooklyn; he lectures and publishes widely on contemporary art and Internet issues. He is currently associate editor of the online magazine Beehive, and one of the editors of Nettime's Unstable Digest. Sondheim teaches in the trAce online writing program; last year he taught new media at Florida International University in Miami. He currently works in video, cdrom, performance, sound, and text, often in collaboration with Azure Carter, Foofwa d'Imobilite, and others. Craig Stormont is from Queens, NY, and he’s been writing poems since the late 1970's. He earned his M.A. at St. John’s University in 1999 by writing a thesis on Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems. His interview with Vincent Ferrini sprang from field research conducted for a dissertation he’s writing on Olson at Stony Brook University. He appreciates writing geared toward uncovering and exposing truths that are not easily discerned in the present context. His play The Drumming (2001) explores how “the mass of men [and women] lead lives of quiet desperation” in contemporary New York. He teaches poetry and writing of all sorts at Stony Brook University and Suffolk County Community College on Long Island. Chris Stroffolino has published several books of poetry, and plays in the rockband Continuous Peasant, whose album Exile in Babyville was released in 2003 on Goodforks. He's in the middle of the picture, between Stephen Malkmus and Brett Ralph. You can reach him at cstroffo@earthlink.net. Lakey Teasdale, born U S A in 1948 now lives on the island of South Ronaldsay, Orkney in the village of St Margaret's Hope, at 58 ° 53 min north. 3 ° 4 min west. Diane Wald’s latest book, The Yellow Hotel, was published by Verse Press in the fall of 2002. She works for animal welfare at the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Ian Randall Wilson is the managing editor of the poetry journal 88. Recent fiction has appeared in the North American Review and The Gettysburg Review. His first collection, Hunger and Other Stories, was published by Hollyridge Press (www.hollyridgepress.com). He is an executive at MGM Studios, and on the fiction faculty at the UCLA Extension. Joel Weishaus was born in Brooklyn, NY. In 1967-1968, Weishaus was the Literary Editor of the Daily Californian, the University of California’s student newspaper. He also helped build an experimental theater in San Francisco Haight-Ashbury District. During those years, too, he traveled to Japan to visit Zen monasteries. In 1971, he edited On the Mesa: An Anthology of Bolinas Writing, published by City Light Books, and Oxherding: A Reworking of the Zen Text, with Block Prints by Arthur Okamura. Weishaus did a one-year hermitage in a mountain cabin in Lake County, CA., lived for a year in Cambridge, MA., where he was a resident of the Cambridge Zen Center, and studied Aikido in San Francisco with Robert Nadeau. He edited Thomas Merton’s Woods, Shore, Desert (Museum of New Mexico Press, 1983), was an Adjunct Curator at the University of New Mexico’s Fine Arts Museum, and a Writer-in-Residence at UNM’s Center for Southwest Research. Weishaus is now Visiting Faculty at Portland State University’s Department of English. His newest book, The Healing Spirit of Haiku, with David H. Rosen, illustrated by Arthur Okamura, will be published by North Atlantic Books, November 2004.