Bios


 
 
 
 
 
Jorn Ake
earned a Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from the College of William & Mary. After ten years working as a painter, he moved to Arizona to complete a Master's degree in Creative Writing at Arizona State University. His first book of poetry, Asleep in the Lightning Fields, won the 2001 X.J. Kennedy award and was published by Texas Review Press in September 2002. His second book, The Circle Line, will be published by The Backwaters Press in 2008. A new chapbook of his work, All About the Blind Spot and Other Poems, is available from Popular Ink at popularink.com. In 2003, he won an Arizona Commission on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. This grant helped support work on his current manuscript, Boys Whistling like Canaries, begun while living in Prague, Czech Republic. He currently resides in New York City.
   
Karen Alcalay-Gut teaches American Poetry at Tel Aviv University. Her latest collection of poems, So Far, So Good (Boulevard, 2004) will soon be followed by The Layered Look.

   
Omnia Amin was born in Cairo, Egypt. She graduated from The American University in Cairo and received an MA and PhD in Modern and Contemporary British Literature from the University of London, Queen Mary and Westfield College. She was Head of the English Department at Philadelphia University in Jordan, and currently teaches at Zayed University in UAE.

   
mIEKAL aND reports: Hidden deep inside the pages of any of my books are unlimited references to the very first thoughts I may have had as a child, the spaces, the hesitations, the mis-pronounced words. I've been writing around & away from those thoughts ever since consciousness first shook me. It's all there inside Samsara Congeries http://xexoxial.org/samsara_congeries/ a life's long poem, soon to be issued under one cover, 30 years of reinventing the hyper-writer of the bloodbath typewriter. Look elsewhere for traces of achievement: mIEKAL aND Author Page at EPC http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/and.

   
Louis Armand lives and works in Prague where he directs the Intercultural Studies programme at Charles University and is the founder of the Prague International Poetry Festival. His poetry has appeared in Poetry Review, Jacket, Sulfur, New Orleans Review, Courtland Review, and Calyx: 30 Contemporary Poets (eds. Peter Minter & Michael Brennan). His books include Strange Attractors (Cambridge: Salt, 2003), Inexorable Weather (Todmorden: Arc, 2001), Land Partition (Melbourne: Textbase, 2001) and Malice in Underland (Melbourne: Textbase, 2003). He has also published volumes of prose fiction (The Garden, Cambridge, 2001; Menudo, New York, 2006) and criticism (including Solicitations: Essays on Criticism & Culture, Prague, 2005). He is the editor of Contemporary Poetics (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007).

   
Roberta Allen is the author of eight books, including the short short collections, CERTAIN PEOPLE and THE TRAVELING WOMAN; a novella-in-shorts, THE DAUGHTER; the novel, THE DREAMING GIRL; the memoir, AMAZON DREAM; and three writing guides. She teaches at the New School and has taught in the writing program at Columbia University. A visual artist as well, she has exhibited worldwide, with work in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
   
Dominic Aulision holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Stonecoast Program at the University of Southern Maine. He currently lives in Seattle, WA where he writes and edits for www.nadamucho.com — a website devoted to the local arts and music scene. He also handles subscription and distribution duties for Golden Handcuffs Review, a journal of contemporary writing in all genres, edited by Lou Rowan. Though violently allergic to cats, he enjoys jell-o pudding snacks, warm cinnamon toast, and the music of Phil Collins. (Photo Credit: Jacob Strunk)
   
Marcus Bales: Not much is known about him except that he lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, and his poems have not appeared in Poetry Magazine or The New Yorker.

   
Anny Ballardini lives in Bolzano, Italy. She grew up in New York, lived in New Orleans, Buenos Aires, Florence. A poet, translator and interpreter, she teaches high school; edits Poet's Corner, an online poetry site; and writes a blog: Narcissus Works. She has translated several contemporary poets into Italian and English. Her book of poems, Opening and Closing Numbers, was published by Moria Press in 2005.
   
jon beacham: from cleveland. fell in love at 15 and saw making as a way out. have encountered beautiful people along the way. some are gone some remain. feel connected to many i never knew. beleive in brotherhood. currently trying to use space as a way of shedding light. trying hard to not let it bring me down.
Jeffrey Beam's poems have appeared in many journals. He is the author of numerous works of poetry including The Fountain (NC Wesleyan College Press), Visions of Dame Kind (The Jargon Society), Gospel Earth (online book with Longhouse Booksellers & Publishers), and the award-winning An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold (Horse & Buggy Press). His enhanced spoken word 2 CD set, What We Have Lost: New & Selected Poems 1977-2001 (Green Finch Press) was one of five finalists for an 2003 Audio Publishers Association Audie Award in Poetry. He also appears on New Growth: Shauna Holiman and Friends - New Songs and Spoken Poems, (Albany Records - includes a studio recitation and performance of "The Life of the Bee" song cycle as performed at Carnegie's Weill Recital Hall.) The Beautiful Tendons: Uncollected Queer Poems 1977-2006 has been accepted for publication by Lethe Press and White Crane Journal for their White Crane Wisdom Series. His poems have recently been translated into Italian. He has published reviews in many journals and newspapers, including Big Bridge (forthcoming), The American Book Review, The Christian Science Monitor, The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, Lambda Book Report, Small Press Review, The Solitary Plover: The Lorine Niedecker Newsletter, The Sun, Yellow Silk, as well as an interview with Jonathan Williams in Rain Taxi, a history of the Jargon Society in the North Carolina Literary Review (now accessible on The Jargon Society web site), and regular reviews in Oyster Boy Review. Beam is a botanical librarian at UNC-Chapel Hill and poetry editor of the print and online literary journal, Oyster Boy Review (www.levee67.com). You can read and hear more of his poetry on his web site at: http://www.unc.edu/~jeffbeam/index.html

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John M. Bennett has published over 300 books and chapbooks of poetry and other materials. Among the most recent are rOlling COMBers (Potes & Poets Press), Mailer Leaves Ham (Pantograph Press), Loose Watch (Invisible Press), Chac Prostibulario (with Ivan Arguelles; Pavement Saw Press), Historietas Alfabeticas (Luna Bisonte Prods), Public Cube (Luna Bisonte Prods), The Peel (Anabasis Press), Glue (xPress(ed), LAP GUN CUT (with F. A. Nettelbeck; Luna Bisonte Prods), Instruction Book (Luna Bisonte Prods), la M al (Blue Lion Books), Cantar del Huff (Luna Bisonte Prods), Sound Dirt (with Jim Leftwich; Luna Bisonte Prods), and Backwords (Blue Lion Books). He has published, exhibited and performed his word art worldwide in thousands of publications and venues. He was editor and publisher of LOST AND FOUND TIMES (1975-2005), and is Curator of the Avant Writing Collection at The Ohio State University Libraries. Richard Kostelanetz has called him "the seminal American poet of my generation." His work, publications, and papers are collected in several major institutions, including Washington University (St. Louis), SUNY Buffalo, The Ohio State University, The Museum of Modern Art, and other major libraries. Ars Poetica: "Be Blank."

   
Ann Bogle's poems have appeared this year in ~*~ W_O_M_B ~*~ poetry, P.F.S. Post, ars poetica, on miPOradio and at her weblog, Ana Verse. A review essay appeared in The Lyre. Creative nonfiction is forthcoming in Minnetonka Review. She has been selected as a grant panelist by the Minnesota State Arts Board.
   
 
Jed Bickman is a recent graduate of Brown University, where he studied English. His honors thesis on Thomas Pynchon, entitled Paranoid Organs, Schizoid Regimes: Capitalism and Pynchon won the 2007 Arlene Rome Ten Eyck and Peter H. Ten Eyck Prize for Literary Theory. He is currently residing in the brilliant empty space of potentiality before the Next Step is decided, though he will always be a writer. His personal website is www.jedicist.org,
   
John Bradley's poetry has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Kerf, New American Writing, The Prose Poem: An International Journal, and other journals. He is the editor of Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age and Learning to Glow: A Nuclear Reader and has essays on war poetry both in the previous issue of Big Bridge and this one.

   
Sheila Black began writing journals twenty-five years ago, igniting her desire to learn more about the writing process as well as her desire to become a teacher, a writer, and a poet. Her educational journey includes a B.A. in Political Science at the University of Oklahoma, thirty-nine post-graduate hours in Creative Writing and Literature at Oklahoma State University, and a Master of Arts in English Literature at the University of Tulsa, obtained in December 2006. Her poetry has been published in The Texas Observer, Stylus Journal of Art and Writing, Midland Review, BigCityLit, Tulsa Kids Magazine, and LiveNow Magazine. She participates in and organizes poetry readings around Tulsa and taught a fledgling Creative Writer's group at Heller Theatre, culminating in their first poetry reading performances. While at the University of Tulsa, she belonged to the Fictional Character's Writers Collective and received the English Graduate Student Poetry Prize in the spring of 2005. Her most recent poetry reading was held at The Living Arts Space Of Tulsa, when she participated with twenty other local poets and writers at the end of this past December in a show titled "Love and Light."
   
CL Bledsoe has work in over 150 journals including The Cimarron Review, Hamilton Stone Review, The Arkansas Review, and Clackamas. He is an editor for Ghoti Magazine http://www.ghotimag.com His first collection, Anthem, is forthcoming later this year.
   
Bobby Byrd is a poet, essayist and the publisher and owner, along with his novelist wife Lee Merrill Byrd, of Cinco Puntos Press in El Paso, Texas. He is the recipient of a poetry fellowship from the NEA, a D. H. Lawrence fellowship, and an international fellowship to study in Mexico. His most recent book is White Panties, Dead Friends & Other Bits & Pieces of Love (Cinco Puntos, 2007). In 2005 he and Lee received the Lannon Foundation Fellowship for Cultural Freedom.
   
Ric Carfagna is the author of 14 collections of poetry, most recently Null Set and Esse (Book I)l published by X-pressed. His poetry has evolved from the early experimental radicalities of his first two books, Confluential Trajectories and Porchcat Nadir, to the unsettling existential mosaics of his current collections, including his ongoing multi-book project Notes On NonExistence. Ric has been the Poetry Review Editor for the E-Journal, Poetic Inhalation and is currently a contributing poet to the E-Journal New Mystics. His poems have been published widely in America as well as in Europe and Scandinavia.
   
Terri Carrion was conceived in Venezuela and born in New York to a Galician mother and a Cuban Father. She was raised in Los Angeles and Miami and currently nests in Guerneville, California, among the redwoods. Her poetry, prose, and photography has appeared and disappeared in various publications.
   
Mary-Marcia Casoly is a native San Franciscan who currently lives in Palo Alto. She has a degree in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Mary-Marcia is a steering committee member of Waverley Writers, a long time poetry venue in the South Bay. Since 1995, she has served as editor of Fresh Hot Bread, Waverley's bimonthly poetry magazine. Her poems have been published in various literary magazines and on the internet. Her book Run to Tenderness, published by Pantograph Press and Goldfish Press, is available at Small Press Distribution.
   
Neeli Cherkovski is a recipient of a Josephine Miles Award and was a Friends of the Sf Public Library Literary Laureate for 2006. He is currently completing a memoir and a new collection of poems.
   
 
David-Baptiste Chirot's bio appeears in pdf format.
   
Tom Clark has worked as a writer, editor and critic of poetry for over forty years. He has published many collections of poems and received awards for his poetry from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations as well as the National Endowment for the Arts. He served as poetry editor of The Paris Review (1963-1973) and, in the 1980s and 1990s, as a poetry critic for The Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle. He has also written a number of critical biographies, including lives of Jack Kerouac, Charles Olson, Ted Berrigan, Robert Creeley and Edward Dorn. For the past twenty years he has been a core faculty member and lecturer in Poetics for New College of California.
   
Lyn Coffin is a semi-widely published poet, fiction writer, and playwright. Seven of her books have been published, three of translation from Czech and Russian, and four of original poetry/fiction/drama. She has won many grants, awards, and prizes. Since moving to Seattle three years ago, Lyn has read at Bumbershoot, Richard Hugo House, Elliott Bay Bookstore and elsewhere; she was runner-up for Poet Populist in 2006 (nominated by PEN). She is looking for a publisher for her book of translations of Jiri Orten, a Czech Jew killed in the holocaust. The book features an introduction by Ed Hirsch, and was featured in Virginia Quarterly Review's Fall 2007 issue.
   

Photo by Mirza Sarajevo
Jennifer Compton was born in New Zealand but has lived in Australia for many years. In November/ December 2007 she was a fellow at the Ligurian Study Centre in Italy and will be resident at the Randell Cottage in Wellington, New Zealand, in 2008. She is a poet and a playwright who also writes prose. Her next book of poetry, Barefoot, will be published in 2008.

   
Ira Cohen is a poet and multimedia artist. He appears on-line at places like East Village Poetry, Jacket, milk, and Akashic Project-- Celestial Grafitti. He can be studied extensively at his Big Bridge tribute page.

Geoffrey Cook was born and raised in Cleveland. He is a historian, writer and artist. His current academic and journalistic interests are Islam, Terrorism and South Asian nuclear proliferation. His journalism regularly appears in the Muslim Observer and is an editor on the Pakistan Weekly. He has published several books of poems and poetic translations, too.

He has an advanced degree in South Asian studies, and was a student of some of the most well known scholars in his field while at Berkeley.

Besides Geoffrey Cook's journalism, his academic and literary publications have appeared widely. He is noted in several biographical publications including Who's Who in America, and he is a member of a number of professional organizations.

Ray Craig, born and raised in Tokyo, is the author of inferred from. two identical distances (Otoliths).
   
Barbara Crooker's work has appeared in magazines such as Yankee, The Christian Science Monitor, Highlights for Children, and The Journal of American Medicine (JAMA). She is the recipient of the 2006 Ekphrastic Poetry Award from Rosebud, the 2004 WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the 2003 Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, and has been a twenty-four time nominee for the Pushcart Prize. Radiance, her first full-length book, won the 2005 Word Press First Book competition and was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize; Line Dance is newly released. She has been an activist since 1963, when she participated in a Ban the Bomb march in her high school cafeteria.
   

Steven Dalachinsky born in Brooklyn, New York some time after the last BIG WAR and has managed to surived lots of little wars. His work has appeared extensively in journals online & off, including Big Bridge, Milk, Unlikely Stories, Xpressed, Ratapallax, Evergreen Review, Long Shot, Alpha Beat Soup, Xtant, Blue Beat Jacket, N.Y. Arts Magazine, 88 and Lost and Found Times.. He is included in such anthologies as Beat Indeed, The Haiku Moment and the esteemed Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. He has written liner notes for the CDs of many artists including Anthony Braxton, Charles Gayle, James "Blood" Ulmer, Rashied Ali, Roy Campbell, Matthew Shipp and Roscoe Mitchell. His 1999 CD, Incomplete Direction (Knitting Factory Records), a collection of his poetry read in collaboration with various musicians, such as William Parker, Matthew Shipp, Daniel Carter, Sabir Mateen, Thurston Moore (SonicYouth), Vernon Reid (Living Colour) has garnered much praise. His most recent chapbooks include Musicology (Editions Pioche, Paris 2005), Trial and Error in Paris (Loudmouth Collective 2003), Lautreamont's Laments (Furniture Press 2005), In Glorious Black and White (Ugly Duckling Presse 2005), St. Lucie (King of Mice Press 2005), Are We Not MEN & Fake Book (2 books of collage--8 Page Press 2005). Dream Book (Avantcular Press 2005). And Totems (Unarmed Press 2007). His books include A Superintendent's Eyes (Hozomeen Press 2000) and his PEN Award winning book The Final Nite (complete notes from a Charles Gayle Notebook, Ugly Duckling Presse 2006). His latest CDs are Phenomena of Interference, a collaboration with pianist Matthew Shipp (Hopscotch Records 2005), Thin Air with Loren Mazzacane Connors (Silver Wonder 2007) and Merci Por le Visite with Sebastian Capezza and Didier Lassere (Amor Fati 2007). He has read throughout the N.Y. area, the U.S., Japan and Europe, including France, most recently at the International Poetry Biennial of Val de Marne in 2007, and Germany.
   
Jane Dalrymple-Hollo is trying to remember what it was like to be her as a child. She makes things that seem to fall into the category of art but she struggles to grasp their meaning. She wants more than anything to believe that the simple act of following the impulse to make things that, though useless, are at least interesting and possibly beautiful has meaning in itself and can even make a positive difference in the world. She doesn't believe in god anymore but she remembers how comforting it once was to pray. Nowadays she thinks of prayer as something akin to tossing a pebble into an infinite ocean of consciousness and believes that making art may be something akin to that. It's certainly better than making war. She ponders these things in Boulder, Colorado, where she makes her home with her husband, Anselm Hollo, and their two companion animals, Zophiel and Charlie. For other work of hers on the web, see her web site at janedalrymplehollo.com/, line becomes approximate form and (sometimes) line again, from "Not Enough Night", and A Life in Art by clicking these links.

   

The author of more than 20 books of poetry, Mahmoud Darwish is the most celebrated Palestinian poet writing today. Born in 1942 in Palestine, he has lived in Beirut, Cairo, Mosow, and Amman, and currently resides in Ramallah. His most recent book of poems is Don't Apologize For What You've Done (Riad El-Rayyes Books, Beirut, 2004). The poems that appear here are from this collection.

   
Alan Davies is the author of RAVE (Roof), NAME (This), CANDOR (O Books), and SIGNAGE (Roof), among many other books. His BOOK 5, part of a long ongoing work, was recently published by Katalanché. He lives in New York City, where he practices zen and writes.
   
Nancy Victoria Davis is a painter, illustrator, book designer, installation artist and co-founder of Big Bridge Press. Born in New York and raised in Ada, Alabama, she took the big bridge to California in 1975, and since then has surrounded herself with art and nature. In addition to operating a tropical plant nursery, she has been inspired by poetry and illustrated the works of Jim Harrison, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, Michael McClure, Andrei Codrescu, and Joanne Kyger. She has been awarded The Rounce and Coffin Award for her design and illustration of "What The Fish Saw", and her broadside "Elegy For The Dusky Seaside Sparrow" was chosen "Best Broadside of The Year" selection by Fine Print Magazine. Her work has been exhibited at The New York Public Library, The San Francisco Public Library, and The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Rental Gallery. Her illustrations have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Nerve Bundle Review, Mike & Dale's Younger Poets and Cafe Review.

   
Martha Deed lives on the north bank of the Erie Canal in North Tonawanda, New York. From there, she makes trouble with her poems. Her chapbook, 65 X 65, was published by Peter Ganick’s small chapbook project (2006). Other recent publications include Shampoo, New Verse News, Death Metal Poetry, Iowa Review Web (with Millie Niss), and many others. Her website: www.sporkworld.org/Deed.
   
Susan Donnelly is the author of the poetry collections Transit and Eve Names the Animals, as well as three chapbooks. Her publication credits include Poetry and The New Yorker, with new work in The Bellevue Literary Review, The Sun and forthcoming in Iron Horse Review and Prairie Schooner. She was a winner in Nicholas Kristof's Iraq War Poems contest for Part III of "After Fallujah," which was published in the New York Times in June 2007. She lives, writes and teaches poetry in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

   
Sharon Doubiago has written two dozen books of poetry and prose, most notably the epic poem Hard Country (West End Press), the booklength poem South America Mi Hija (University of Pittsburgh) which was nominated twice for the National Book Award, and the story collections, El Niño (Lost Roads Press), and The Book of Seeing With One's Own Eyes (Graywolf Press) which in 2005 was selected to the Oregon Culture Heritage list, Literary Oregon, 100 Books, 1800-2000. She holds three Pushcart Prizes for poetry and fiction and the Oregon Book Award for Poetry for Psyche Drives the Coast. In 2008 Love on the Streets, <Selected and New Poems will be published by the University of Pittsburgh as well as Volume One of her memoir, My Father's Love/Portrait of the Poet as a Girl, by Red Hen. She's an online mentor in Creative Writing for the University of Minnesota and a board member of PENOakland. Her new collection of memoir stories, Why She Loved Him, is looking for a press.

   
Helen Duberstein Helen Duberstein has just completed a novel, Skip to My Lou. She has published two novels, A Thousand Wives Dancing and Roma, and a volume of short stories, Shadow Self & Other Tales. Her fiction, poetry, reviews, and articles have appeared in the New Republic, the Village Voice, Commentary, Liberation, Confrontation, Eidos, and other publications. She participated in the early formation of the Living Theatre, was a member of the Circle Repertory Theatre Company, and worked with the Theatre for the New City.

   

Photo by Tulku Gyurme Tsering
Richard Denner, a Vajrayana Buddhist monk and jack of all trades, lives with his elderly mother near Sebastopol, California. He is the impresario of dPress chapbooks, and his Collected Poems:1961-2000 has been published by Comrades Press. You are invited to visit his website: http://www.dpress.net
   
Ana Doina is a Romanian-born American writer. She has an MA in Philosophy and History and remains a passionate student of both. Her poems and essays have been published in many literary magazines, anthologies, textbooks, and online publications, and her work has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, in 2002 and 2004.
   
 
Jéanpaul Ferro is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee. His work has appeared in the Columbia Review, Cortland Review, Barrelhouse Magazine, Review Americana, The Providence Journal, Hawaii Review, and Pedestal Magazine. His poetry has been featured on WBAR radio in New York City, and he will be the featured author in the August 2008 issue of Contemporary American Voices. He currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island. E-mail at: jeanpaulferro@netzero.net
   
Edward Field (born 1924 in Brooklyn) dropped out of New York University to enlist in the US Air Force in WW2. As a navigator in heavy bombers, he flew 25 missions over Germany. It was in the army that he began writing poetry, but his first book of poems, Stand Up, Friend, With Me, was not published until 1963 after it won the Lamont Award. Among his publications since then are Variety Photoplays; the novel Village (later revised as The Villagers), a four-generation historical novel about Greenwich Village, written with his partner Neil Derrick; and a memoir, The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag, and Other Intimate Literary Portraits from the Bohemian Era. His latest book, just released by the University of Pittsburgh Press, is After the Fall, Poems Old and New, which focuses on what has happened since 9/11. Other honors include the Shelley Award, a Lambda Award, and the Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1965, the documentary film To Be Alive for which he wrote the voice-over narration won an Academy Award. He can be seen reading poems on www.YouTube.com/fieldinski. More information at www.edwardfield.com.

   

Photo by C.J.Rayhill
Adelle Foley is a financial analyst, an arts activist, and a writer of haiku. Her column, "High Street Neighborhood News," appears monthly in The MacArthur Metro. Her poems have appeared in many magazines, in the textbooks, An Introduction to Poetry and Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, and in Columbia University Press's internet database, the Columbia Granger's World of Poetry. Along the Bloodline is her first book-length collection.
   
Hugh Fox, born in Chicago in 1932, has been English professor at Loyola University in Los Angeles, the Instituto Pedagogico in Caracas, the University of Santa Catarina in Florianópolis, Brazil, the U. of Hermosillo (Mexico), Michigan State University. He has had one hundred books published, mostly poetry, but also archaeology, novels, critical works, and drama. Some forty-five unpublished novels, some recent, some going back fifty years, are still on shelves waiting for a publisher. His most recently published books are Defiance (Higganum Hill Press, 2007), Finalmente/Finally (Solo Cafe, 2007); and his book on archaeology, Rediscovering America, will be coming out from World Audience in NYC in 2008.
   

Vernon Frazer's poetry and fiction have appeared in Café Review, First Intensity, Jack Magazine, Lost and Found Times, Massacre, Moria, Shampoo, Sidereality and many other literary magazines. He has written six books of poetry. He introduced his longpoem, IMPROVISATIONS (I-XXIV), at The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in Manhattan. Frazer has produced five recordings of poetry with free jazz accompaniment and appeared on several recordings with the late jazz saxophonist Thomas Chapin, including their duo release, Song of Baobab. Frazer’s collection of short fiction, finished as a finalist in the 1996 Black Ice/FC2 Fiction Contest. His most recent novel is Relic’s Reunions. He recently finished editing an anthology of Post-Beat poetry for publication in the People’s Republic of China. His newest books are Avenue Noir and IMPROVISATIONS
   

Mel Freilicher's fiction/non-fiction hybrid, The Unmaking of Americans: Seven Lives was published by San Diego City Works Press. He has chapbooks out from Standing Stones Press and Obscure publications, and was anthologized in Sun and Moon Press' Contemporary American Fiction. Freilicher has guest edited issues of American Book Review and Fiction International. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in numerous publications, such as Golden Handcuffs Review; Frame-work: Journal of the LA Center for Photographic Studies; Flue: Magazine of the Franklin Furnace Archive; River Styx; San Diego Reader; San Diego Union-Tribune; poeticinhalation. He's been teaching writing and literature at UCSD and SDSU for several decades.
   
Born & raised & living in New York City, Kirpal Gordon enjoys building meditation gardens in between writing projects. His thirty year collection of jazz writing, Eros in Sanskrit, & its companion CD of spoken word & jazz, Speak-Spake-Spoke, are available from www.LeapingDogPress.com.
   
Joshua Gage is a graduate of Naropa University's Low Residency MFA program in Creative Writing. He currently teaches at Cleveland State University and Cuyahoga Community College. His forty-part poem, Deep Cleveland Lenten Blues, is available as a chapbook from Deep Cleveland Press. His books breaths and Nothing but Surrender are forthcoming from VanZeno Press and Rager Media, respectively. If one were to google his name with the phrases "poetry" and "Literary Cafe," one could read some of his poems, and even watch a really neat video of him reading at a Cleveland hotspot. One might also discover his addiction to Irish whiskey and Pendleton shirts, both of which appreciative fans should send to him.
   
Judy Grahn is a lifetime activist and artist, whose work has been foundational to more than one social movement in the US and internationally, including G/L/B/T and Women's Spirituality. As a poet and social theorist, her work has been widely published, distributed, anthologized, staged, and put to music.

She teaches creative arts and women's spirituality, and is Research Faculty for Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. Spring of 2008 Red Hen Press intends to publish love belongs to those who do the feeling, a collection of her short poems, some of which she performs with singer/songwriter Anne Carol. A CD is in recording stage. Also, Judy edits and publishes her own essays in Metaformia: A Journal of Menstruation and Culture (Metaformia.org).

   
 
Allan Graubard's poems appeared in the recent Shamanic Warriors, Now Poets (edited by Ira Cohen and J.N. Reilly) and Celestial Graffiti (edited by Ira Cohen). His play, For Alejandra, on the suicide of poet Alejandra Pizarnik, was last performed at the Sibiu International Theater Festival, Romania, summer 2003, with publication and a national radio broadcast, after its premiere in New York and runs in Washington, DC, and Dubrovnik. In 2005, Green Integer Press will publish his adaptation of Gellu Naum’s play, The Taus Watch Repair Shop, in collaboration with translator Sasha Vlad. Previous translations include Vlado Gotovac: Selected Poems (The Most/The Bridge, Zagreb), and King Gordogan, by Radovan Ivsic (P.E.N. Center, Zagreb). He has read at Beyond Baroque (Venice, California), Zebulon (NY), Museum of Contemporary Arts (Washington, DC), and a host of other places. Photo by Ira Cohen.
   
   
Harriet Green is an artist, poet, publisher and makes umbul-umbul (Bali style festive flags). She has begun incorporating some of her poetry into her artwork and has recently exhibited The Alchemy Collection at Harbour Lights Picturehouse Gallery in Southampton. Last year she started a new poetry group which currently meets at Hanger Farm Arts Centre in Totton, Southampton, usually on the last Tuesday of each month. Her first anthology was Luciana: Below the Belt, Chameleon Library, 2004, ISBN 0954818105. Her next anthology, again illustrated with her own photography, is due out in spring 2008. She likes photography, films, Italian food and all sorts of crazy music. She has three fantastic children and lives in Hampshire, UK.

   
Brian Howlett, Sensei is an artist who first began exploring the links between Zen and visual art as artist in residence at Coyote School of Fine Arts in the 1970s and has a Masters in Fine Art. His work explores the connections between the spiritual moment and the earthiness and unpredictability in modern American life.

In his artwork Brian makes links between characters in his personal experience, the grand figures of Buddhist history, and Zen koans. He works in acrylics, watercolor, and ink, with a mixture of abstraction, cartoon figures and a lyric appreciation of landscape. His works are in many private collections.

Brian has a special interest in integrating Zen and art, and for many years he led regular introductory meditation classes at PZI in Santa Rosa. He currently leads an ongoing series of programs integrating Zen and art in Santa Rosa, and he is developing additional programs that bring Zen into daily life through the arts. Brian is based in Santa Rosa, CA.

Patrick John Green writes whenever he can, usually during his lunch breaks in Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square. In the square coexist the extremes of humanity, from the homeless to the affluent, from the musician to the consumer. It is an appropriate setting in which to pull words on war, since the "war" theme is überevocative, touching even those wishing to be left alone.
   
Susan Griffin is the eco-feminist author of The Book of the Courtesans: A Catalogue of Their Virtues (2001); Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (1978); Pornography and Silence; and A Chorus of Stones; Unremembered Country (1987); The Eros of Everyday Life (1995); What Her Body Thought: A Journey into the Shadows (1999); Bending Home: Selected New Poems, 1967-1998 (1998). She received a MacArthur grant for Peace and International Cooperation, an NEA Fellowship, and an Emmy Award for the play Voices.
   
H. Palmer Hall's most recent chapbook is To Wake Again. He has books from Plain View Press (Coming to Terms) and Pecan Grove Press (Reflections from Pete’s Pond) and forthcoming from Turning Point Press (Foreign and Domestic) in 2009. Recent work has appeared in North American Review, Mizna: A Journal of Arab American Culture, The Texas Observer and other literary magazines. He is a librarian at St. Mary's University in San Antonio, Texas.

   
Clarinda Harriss teaches poetry and editing at Towson University, where she chaired the English Department for a decade. She serves as faculty adviser of Grub Street, Towson’s prizewinning literary magazine. Her latest collection of poems is Dirty Blue Voice; a new one, Mortain, will come out in 2008. A book of short fiction, including several award winners, is making the rounds of publishers. Prison writers are one of her main research interests.

   
Katherine Hastings is the author of several chapbooks, including Wolf Spider and Sidhe, both published by dPress and Lonidier Rampant, The Small Change Series, WordTemple Press. Her work has appeared in many journals and anthologies. She founded and hosts the WordTemple Poetry Series in Santa Rosa, CA, bringing well-established poets together with poets who have not yet published a book of poems. In addition, she hosts a radio program, also called WordTemple, on Santa Rosa's NPR-affiliate KRCB 91.1 FM (for information go to www.wordtemple.com).

   
Michael Heller is a poet, essayist and critic. His most recent book was Earth and Cave (Dos Madres Press, 2007). Forthcoming in 2008 are Eschaton, a new collection of poems (Talisman), Marble Snows: Two Novellas (ahadadabooks) and Speaking The Estranged: Essays on the Work of George Oppen (Salt).
   
   
Tom Hibbard has had recent poems appearing online in Cricket (vol. 1, issue 2), Eratio (issue 7) and Otoliths (issues 2 and 3); these poems are from a multi-media piece titled Iraqi Ice Tea and a 2006 chapbook titled Ghotki Crater. Several recent reviews have also appeared, in Moria (vo. 9, issue 1) on David Meltzer and in Jacket (issue 30) on Mark Wallace and on the ejournal Big Bridge. Hibbard's chapbook Nonexistent appeared in 2004. Other works mostly poetry and reviews are easy to locate in many places online.
   
   
David Howard, after working as a pyrotechnic and special effects supervisor for acts like Metallica and Janet Jackson, to Purakanui in order to write. His collaboration with photographer Fiona Pardington, How To Occupy Our Selves, was published by HeadworX in 2003; a draft of the opening poem "There You Go" was featured in Best New Zealand Poems 2002, and the full text was set for mezzosoprano, narrator and piano trio by the Czech composer Marta Jirackova. The Harrier Suite appeared in Best New Zealand Poems 2004 and was collected in The Word Went Round (Otago University Press, July 2006). His poetry has been translated into German, Italian, Slovene and Spanish.
   
Paul Howell is the author of Politics of Joy (Alter Ego Press, Newport, Vermont, available on the net), Morphology (McGill Queens University Press) and Joseph's Hardware (Lulu Books). Eustis Circle is scheduled for publication in 2008. He is working on Black as Hair White as Bone, a collection of poems. He lives with his family in Montreal.
   
Halvard Johnson was born in Newburgh, New York, and grew up in New York City and the Hudson Valley. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council, and Baltimore City Arts. He has published many collections of poetry — Transparencies and Projections, The Dance of the Red Swan, Eclipse, and Winter Journey — all from New Rivers Press and, now out of print, archived at the Contemporary American Poetry Archives capa.conncoll.edu. Recent collections include Rapsodie espagnole, G(e)nome, The Sonnet Project, Theory of Harmony — all from www.xpressed.org — and The English Lesson, from Unicorn Press. Guide to the Tokyo Subway was published in 2006 by Hamilton Stone Editions, which has published another collection (Organ Harvest with Entrance of Clones) in 2007. He has lived and worked in Chicago, Illinois; El Paso, Texas; Cayey, Puerto Rico; Washington, D.C.; Baltimore, Maryland, and New York City. For many years he taught overseas in the European and Far East divisions of the University of Maryland, mostly in Germany and Japan. He currently lives in New York City, and spends quality time in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico.

   
 
Kent Johnson's Homage to the Last Avant-Garde, a collection of new and selected poems, will be published in 2008 by Shearsman Editions in the UK. His translation (with Forrest Gander) of Jaime Saenz's The Night was recently published by Princeton.

   
Alexander Jorgensen wakes up indulging in queer tirades. Has suffered from existential homelessness while learning to communicate. Attempts to remind the developed world just how apples once tasted. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Otoliths, Shampoo and Kabita Pakshik (translations into Bengali by the gifted poet and translator Subhashis Gangulee). Additionally, he has performed and recorded with David-Baptiste Chirot and the Black Mountain Collective. An incessant traveler, he has divided his time between the People's Republic of China and "elsewhere" since 2002.

   
Paul Kahn is an information architect working in Paris; he teaches that subject in France and elsewhere. Since 2005 he has edited NEW Magazine, visual and verbal communication, an annual of writing and contemporary art. His most recent books are Travels/Meeting Drawings (Dynamic Diagrams 1998) and Mapping Websites (Rockport Publishers 2001), both collaborations with designer Krzysztof Lenk. His writing on Chinese poetry in translation includes Han Shan In English (White Pine, 1989). He the author of the American English adaptation of The Secret History of the Mongols (2nd edition: Cheng & Tsui, 1997), the thirteenth century Mongolian narrative of the life of Chingis (Genghis) Khan.
   
Rebecca Kavaler, a Southerner by birth, has resided in New York City for longer than she admits. During that time, her short fiction has won various awards, including two National Endowment of the Arts fellowships and a New York State Council of the Arts grant. She has won the AWPA Award for Short Fiction and has appeared in Best American Short Stories and Best of Nimrod. Her stories are available in three collections, and her novel Doubting Castle, originally published by Schocken Books, was recently reprinted by Hamilton Stone Editions. Her poetry has been published in Atlanta Review, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Big Bridge, Hamilton Stone Review, and Prairie Schooner.

   
Johnathan Kane writes: I got my first camera in 1975 when I was sixteen years old. Within two years, I became the society photographer for the Naples Star, a local weekly newspaper. I loved photographing Naplesian cocktail soirees and tax deductible charity spotlight dances, because it gave me the opportunity to study, document and express my feelings about society. I was photographing alien culture, Neptune with a Pier, dull AM radio, and a Flaming Fountain.

In the past, I preferred black and white film exclusively for the tonality and textures I could achieve. I refrained from color film, because I was not attracted to the natural look of it. As my work gravitated towards a more surrealist sensibility, I found the qualities of black and white film enhanced the effects I wanted to create.

Digital photography, with its boundless color spectrum, changed my mind about working in color. In the digital medium, I am able to conjure up the subtlest hues-mélanges of colors. Colors I see bouncing off shadows or refracted by light in swamp buggy salvage yards and industrial parks, which, more recently, have become the ground for my figures. Or layered into my mis-en-scene, achieving the look in my photos that I have always aimed for, and have never seen anywhere else.

I work experimentally, preferring not to plan out my pieces in an academic manner. I am more interested in the effects of chance, coincidence and synchronicity in my work. I work in repetition, using it as a technique to exhaust my options, creatively and technically, until I am satisfied with the final piece.

   
Larry Keenan, an internationally noted San Francisco Bay Area photographer, graduated with highest honors, from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1967, and majored in Design and Education. He holds two degrees, a Bachelors of Fine Arts and a Bachelors of Applied Art. He also holds a lifetime state teaching credential. During this period, Keenan photographed the final days of the Beat Generation. A selection of his "Beat Era" work is in the permanent collection of the Archives of American Artists in the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

From 1967-70, Keenan taught Photography and Art at Concord High School in Concord, CA. In 1971, he won the James D. Phelan Award — the most prestigious award bestowed upon California-born artists. Keenan has operated his own business as a professional photographer since 1970. He works in his studio and on location and has traveled the world on numerous commercial and personal assignments. His prized photographs are in museums and private collections throughout the world.

Because of his interest and talent in conceptualizing, multi-imaging and digitizing, Keenan has produced exceptional images with the computer since 1985. He was featured on the PBS television program Computer Chronicles digitizing and creating the award winning package cover of Deluxe PhotoLab for Electronic Arts using the Amiga 2000 computer system. In 1992, Willow Mixed Media produced a half hour artist's profile on Keenan and his work for cable television. He is celebrated as a "digital pioneer" in the Random House book Digital Photography and produced his own line of Fractal greeting cards. City Lights Books published his Postcards from the Underground in 1999. Keenan is an alumnus of the Center of Creative Imaging in Camden, Maine and is presently working primarily with a G4 Macintosh system.

In November 1995 Keenan's photography was exhibited in Beat Culture and the New America: 1950-1965 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. From February to June 1996 his work was featured at The National Portrait Gallery for the Smithsonian Institution's exhibit REBELS: Artists and Poets of the 1950s. 1996 he had a solo exhibit in NY at Great Modern Pictures.

Keenan's homepage, a significant exhibit of his photographic work, can be found at: www.emptymirrorbooks.com/keenan/index.html

   
Tsipi Keller is a novelist and translator. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, of CAPS and NYFA awards in fiction, and is the author of the novels Jackpot (2004), and Retelling (2006), both published by Spuyten Duyvil. Most recently, her short fiction appeared in StorySouth, Quick Fiction, Elimae, and is forthcoming in Salt River Review, and Spuyten Duyvil's anthology of 21st century women writers.
   
Sybil Kollar's poetry collection Water Speaking to Stone was published by Pivot Press, 2004. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals including The American Voice, Chelsea, Columbia:A Journal of Literature and Art, Big Bridge, The Hamilton Stone Review, The Literary Review, New Millenium Writing, and Rattapallax. Her poems have been published in anthologies including A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women, and she's written poems as text for a song cycle “Just Us” composed for mezzo-soprano and flute by Donna Kelly Eastman which was performed in Washington and was included in the CD Series of the Society of Composers, Inc. She is a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship/Poetry and has been awarded writing residencies in Germany, Scotland and Spain. She is presently working on a prose poem collection Where the Sticks Fall.
   
 
Individual entries on Richard Kostelanetz appear in Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Novelists, Postmodern Fiction, Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Reader's Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, the Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Webster's Dictionary of American Authors, The HarperCollins Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature, NNDB.com, and the Encyclopedia Britannica, among other distinguished directories. Otherwise, he survives in New York, where he was born, unemployed and thus overworked.
   
Richard Krech was born in 1946, and grew up in Berkeley, California. He became involved in civil rights and anti-war activities in 1963 and started writing soon thereafter. His first book was published in 1967, by d.a. levy, in Cleveland. He published a poetry magazine, The Avalanche, which lasted five issues. Along with the The Avalanche, Krech published several chapbooks under his Undermine Press imprint and sponsored weekly poetry readings at a Telegraph Avenue bookstore in Berkeley from 1966 to 1969. His poetry appeared in various small magazines around the country including Work (from John Sinclair's Artists Workshop Press in Detroit), Ole, Manhattan Review, City Light's Journal for the Protection of all Beings, and Kauri. During that time, and afterwards, he wrote for the underground press, including the Berkeley Barb, the San Francisco Express Times, the Seattle Helix and other publications.

He stopped writing poetry in the mid-70's and in 1976 The Incompleat Works of Richard Krech was published by Litmus Inc., and that same year Krech started law school. After graduating from New College of California School of Law, Krech has been practicing criminal defense in Oakland (a good place to practice criminal law) since 1980. His practice has included everything from murder to shoplifting as well as pro bono representation of anti-apartheid demonstrators in the 1980s, anti-war demonstrators in the 1990s and 2000s, and others similarly situated. His practice includes trial and appellate work.

After a 25+ year line-break he began writing poetry again early this century, and has recently had five chapbooks published and numerous appearances in the small press and on-line. Krech's newest book, In Chambers: The Bodhisattva of the Public Defender's Office, published by sunnyoutside.com, relates poems of justice and injustice from the perspective of a criminal defense lawyer. Krech lives with his wife, Mary Holbrook, a former lawyer and now a therapist in Albany, California.

   
Ohioan poet, artist and rabbit master T.L. Kryss is the publisher of the poetry series Black Rabbit Press. He published, with rjs, the groundbreaking anthology of d.a.levy's work, ukanhavyrfuckinciti bak (1967).  His poems have recently appeared in Abraxas, Death Row, Measured Steps, The Outsider, Unarmed Poetry Journal, et al.  Books and broadsides include Current Outsider (Vagabond Home Page), Downwind from the Fires of Nothingness and Spring into Winter (Kirpan Press), Sunflower Wars (Bottle of Smoke Press), Just Blue Skies: Poems for & after d.a.levy (an electronic chapbook appearing on the d.a.levy homepage, Light & Dust Anthology of Poetry) and The Search for the Reason Why (Bottom Dog Press).
   
Beatriz Lagos, one of the most prolific bilingual poets working and writing today was born in Argentina. Though she has lived in Petaluma, California since 1976, she spent her childhood and adolescence in Casilda and Buenos Aires, Argentina, under military dictatorship. She is an active poet and lecturer. She was invited and attended several World Congresses of Poets held in San Francisco, Corfu, Madrid and Florence. She has been awarded numerous prizes for her poetry which are published in literary magazines and in several books in English and Spanish. As a lecturer she has lectured in universities and literary circles in Sonoma, Marin county, Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco, Indian Valley Colleges and in Europe in the Literary Ateneum in Madrid and several Spanish cities like Guadalajara and Pastrana, Spain; in Greece, and Florence. In prose she wrote and published essays on literature and Hispanic Caminería, novels, and her Memoirs.

Ms Lagos holds a diploma as a Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature from Buenos Aires, and a master degree from UC Berkeley, diplomas in English from Cambridge, Michigan and Buenos Aires and a degree in Library Studies.

In the Spanish Historical Village of Hita, Castile-La Mancha, she organized and held nine Poets Encounters from 1990 to 1996. As a passionate scholar of local history, Ms Lagos has studied General Vallejos´s Memoirs, and the traditions of Native Americans peoples. Her studies and experiences are reflected in the poems and collections she publishes, including The Great Petaluma Mill and "Shaman Hatal," a Navajo chant which was honored by the Navajo and published in California Poetry Quarterly.

   
Ruth Lepson is poet-in-residence at the New England Conservatory of Music. Her new book of photos and synaesthetic prose poems, Morphology, with photographer Rusty Crump, is available at blazevox.org. Alice James Books published her book of poems Dreaming in Color, and she edited Poetry from Sojourner: A Feminist Anthology (University of Illinois Press). Her work has been in Jacket, Shampoo, Carve, EAOGH, and many other mags. She will be reading at the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City on April 19, 2008, and performing with jazz musicians in Boston in the spring.
   
Laura Lentz lives in Redondo Beach, California.

   
   
Louise Landes Levi has translated & written books, published chap books, broadsides & cards, / played sarangi in concert halls, in radio stations in town squares & railroad stations for some decades & perhaps for some lives.

Overland journeys to India produced several interpretive translations/ one of Rene Daumal ( the great Sanskrit autodidact & author of well known Mt. Analogue) RASA originally printed by New Directions (1982), now available through Siva Stan, the other, of the legendary poet genius Mira Bai whose devotion to Krishna freed her entirely. SWEET ON MY LIPS was published by Cool Grove Press in 1997 & reprinted in 2003 w. an introductory essay by La Monte Young.

In a strange twist of fate, much of Ms. Levi’s own work was thrown away by a concierge (or divine agent) in Paris, 1977. Henri Michaux, known for his eremitism & anonymity, nurtured our author through this crisis. A generous selection of LLL’s translation from HM, plus an essay on her meeting with him can be found on line at www.milkmag.com. Forthcoming fr. Coronamundi, a large selection of the work. Towards Totality, 2005.

Ms. Levi studied at the Univ. of Calif, played with Daniel Moore’s early fusion orchestra The Floating Lotus Magic Opera company, then traveled East, for more instruction. Please refer to www.coolgrove.com (Guru Punk & Sweet on My Lips/author interview) for details.

Her poetry books include early chap books: Poems Ambrosial Press, Bombay, 1972, The Water Mirror (Het Water Spiegel) the Amsterdam School (tranls. B. Mohr) 1983, Amiata, Felix Mansingh, Amsterdam 1984, Departure, Guus Bauer, Amsterdam, 1986 and Concerto, Accordian Series, 7, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1988, Extinction, Left Hand Books, Barrytown 1990 & 1992, The Tower, Il Bagatto, Amsterdam, 1994, The Highway Queen, PBP, Amsterdam & Vienna, 1994, Le Lampade di Casa Sono State Acesse, MA, tranls. Rita Degli Esposti, Supernova, Venice 1996 & 2000, Guru Punk, Cool Grove Press, Brooklyn, 1999, Chorma, transl. Sibila Rigori Porto dei Santi, Loiana 2000, Avenue A & Ninth Street, Shiva Stan Kathmandu-Woodstock, 2004, Ma’ Kar A Kar/MA, Univ. of Rhode Island, Providence, 2005 & forthcoming Crazy Louise, Felix Mansingh, Amsterdam 2005.

LLL is known to be peripatetic & shy. Please contact her for any publications that are as difficult to find as she is at: levitate108@hotmail.com

Since 1992 she has directed Il Bagatto Books, printing occasional chapbooks, broadsides & postcards. The press originated in Arcidosso, Italy & travels w. her. It is co sponsored by Ms. Sofia Bentinck.

Books online: Banana Baby (2003) www.poeticinhalation.com, ed. Andrew Lundwall , Chorma (2000), www.portodeisanti.org in English w. facing Italian transl., also printed in handmade edition by Porto dei Santi, The Highway Queen (1994) www.genabrink.com, originally designed as a map by il Bagatto w. Post-Buddhist-Punk, Vienna. ed. S. Peddi and the anthology ‘Celestial Grafitti' at www.poetz.com, Six Poems, ed. by Ira Cohen.

   
Joel Lipman Professor of Art & English at the University of Toledo, Joel Lipman's visual and lexical poetry has been independently published since the 1960's. His esoteric books include Machete Chemistry/Panades Physics [with Yasser Musa], Luna Bisante Prods chapbook The Real Ideal and Ransom Notes [Obscure Publications, 2006]. His bookworks, mail art and visual poems, including the beautifully vicious investigation, Jesse Helms' Body, and the lyrical Origins of Poetry, have been internationally exhibited. Panels from these sequences can be found at his the Light & Dust Survey.
   
Rachel Loden is the author of Hotel Imperium (Georgia), four chapbooks, including The Richard Nixon Snow Globe (Wild Honey Press), and a just-completed manuscript that she's calling Dick of the Dead until somebody talks her out of it. Her work has appeared recently in New American Writing, The Hat, Zoland Poetry, Best American Poetry 2005 and Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry, and she has been interviewed in The Iowa Review and Jacket. Awards include a Pushcart Prize, a Fellowship in Poetry from the California Arts Council, and a grant from the Fund for Poetry. She blogs at http://wordstrumpet.blogspot.com/.
   
Rick London's most recent publication is the chapbook Picture With Moving Parts (Doorjamb Press, 2002). He lives and works in San Francisco.

   
Marc Lowe holds a Master's degree in Japanese Literature and spent some years living, teaching, and writing in Japan. His fictions and prose poems appear or will appear in various journals, including 5_trope, BlazeVOX, Caketrain, elimae, Mad Hatters' Review, Opium Magazine, Pindeldyboz, Retort, The Salt River Review, Sein und Werden, Steel City Review, and others. Please visit him at his website malo23.com for more information.
   
Carlos M. Luis was born in La Habana, Cuba 1932. Began at an early stage to be interested in Surrealism and Socialism. Moved to New York in 1962 where he continued to participate in Surrealist and Socialist groups of discussion. Colaborated with New Politics. There he met Nicolas Calas, Claude Tarnaud, Lionel Abel among others. In 1979 moved to Miami with his family. Began to explore (around the middle of the nineties) Visual Poetry in Aix en Provence under the influence of composers such as Anton Von Webern or John Cage. Have been involved in this current of poetry ever since without abandoning his surrealist and socialist inclinations. Have published and exhibited in USA, Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico, Uruguay and Brasil books of poetry essays, collages and visual poetry . . . Former professor of Humanities at St. John Vianney College.
   
 
Glenn McLaughlin does not fit into any officially recognized minority group being semi over weight, semi old, semi employed and easily burned by strong sunlight. He is a former runner and chemist but now walks occasionally, takes the escalator and lost most of the chemistry after years following a career that Dustin Hoffman had enough brains in "The Graduate" to ignore. After writing poetry for only a handful of years, he's had several poems published in real journals, some online virtual things and he runs a poetry series for the Mad Poets Society in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, where he lives with his current wife and their numerous pets, the children having all flown the coop.
   
Malcolm McNeill has worked for many various publications including The New York Times, National Lampoon, Marvel Comics, and also the television show Saturday Night Live for which he won an Emmy. He also wrote and illustrated a monthly science fiction series called "Tetra" for Gallery magazine. In addition to this, McNeill collaborated with the writer William S. Burroughs on projects including "The Unspeakable Mr. Hart" and a long story titled "Ah Puch is Here" which remains unpublished. (In Mayan mythology, Ah Puch is the god of death and king of Metnal, or the underworld. He was depicted as a skeleton or corpse adorned with bells. Sometimes Ah Puch was depicted with the head of an owl. To the Maya the screech of an owl signifies an imminent death.) Note. In 1979 a text-only version of "Ah Puch is Here" was published as "Ah Pook is Here."
   
devorah major devorah major is a poet, performer, novelist, former San Francisco Poet Laureate (2002-2005), and arts educator and activist. Her most recent poetry collections are where river meets ocean and with more than tongue. She has published two novels An Open Weave and Brown Glass Windows. She has toured nationally and internationally and is a featured poet on six CD albums. She is an adjunct professor at California College for the Arts and Poet in Residence at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
   
Michael Maggiotto's poems have appeared in issues of the Red River Review. He lives with his wife in Muncie, Indiana, where he works at Ball State University.
   
Chris Mansell's Love poems appeared with Kardoorair Press in 2006. Mortifications & Lies (2005) also published by Kardoorair was described as ". . . an important book, both stylistically and thematically a ground-breaking book. One emerges from the experience of reading it disturbed and challenged." Previous books include Head, Heart & Stone, Redshift/Blueshift, Day Easy Sunlight Fine, The Fickle Brat (audio + text CD from Interactive Digital, Stalking the Rainbow and other smaller publications). Interactive Digital will soon publish Café Sun, a collection of video/digital poems on dvd. Although primarily a poet, she has also had a number of plays performed and indulges in short fiction from time to time. She has won a number of awards and been short-listed for others. For more information please see her site at: www.chrismansell.com.

   
Richard Martin is the author of four books of poetry, including White Man Appears on Southern California Beach (Bottom Fish Press) and Modulations (Asylum Arts). His work has appeared in ACM, Exquisite Corpse, Fell Swoop: The All Bohemian Review and unarmed. His is also the author of boink!, an anti-memoir published by Lavender Ink and four chapbooks: Negation of Beautiful Words (poetry) from Igneus Press, SIDEWAYS (poetry) and Obstinate Midgets (flash fiction) from Obscure Publications, and Quack (a one-act play) from Lot M. Press. Recipient of a NEA fellowship for poetry, he founded and coordinated the Big Horror Poetry Reading Series, Binghamton, New York, 1982-1996. He lives in Boston.
   
Stephen-Paul Martin is a widely known writer of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction

   
Sheila E. Murphy's Collected Chapbooks will appear from blue lion books in 2008. Her most recent title is The Case of the Lost Objective (Case) from Otoliths Press (2007) and Continuations (collaboration with Douglas Barbour) from The University of Alberta Press (2006). She recently performed in NYC and in Minneapolis/St. Paul with the Be Blank Consort, and in Edmonton, Alberta, with Douglas Barbour. Her home is in Phoenix, Arizona.
   
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.
EPC Page
David Meltzer Survey

   
   
Philip Metres is a poet and a translator whose work has appeared Best American Poetry (2002). His books include: To See the Earth (2008), Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 (2007), Instants (chap, 2006), Primer for Non-Native Speakers (chap, 2004), Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein (2004), and A Kindred Orphanhood: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky (2003). He teaches literature and creative writing at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. Were it not for Ellis Island, his last name would be Abourjaili. He can be reachedat pmetres@jcu.edu. For more information and for links to books and poems, see http://www.philipmetres.com and http://www.behindthelinespoetry.blogspot.com.
   
   
Boston born, Neil Nelson has resided in New Mexico, California, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Madras, So. India. He and his wife Sonia, live in Albuquerque where they recently returned after a long absence, and where a chance encounter with Robert Creeley in the sixties led Neil to the University of New Mexico classes of the late Gene Frumkin, and acquaintance with many of the early participants in the Placitas experiment that marked early seventies New Mexico. A reminiscence recalling his meeting with Creeley, "The Poet," along with other tributes to that erstwhile Placitas resident can be accessed on-line in Rough Road Review. He is an invited contributor to the forthcoming book How We Came to Santa Fe to be released at the New Year.
   

Photo by Joan Treat
Paul E. Nelson founded Global Voices Radio, co-founded SPLAB in Auburn, Washington. Earned M.A. in Organic Poetry. Published in: The Argotist, Golden Handcuffs Review, Raven Chronicles, Fulcrum, OlsonNow blog. Performed at: Bumbershoot, Seattle Poetry Festival, Burning Word, Sacred Activism Conference. Interviewed: Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Michael McClure, Robin Blaser, Wanda Coleman, George Bowering, Joanne Kyger, Victor Hernandez Cruz. Authored: A Time Before Slaughter. President: Washington Poets Association. Writes: American Sentences.
   
The poems of Rodney Nelson (he's at the far left of the photo) first broke into print in 1970 (Georgia Review, Nimrod, for example), and there were chapbooks; then he sidetracked and did not touch a poem from 1982 to 2004. The comeback was in the ezines. See his entry in the Poets & Writers directory. He has worked as licensed psychiatric technician and book and copy editor.
   
Stephen Nelson: Born (1970) and raised in Scotland. Graduate of Glasgow University. Writer and musician with poetry and fiction published in various magazines. One time busker, traveller, dancer, juggler; now enjoys Christian contemplation and the occasional ginger biscuit.
   
Murat Nemet-Nejat Murat Nemet-Nejat, poet, essayist, and translator, born in Istanbul, has lived in the United States since 1959. He is the editor of Eda: An Anthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry. His books include the poems The Bridge, Turkish Voices, "Vocabularies of Space," Io's Song, "Aishe Series and Other Harbor Poems," Alphabet Dialogues/Penis Monologues (a collaboration with the poet Standard Schaeffer), and The Structure of Escape, the translations from the Turkish poets Orhan Veli and Ece Ayhan, I, Orhan Veli and A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies, and the essays, The Peripheral Space of Photography, "Ideas Towards a Theory of Translation in Eda," "Questions of Accent," and "Eleven Septembers Later: Readings of Benjamin Hollander's Vigilance."
   
Kevin Opstedal is a poet as well as the editor/publisher of Blue Press Books (bluepressbooks.com), a venture started 10 years ago with poet Michael Price. His most recent book of poems is User's Manual to the Pacific Coast Highway (Seven Fingers Press, Boulder, 2007). He has also recently helped edit the as yet unpublished Dear Oxygen, Selected Poems of Lewis MacAdams. Born and raised in Venice Beach, California, Opstedal currently resides in Santa Cruz.
   
Jose Padua's poetry and fiction have appeared in Bomb, Salon.com, Exquisite Corpse, Another Chicago Magazine, Unbearables, Crimes of the Beats, Up is Up, but So Is Down: New York's Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992, and many other journals and anthologies. He has also written features and reviews for NYPress, Washington City Paper, the Brooklyn Rail and the New York Times. He has read his work at the Lollapalooza Festival, CBGBs, the Knitting Factory, the Black Cat Club, the Public Theater, the Washington Project for the Arts, and many other venues. Some of his work can be found at http://jfpadua.blogspot.com/ and http://paduakings.blogspot.com/.
   
Frank Parker combined his crafts of printing and writing to publish his book Heart Shaped Blossoms and has since become active in electronic publishing: i.e., Frank's Home, http://frankshome.org. His poem "Wild with Spring" won a prize in Quarry West 35/36: Poets and Writers of the Monterey Bay, edited by Ken Weisner, judged by Francisco X. Alarcón, in the Spring of 2000. . . . moved to Tucson, Arizona, May 2003, from Monterey, California. Frank is on the board of POG (Poetry Organization) which sponsors readings in Tucson. He is also the audio archivist for the Chax Press and POG reading series.
   
Mark Pawlak is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Official Versions. His work has been translated into German, Polish, and Spanish, and has appeared widely, in English, in journals and anthologies, including in The Best American Poetry 2006 (Billy Collins, ed.). In addition, he is editor of four anthologies, the most recent being Present/Tense: Poets in the World, a collection of contemporary American political poetry. Pawlak is co-editor/publisher of Brooklyn-based Hanging Loose Press. He supports his poetry habit by teaches mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he is Director of Academic Support Programs. He lives in Cambridge with his wife and his teenage son.
   
Charles Potts has been a published writer since his first appearance in Wild Dog in 1963. He was the driving force underneath The Temple Bookstore, The Temple magazine, and The Temple School of Poetry. He founded Litmus Inc. in Seattle and Berkeley which published 18 first editions, including Charles Bukowski's Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8-Story Window in 1968. He also founded Tsunami Inc., a vertically integrated international publishing venture, which published The Temple magazine, for six years, ending in 2002, as well as several fine first editions of poetry by Stephen Thomas, Teri Zipf, Jim Bodeen, Travis Catsull, klipschutz, and the widely appreciated anthology, Pacific Northwestern Spiritual Poetry. Potts is a Master Practitioner in the Society of Neuro Linguistic Programming, an Accomplished Toastmaster, and from 1988-1994, he was the Northwest Representative for the Pinxxiee Corporation and Chinese Computer Communications, Inc. In the mid-nineties he spent a year in Fukuoka, Japan, where he studied the structure of Japanese language and culture. Recent Charles Potts books include a reprint of Little Lord Shiva: The Berkeley Poems, 1968, from Glass Eye Books; Lost River Mountain from Blue Begonia Press; Fascist Haikus from Acid Press; Angio Gram from D Press; Nature Lovers from Pleasure Boat Studio; Slash and Burn with Robert McNealy from Blue Begonia Press; and Across the North Pacific from Slough Press in College Station, Texas. Kiot, The Portable Potts, and The Yellow Christ and Laffing Water, two volumes of his classic memoir Valga Krusa have recently been published also.
   
Marthe Reed's poetry has appeared in such print journals as Golden Handcuffs Review, New Orleans Review, and Sulfur, and in numerous online ezines such as HOW2, MiPoesias, Exquisite Corpse, Aught, eratio, and moria. Her manuscript, an earth of sweetness dances in the vein, was a finalist in Ahsahta Press's 2006 Sawtooth Poetry Contest. A book, Tender Box, A Wunderkammer, is just out from Lavender Ink in New Orleans.
   
Tennessee Reed began writing at the age of five and has compiled five books of poetry. They include Circus in the Sky; Electric Chocolate; and Airborne. Her fourth and fifth poetry books are included in her latest collection City Beautiful — Poems 1998 - 2006.
   
Lou Rowan began writing in the heyday of experimentation associated with St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery in New York City.
During the 70's, Lou taught in the City; in l980 he entered the business-world, becoming an executive with two global institutional-investment firms.
In his satirical novel, My Last Days, a well-known superhero takes on the corruptions of many current public figures in politics, business, and the arts. Toby Olson calls My Last Days, "a wonder." It is forthcoming from Chiasmus Press.
A selection of his stories will be published next spring by Ahadada Books. Rochelle Owens calls these experimental stories a combination of Rabelais, Voltaire, and Mickey Spillane.
Lou has published poetry, and a range of critical essays, most recently in The English Studies Forum and The Review of Contemporary Fiction.
He is currently working at a long novel on the "losing of the West."
He lives in Seattle, where he edits Golden Handcuffs Review, a journal of contemporary writing in all genres.
   
Tad Richards has lived long enough to have written a bunch of stuff, a more or less complete list of which you could find, should you so desire, at his web page, http://www.opus40.org/tadrichards/. "March 2003" is one of a series of poems that he can't seem to start writing, all in the same 5-stanza syllabic form that he came up with, although it's probably not innovative enough to be called an innovation. It's five stanzas of five lines each, using a repeating syllabic pattern which repeats every four lines, so that every stanza is different, except tor the last which mirrors the first. He thinks of these 5/4 poems as a sort of extended sonnet sequence, with its own special demands and satisfactions. Ye Olde Font Shoppe Pres in Connecticut will be publishing a chapbook of them, Take Five: Poems in 5/4 Time.
   
e k rzepka is a catabolic literary antaction against deferred tautomerization. he can be found dissolving into such locations as nanajin zaleikeinen. a multilingual heritage for the multinationally silent.
   

Photo by Gerard Malanga 2007
Aram Saroyan's most recent books are Complete Minimal Poems and Artists in Trouble: New Stories. He teaches in the Master of Professional Writing program at USC.

   
Larry Sawyer sells unreal estate on the Internet. His poetry and critical reviews have appeared in Van Gogh's Ear (France), Jacket (Australia), The Prague Literary Review, Unpleasant Event Schedule, Outlaw (UK), Mad Love, Skid Row Penthouse, Paper Tiger (Australia), Tabacaria (Portugal), Hunger, Skanky Possum, Exquisite Corpse, NY Arts Magazine, RANGE, can we have our ball back?, Shampoo, WORD/ for Word, Versal (Holland), The Tiny, Coconut, 88, Court Green, The East Village, and elsewhere. His chapbooks include Poems for Peace (anthology, Structum Press); A Chaise Lounge in Hell (aboveground press, Ontario, Canada); and Tyrannosaurus Ant (mother's milk press). Sawyer edits www.milkmag.org with Lina ramona Vitkauskas and curates the Myopic Books Poetry Reading Series at Myopic Books in Wicker Park, Chicago. His blog is http://larrysawyer.blogspot.com/. Forthcoming work will appear in The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (Cracked Slab).
   
Leslie Scalapino's most recent book of poetry is Day Ocean State of Stars' Night, Green Integer, 2007. Her selected poems, It's go in horizontal, will be published by UC Press in spring 2008.
   
Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino's poetry and prose have appeared in print in Barrow Street, The Germ, jubilat, Ixnay and in Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics and online at GAMMM, Onedit, Pindeldyboz,, Ghoti and Xcp: Streetnotes. His interview with the English writer Colin Wilson is online at The Argotist Online. He lives in Brooklyn Heights, New York, where he edits the online poetry journal eratio and works as a private docent. http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Wilson%20interview.htm http://www.eratiopostmodernpoetry.com
   
Fisher Thompson has traveled coast to coast in the USA in search of a literary home; finally settling in Southern California. He has published book reviews, essays, poetry and prose in numerous publications erudite and incendiary, including Barfing Frog Press, Indite Circle, Laura Hird, Mad Hatters' Review, and Muse Apprentice Guild. His travels continue as he forever searches for the story within. . .

   
James Tierney is a writer of fiction and of critical essays on art and fiction, and he is going to live in El Paso, Texas.
   
Larissa Shmailo has recently been published in Fulcrum, Drunken Boat, BigCityLit, Nairopa's We, Little Red Leaves, The Argotist Online, Ginosko, and many other publications. Her CD, The No-Net World, has been heard on radio stations and the Internet around the world. Larissa translated the Russian Futurist opera Victory over the Sun by A. Kruchenych and recently contributed translations to the anthology Contemporary Russian Poetry from Dalkey Archive Press. Larissa is a director of TWiN Poetry (www.myspace.com/twinpoetry), an informal collective of 8,000 poets, spoken word artists, and poetry lovers.
   
Harris Schiff's books include Secret Clouds, Easy Street, I should run for cover but I'm right here, In the Heart of the Empire (possibly available from United Artists Books), Yo-Yo's with Money (with Ted Berrigan), Transmission From a Liberated Zone, recently (2005) Abandonship (Blue Press Books) and forthcoming, The Selected Poems of Harris Schiff (to be published by an unknown clever person out there). Harris's 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 on the fourth of July 1996 uploaded the longest established floating literary cyberzine on the web: $lavery — Cyberzine of the Arts.
   
Born in 1951 in Louisville, Kentucky, David Schneider was the first child of Marc, a Jew and engineer, and Georgia, his southern Baptist sociologist mother. David rapidly acquired three sisters, the rudiments of a standard boomer education, and a bi-religious, Southern upbringing, involving. Saturday School and Sunday School. He grew up in Pittsburgh, PA . He began to practice Zen meditation with a local group at Reed College, in Portland, OR and attended sesshins with Joshu Sasaki Roshi in 1970 and 71. In January, 1971, he met Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, and in April of the same year, he saw Suzuki Roshi and Trungpa Rinpoche together at the San Francisco Zen Center. David dropped out of Reed College to move into Zen Center. He took up studies under Richard Baker Roshi, and in 1977, he received ordination as unsui or "cloud-water person." He did many academic and practical jobs as part of community life there, which ran from 1972-85. The 1983 scandal at SF Zen Center led to the departure of Baker Roshi. In 1984, in the formal shuso ceremony, David was ordained as a head monk at the Hartford Street Zen Center in San Francisco. David wrote Street Zen, a biography of Issan Dorsey, published in 1993 by Shambhala Publications, and again in 2000 by Marlowe. Street Zen won several prizes, included "Best Buddhist Book of the Year" in 1993. In 1994 he co-edited with Kazuaki Tanahashi a collection of zen stories, titled Essential Zen.

David now works for Vajradhatu Publications Europe; he continues as well to pursue writing projects - currently, a biography of Beat poet and zen master Zenshin Philip Whalen - as well as calligraphy exhibitions.

   
James Scully lives in San Francisco. Recent publications: Line Break: Poetry as Social Practice (essays) and Donatello's Version (poems).
   
Hugh Seidman's poetry has won several awards including, most recently, the 2004 Green Rose Prize from New Issues Press (Western Michigan University) for his sixth poetry collection, Somebody Stand Up and Sing, published in 2005. Other awards include two New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) grants, a New York State Creative Artists Public Service (CAPS) grant, and three National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) fellowships. His first book Collecting Evidence (Yale University Press) won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize; his fourth book People Live, They Have Lives (Miami University Press, Oxford, Ohio) won the Camden Poetry Award (Walt Whitman Center for the Arts). Seidman's Selected Poems: 1965-1995 received a 1995 Critics' Choice "Best Books" citation and was chosen as one of the "25 Favorite Books of 1995" by The Village Voice. His other books are Throne/Falcon/Eye (Random House) and Blood Lord (Doubleday). A chapbook, 12 Views of Freetown, 1 View of Bumbuna (Half Moon Bay Press), was published in 2003. New Poems, an ebook downloadable from Ahadada Books at http://www.ahadadabooks.com/content/view/55/41/ was published in 2006. Seidman has taught writing at the University of Wisconsin, Yale University, Columbia University, the College of William and Mary, the New School University, and several other institutions.
   
Lisa Sewell is the author of two books of poems, The Way Out (Alice James Books) and Name Withheld (Four Way Books). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Denver Quarterly, Third Coast and, most recently, Laurel Review.
   
Ron Silliman is author of numerous books including Tjanting, The Figures, Berkeley, CA, 1981; Bart, Potes & Poets Press, Hartford, CT, 1982; ABC, Tuumba, Berkeley, CA, 1983; Paradise, Burning Deck, Providence, RI, 1985 (1985 Poetry Center Book Award); The Age of Huts, Roof Books, New York, 1986; Lit, Potes & Poets Press, Hartford, CT, 1987; What, The Figures, Great Barrington, MA, 1988; Manifest, Zasterle Press, Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, 1990; Leningrad (collaboration with Michael Davidson, Lyn Hejinian, and Barrett Watten), Mercury House, San Francisco, CA, 1991; Demo to Ink, Chax Press, Tucson, AZ, 1992; Toner, Potes & Poets Press, E. Hartford, CT, 1992; Jones, Generator Press, Mentor, OH, 1993; and N/O, Roof Press, New York, NY, 1994.
   
   
John Oliver Simon is a fifth-generation Californian born in New York City in 1942. His books of poetry include Roads to Dawn Lake (Oyez, 1968), Rattlesnake Grass (Hanging Loose, 1976), Neither of Us Can Break the Other\s Hold (Shameless Hussy, 1982), Lord of the House of Dawn (Bombshelter, 1991), Son Caminos (poems in Spanish, Hotel Ambosmundos, Mexico City, 1997) and Caminante (Creative Arts, 2002). Ghosts of the Palace of Blue Tiles, a chapbook of his translations of Mexican poet Jorge Fernández Granados, was published by Tameme in 2008. He is Artistic Director of Poetry Inside Out, a project of the Center for the Art of Translation, which teaches literary translation to bilingual elementary and middle school students.
   
Hal Sirowitz is the former Poet Laureate of Queens. His archives will be kept in the Fales Collction at NYU. Some of his poems from My Therapist Said will be performed to music by David Eddleman at Symphony Space in New York City on May 29, 2008.
   
Dale Smith edits Skanky Possum books with Hoa Nguyen. His poems, essays, and reviews appear in First Intensity, The Poker, Chicago Review, Bookforum, and other small journals. American Rambler (2000) and The Flood & The Garden (2002) are available through SPD Books in Berkeley. He is working on a PhD in rhetoric at the University of Texas. Notes No Answer (Habenicht Press) was published last year and Black Stone (Effing) will be available in Fall 2006. He lives in Austin with Keaton, Waylon, and Hoa.
Joel Solonche is coauthor of Peach Girl: Poems for a Chinese Daughter (Grayson Books). His poems have appeared in many journals, magazines, and anthologies. He teaches at SUNY Orange in Middletown, New York.
   
Joseph Somoza has just published a new book of poems, Shock of White Hair. He lives with his wife Jill, a painter, in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where they take an active part in the local arts community.
   
Alan Sondheim's books include the anthology Being on Line: Net Subjectivity (Lusitania, 1996), Disorders of the Real (Station Hill, 1988), .echo (alt-X digital arts, 2001), Vel (Blazevox 2004-5), Sophia (Writers Forum, 2004), Orders of the Real (Writers Forum, 2005), and The Wayward (Salt, 2004) as well as numerous other chapbooks, ebooks, and articles. His video and film have been internationally shown. Sondheim co-moderates several pioneering email lists, including Cybermind, Cyberculture and Wryting. Since January, 1994, he has been working on an "Internet Text," a continuous meditation on philosophy, psychology, language, body, and virtuality. In 1999, Sondheim was the 2nd Virtual Writer in Residence for the Trace online writing community (Nottingham-Trent University, England).

In 2004, he was a 5-week resident of the Center for Literary Computing and the Virtual Environments Laboratory at West Virginia University; in 2006 he was a 6-week resident there. In 2005 he was resident artist/writer at Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana. He produced two CDs at the latter (his older records have been reissued by ESP-Disk and FireMuseum). Currently he is working on a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant at WVU, between a number of departments; his research is in codework, computer literature, virtual environments, and avatars. A second CD appeared last year from FireMuseum, as well as an lp from Qbico. In 2001, Sondheim assembled a special issue of the American Book Review on Codework, which was seminal in its genre. Sondheim taught in the Trace online writing program; in 2001-2 he also taught new media at Florida International University in Miami. He is currently teaching two courses in film at Brown University. Sondheim works with the Swiss dancer/choreographer Foofwa d'Imobilite, as well as his partner, Azure Carter; their work has been premiered across Europe, and is continuing on a New York State Counceil of the Arts grant for this year. Sondheim's own laptop performances have been seen internationally. Last year he had a major exhibition at Track 16 Gallery in Los Angeles. Sondheim's work is trans-media; his emphasis is on writing, theory, and digital performance; his most recent performance was in Second Life with Sandy Baldwin, for live audiences in France and Germany.

Relevant URLS: http://www.asondheim.org/; Blog: http://nikuko.blogspot.com/; and WVU 2004 projects http://www.as.wvu.edu/clcold/sondheim/files/.

   
Jayne Lyn Stahl is a widely published poet whose work has appeared in Exquisite Corpse, The New York Quarterly, Poetry Magazine, The Jacaranda Review, City Lights Review, Pulpsmith, Big Bridge, Jack Magazine, and many other notable magazines and anthologies. She is a member of PEN American Center in New York and PEN USA.
   
James Spitzer is an artist living and working in Northern California. For related work check him out in the last issue of Big Bridge.

   
Ingrid Swanberg is a native Californian transposed to the Midwest. Her poetry has appeared in different small press venues since 1967. A recent electronic chapbook, Eight Poems, appears in the Light & Dust Anthology of Poetry, and poems are forthcoming in Osiris, Presa and Whitewall of Sound. She has just completed a full-length book of poetry, The Fire at My Feet.

She has been actively involved as a writer, editor and publisher in preserving and advancing the work of d.a.levy since the early 70s when levy's close friend and collaborator, D.r. Wagner, gave her the original manuscript of levy's concrete poem sequence, Zen Concrete, originally published by bill bissett’s blewointmentpress.

She edited several mimeo poetry magazines in collaboration with D.r. Wagner and Melinda Barry in Sacramento, California and later on in Madison, Wisconsin. In the early 80s she assumed editorship of the poetry magazine Abraxas, and founded Ghost Pony Press with the intention of eventually reprinting Zen Concrete. The book materialized in 1991 as Zen Concrete & Etc., presenting 245 pages of levy's poetry, concrete poetry and collages, including a facsimile reproduction of the mimeo edition of the long poem Cleveland undercovers and a transcription of a radio talk show featuring levy, plus essays by and interviews with some of his contemporaries. In 1998 she and Karl Young launched the d.a.levy homepage with the shared vision of levy's being situated in his rightful place among the international avant-garde. In 2007 she co-edited, with Larry Smith, d.a.levy & the Mimeograph Revolution. She received the PhD in Comparative Literature in 2005 (University of Wisconsin-Madison). She is currently revising and expanding her dissertation, a comparative study of the lyric poets d.a.levy, Friedrich Hölderlin, Arthur Rimbaud and Georg Trakl, into a book that will also include a study of the Ohioan poet James Wright.

   
Robert Sward has taught at Cornell University, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and UC Santa Cruz. A Fulbright scholar and Guggenheim Fellow, he was chosen by Lucille Clifton to receive a Villa Montalvo Literary Arts Award. His thirty books include Heavenly Sex: The Collected Poems and God is in the Cracks (Black Moss Press). Born and raised in Chicago, he served in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War and later worked as book reviewer and feature writer for The Toronto Star and The Globe & Mail, and as producer for CBC Radio, where he interviewed and produced shows on Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen and others. His non-fiction book The Toronto Islands was a bestseller. Please visit Roberts new website http://www.robertsward.com and blog http://drswardscureformelancholia.blogspot.com/ .
   
Nathaniel Tarn is a poet, translator, critic, editor and anthropologist, living north-west of Santa Fe, NM. with some 30 plus books in these disciplines. Some volumes, incredibly enough, are available for purchase by those with hope and energy. It is astonishing how such purchase empowers survival. T is celebrating his 80th year. He has worked very recently in Indonesia, the Philippines, Borneo, Papua New Guinea, Australia and Antarctica. Some of the Borneo work, arising out of NGO volunteering, will appear in his New Directions volume, Fall 2008: the "Ins & Outs of Forest Rivers" poem first came out in a recent issue of "Mandorla." The book also contains the Mathias Grunewald poem, now in "First Intensity" no.22. As the list below reveals, there are at least two other new projects. Tarn has passionate belief in birds and flowers, none whatsoever in today's pobiz, and a powerful conviction that the human race is doing itself in. He is beginning to be fond of children. Recent and Forthcoming Publications:
"Selected Poems: 1950-2000" (Wesleyan University Press)
"The Embattled Lyric: Essays & Conversations in Poetics & Anthropology" (Stanford University Press)
"Scandals in the House of Birds: Shamans & Priests on Lake Atitlan, Guatemala" (Marsilio, NYC & L'Harmattan, Paris)
"Ins & Outs of the Forest Rivers" (New Directions, Fall 2008)
Untitled U.K. Book, 2008
"The Persephones" Rewritten (Ninja Press, 2008)
Papers at Stanford University Libraries, Special Collections

   
Eileen Tabios most recently released The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes (Marsh Hawk Press, 2007) and SILENCES: The Autobiography of Loss (Blue Lion, 2007). In her poetry, she has crafted a body of work that is unique for melding ekphrasis with transcolonialism. She’s also edited or co-edited five books of poetry, fiction and essays. She is the Poet Laureate for Dutch Henry Winery in St. Helena, California, where, as a budding vintner, she is arduously and long-sufferingly researching the poetry of wine. Her poems have been translated into Spanish, Italian, Tagalog, Japanese, Portuguese, Paintings, Video, Drawings, Visual Poetry, Mixed Media Collages, Kali Martial Arts, Modern Dance and Sculpture.
   
Gay Partington Terry is a Manx West Virginian insomniac who practices and teaches Tai Chi Ch'uan, Qi Gong, and yoga. When she was young, she assisted her father in his magic act. As an adult, she's been a waitress, a factory worker, and welfare worker in northern Appalachia; she cataloged tribal arts for Sotheby's and worked in Margaret Mead's office before she died. She's had short stories published in ezines and small fantasy magazines, and has written two parts of "The Toxic Avenger." She has two grown children and a granddaughter, and lives in Brooklyn with her long-suffering husband; they're watched over by the ghost of a loyal Australian Shepherd.
   
Nickolay Todorov was born in the violent and mystical Balkans. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a witness and a beneficiary of the wild Southern California lifestyle. His short stories have been published in The Barcelona Review, The Pacific Review, Whiskey Island Magazine, Farmhouse Magazine, The Istanbul Literary Review, The Southern Ocean Review, and The Dublin Quarterly Review, and upcoming in The Literary Review. His travelogues, born of his obsession with adventure, have been published in Destination Elsewhere, Travelmag, unoTraveller, Pology, and Travelbogger Magazine.
   
Georgios Tsangaris lives in a small cabin in the woods of southern vermont. In the summer he walks on coals in a circus. During the school year he attends marlboro college and works on an ethnographic study of a local punk rock art collective. He is trying to prepare for peak oil/2012/the rapture. he can be contacted at geo@marlboro.edu.
   
Paul A. Toth lives in Sanibel, Florida. His first novel Fizz and its successor Fishnet are available now. Short fiction credits include The Barcelona Review, Night Train and The Mississippi Review Online.  His poetry has featured by The Potomac, Nth Position, Piker Press, Arabesques Review, and others.  See www.netpt.tv for more information.

   
Aysegül Tözeren. was born in Istanbul and currently lives in Istanbul, Turkey. In the year that she's graduated from Istanbul Medical Faculty, her first visual poem was published in Zinhar Magazine, which is the only visual and concrete poetry magazine in Turkish. After, her work has appeared in Otoliths, Monokl, Yasakmeyve Magazines, poetikHars, coupremine blog and in nokturno.org with Finnish textual information . Some of the visual poems that were published in magazines were exhibited in Platforma(an exhibition for Visual Poetry of Asia) and in Public Pages exhibitions. Her essay on Kenneth Patchen was published in Kaldron.
   
   
Patricia Valdata is a novelist and poet who lives in Elkton, Maryland.
   
   
Stephen Vincent's Signals, the photo/poem piece in this issue is from his Ghost Walk series, segments of which can found on his blog at http://stephenvincent.net/blog/. Junction Press recently published Walking Theory, a much acclaimed poetry volume of walking in and around San Francisco (www.junctionpress.com). Other recent works include the ebooks Sleeping With Sappho (faux press) and Triggers (Shearsman).
   
Dan Waber is a visual poet, concrete poet, sound poet, performance poet, publisher, editor, playwright and multimedia artist whose work has appeared in all sorts of delicious places, from digital to print, from stage to classroom, from mailboxes to puppet theaters. He is currently working on everywhere in between. He makes his online home at logolalia.com
   
 
Anne Waldman is an internationally known poet, performer, professor, editor, with strong personal links to the New York School, the Beat Literary Movement, and the experimental strands of the New American Poetry. She has also extended performance to new dimensions with her "modal structures" as in the celebrated "Pieces of An Hour" (for John Cage). She is a Distinguished Professor of Poetics at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, a program she co-founded with poet Allen Ginsberg in 1974.
   
Christopher Wells has worked as a computer technician, library clerk, guitar instructor, tutor, janitor, and grader of green beans. He lives in central Ohio with his wife and animals. Flaming Giblet Press will publish his novel White Kitty in a limited edition in 2008. He is coeditor of the electronic journal 21 Stars Review.
   
Keith Wilson was born in New Mexico in 1927. He grew up in the Southwest, punching cows, digging ditches and working on farms and ranches. After graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1950 and serving in Korea, he resigned his commission and worked for his Master's degree at the University of New Mexico. He has taught writing at the University of Nevada, the University of Arizona, and at New Mexico State University. He has received a number of awards for his poetry including the P.E.N. American Center grant, the D. H. Lawrence Creative Writer Fellowship, the Westhafer Award, a Senior Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writer Fellowship. Among his many books are Sketches for a New Mexico Hilltown, 11 Sequences, Graves Registry and Other Poems, Homestead, Rocks, The Shadow of Our Bones, The Old Man and Others, Holland, Some Faces of America, Midwatch (Graves Registry Books 4-6), and Thantog: Songs of the Jaguar Priest.. Today he still lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico, with Heloise, his wife of nearly fifty years.
   
Maw Shein Win lives in Berkeley, California. Her work has been published in journals such as Watchword, Instant City, Shampoo, and Unpleasant Event Schedule, and was recently featured in No Tell Motel. She is co-founder of Comet (www.cometmagazine.com) and was an Artist In Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts. A recipient of the Creativity Workshops 2007 Women Writers Fellowship in Italy, she also has a residency at Can Serrat International Art Center in Spain for 2008.
   
Mary (Sands) Woodbury is the editor of Jack Magazine. In the past she was the web designer for Big Bridge, where she worked with Ira Cohen and Robert La Vigne on large art cyber-spectives. She has degrees in English and anthropology from Purdue University, and has been a writer and editor for the past few years. Mary moved from California to the Midwest temporarily, and currently lives in Vancouver, British Columbia with her husband and their cat, "Kitty".
   
Nellie Wong is the author of three books of poetry. Two of her poems are engraved on public sites in San Francisco. She is co-featured in the documentary film, "Mitsuye & Nellie Asian American Poets." Her poem, "Sailing with Memories of Li Hong," was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2005. She integrates political activism and art with Radical Women and the Freedom Socialist Party.
   
Karl Young's personal home page can be found by clicking here.

And his Light and Dust Web anthology can be found by clicking here.

For the beginning of a retrospective of his literary activities, click here.

   
Harriet Zinnes's many books include Whither Nonstopping (poems), Drawing on the Wall (poems), My, Haven't the Flowers Been (poems), Entropisms (prose poems), Lover (short stories), The Radiant Absurdity of Desire (short stories), Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts (criticism), and Blood and Feathers (translations from the French poetry of Jacques Prevert). Forthcoming are a new edition of the Prevert and a new collection of poems titled Light Light or The Curvature of the Earth. She is a contributing editor of The Hollins Critic and as art critic a contributing writer of New York Arts Magazine. She is Professor Emerita of English of Queens College of the City University of New York.
   
Once, long, long ago in the Dark Forest, Jordan Zinovic heard Baba Yaga singing and glimpsed her walking hut -- a vision that utterly arrested his maturation. Through the passing years he has grown younger, and smaller, desperately pursuing her trail of glimmering words. Compulsion is all that remains. He doesn't ask for pity.