Tara Bray's work has most recently or will soon appear in Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Green Mountains Review, and New Orleans Review. She manages the Nevada Arts Council's Tumblewords and its Traveling Exhibition Program and teaches at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Selections from Jenna Cardinale's Journals series have appeared in Milk Magazine and are forthcoming in 6 x 6. She lives in the Bronx, where she teaches poetry to the K-6 crowd.
Joshua Corey is the author of Selah (Barrow Street Press, 2003) and has published poems in Octopus, LIT, VOLT, American Letters & Commentary, and elsewhere. His second book, Fourier Series, won the Fitzpatrick-O'Dinn Award judged by Christian Bök and is forthcoming from Spineless Books. More prose musings can be found at http://joshcorey.blogspot.com.
Danielle Dutton lives in Colorado with her boyfriend and their cat, Dr. Spanglestien. Her most recent work has appeared in Fence and NOON, and at the web-journal Tarpaulin Sky.
Jacob Edmond is a scholar of comparative literature currently based at Harvard University. He works on contemporary American, Chinese, and Russian poetry. In his Ph.D. dissertation, he compared the poetry of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Lyn Hejinian, and Yang Lian, and he is currently working on a history of the interaction between Russian poets and American Language Poetry. He would like to thank Michael Radich, a poet and scholar of Chinese language and culture, for his invaluable comments on the translation.
Jeffrey Encke, a critic and poet whose work has recently appeared in Octopus, Colorado Review, Barrow Street, Salt Hill, and Quarterly West, has studied the history of the manifesto extensively. He is currently revising for publication his doctoral dissertation on the subject, Manifestos: A Social History of Proclamation. His other writing projects include two full-length poetry collections, Most Wanted and Hydrography, and a study of the influence of technological innovation on the production and reception of art, Rogue Magic. He holds a PhD in English from Columbia University, where he served as writer-in-residence for the school's Program in Narrative Medicine in 2002.
Ian Ganassi's poetry has appeared in numerous literary magazines, including The Yale Review, The Paris Review, and Denver Quarterly. His most recent publications include poems in Hotel Amerika and The Hat; an essay in the current issue of American Letters & Commentary; a translation of Book 2 of Virgil's Aeneid in New England Review; and poems forthcoming in Poetry Motel. He lives in New Haven where he works as a percussionist.
Forrest Gander lives outside Providence, in Rhode Island. His most recent books include Torn Awake (New Directions, 2001) and a translation of poems by Mexican poet Pura Lopez Colome, No Shelter (Graywolf, 2001).
Carolyn Guinzio is from Chicago and lives in Fayetteville, AR. Her work is forthcoming in the Indiana Review, Luna and New American Writing among others.
Matt Hart is the editor of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, and Light Industrial Safety. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Conduit, Ploughshares, and The Canary, among others. He teaches in the Academic Studies Department at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.
Matthew Henriksen has poems in storySouth,
Three Candles, canwehaveourballback?, and Bestest American
Poetry. He co-edits Typo
and will soon live in New York with his hot new wife.
Tom Horacek's poems have appeared in can we have our ball back?,
Fence, and Failbetter, and a collection of his cartoons will
be published by Drawn and Quarterly in 2005.
Kent Johnson is translator, with Forrest Gander, of Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz (U of California Press, 2003). He and Gander have recently finished a translation of Saenz's The Night, a section of which appears in this issue. Other selections from The Night are forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Mandorla, and No: a journal of the arts. His poem on the Abu Ghraib prison matter, which is being translated into Arabic, is available at http://www.blazevox.org/kent.htm. Kent was recently named the 2004 State Teacher of the Year by the Illinois Community College Trustees Association.
Ronald Johnson was born in Ashland, Kansas in 1935 and died in Topeka, Kansas in 1998. In between, he attended the University of Kansas for a year before enlisting in the Army on the G.I. Bill, completing his education at Columbia University, where he moved in the post-Black Mountain College circles, thanks mainly to Jonathan Williams, his companion for many years. After a lengthy period of wandering - through the English countryside and Appalachia - Johnson began to publish books of poetry, notably A Line of Poetry, a Row of Trees and Book of the Green Man. He was a critical participant in the Concrete Poetry movement of the 1970s, publishing work with Ian Hamilton Finlay's various organs, and culminating in the appearance of Songs of the Earth, his concrete meditations on Mahler's Ninth Symphony. In 1969 he settled in San Francisco, his home for twenty-five years, which is where he wrote his masterpiece ARK. During this period, he worked as a bartender, caterer, cook and cookbook writer, producing several terrific cookbooks, including The Aficionado's Southwest Cooking and The American Table. In 1994, he moved back to Kansas, to Topeka, where he worked part-time as a gardener, writing the poems that make up his final work, The Shrubberies.
Anastasios Kozaitis works on the lateral file line at the Hon Factory in Muscatine, Iowa. You'll find him most every night just over the Mississippi in Rock Island, Missouri at Jim's Rib Haven gnawing on a baby back beef rib. He prefers the hot barbecue sauce. After wiping off the excessive rib glaze and slurping down lemonade, he might pen a poem before heading over to Davenport, Iowa for some ice cream at Whitey's. And, if that ain't enough excitement and you still haven't found him make sure you check the craps tables in the Lady Luck Riverboat Casino.
Joshua Kryah's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Chelsea, Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, and Verse. He is the newest Schaeffer Fellow in poetry at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.
Kevin Larimer's poems have apeared in various journals, including Fence, The Iowa Review, Volt, Electronic Poetry Review, Pleiades, and most recently The Canary. Several of his poems are forthcoming in Shade. He lives in Brooklyn.
Julie Larios has published poetry recently in Ploughshares, Field, Threepenney Review and ZZYZYVA. She was a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Fellowship and was awarded an Academy of American Poets Prize in 2002. She lives in Seattle.
John Latta's first collection, Rubbing Torsos, appeared in 1979 (Ithaca House). A new book titled Breeze, winner of the 2003 Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry, is recently out (University of Notre Dame Press). New poems are in or forthcoming in Chicago Review, Xantippe, Bird Dog, Typo, No: a journal of the arts, New American Writing, Jacket, Boston Review, and elsewhere. A newish resident of Blogland, he resides at Hotel Point.
Alex Lemon lives in St. Paul, MN with a cactus. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Black Warrior Review, New Orleans Review, CutBank, Sonora Review, Swink, The Butcher Shop and Typo among other publications. He is the assistant editor for LUNA, a journal of poetry and translation.
Ben Lerner's first book, The Lichtenberg Figures, will be published by Copper Canyon next fall. He co-edits No: a journal of the arts.
Aaron McCollough is the author of two books: Welkin (Ahsahta Press, 2002) and Double Venus (Salt Publishing, 2003). He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He has recent work in or forthcoming from Denver Quarterly, Conduit, Castagraf, Stride, Phoebe, Drunken Boat, and The Canary. He is the poetry editor for GutCult. McCollough's third book, Little Ease, is forthcoming from Ahsahta Press in 2006 & his poems are forthcoming in anthologies from Verse Press and Stride Books.
Paul McCormick's recent work appears or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, LUNA, La Petite Zine, DIAGRAM, Salt Hill, and can we have our ball back? He lives in Huntington Station, NY and works as an assessment specialist for Harcourt Brace, McGraw-Hill, and Riverside Publishing. He is currently a finalist in the National Poetry Series.
Joyelle McSweeney's second book, The Commandrine and Other Poems, is forthcoming from Fence Books in 2004; her first, The Red Bird, was also published by Fence Books. She writes for The Constant Critic and teaches at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.
Jeff Morgan grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska and now lives in Lemont, Pennsylvania. He's recently married to the poet and artist Carla Conforto. Also recently, his poems have appeared in places like La Petite Zine, LIT and Pavement Saw. He's cautiously optimistic that his first book, Crying Shame is contest ready. It's probably ready. Of course, the swimsuit competition gives him nightmares. On a non-poetry note, Jeff would always (always!) prefer to be looking at big slick before the flop than a pair of bullets. Needless to say he'll take either and p.s. he's coming over the top. Raise, call or fold him at jwm222@psu.edu.
Daniel Nester is author of God Save My Queen and God Save My Queen II (Soft Skull), a prose poem project on his obsession with the rock band Queen. His work has appeared in Verse, Open City, Crazyhorse, and Best American Poetry. He is editor of the online journal Unpleasant Event Schedule .
Peter O'Leary has published a book of poetry, Watchfulness (Spuyten Duyvil), and a book of criticism, Gnostic Contagion: Robert Duncan & the Poetry of Illness (Wesleyan). In addition to acting as literary executor for the Ronald Johnson Estate, he is one of the long-time editors of LVNG. While making his "permanent" home in Chicago, he has recently been a temporary resident of Vienna and Budapest.
Jerome Rothenberg's most recent book of poems, his eleventh from New Directions, is A Book of Witness: Spells & Gris-Gris, and he is also the editor of Maria Sabina Selections just published by University of California Press in the Poets for the Millennium series. Books scheduled for 2004 include Writing Through: Translations & Variations (Wesleyan), Picasso's The Burial of the Count of Orgaz & Other Poems (Exact Change), A Book of Concealments (Chax Press), and 25 Caprichos, after Goya (Kadle Books, Tenerife, Spain).
Jaime Saenz (1924-1986), is widely recognized as Bolivia's greatest poet of the 20th century.
Zafer Senocak is a writer living in Berlin who has been referred to in The Encyclopedia of German Literature 2000 as "one of the most innovative German intellectuals and writers." The poem "Woman Babylon" appears in his 1994 book Fernwehanstalten (Babel Verlag). A volume of his essays, Atlas of a Tropical Germany, translated by Leslie Adelson, was published by the University of Nebraska in 2000. His newest collection of poems Schlafreflexe is forthcoming.
Peter Jay Shippy is the author of Thieves' Latin (University of Iowa Press). He has new work forthcoming in Verse, American Letters & Commentary and Barrow Street, among others.
Eleni Sikelianos's most recent books of poetry include The Monster Lives of Boys & Girls (Green Integer, part of the National Poetry Series), Earliest Worlds (Coffee House), & The Book of Tendons (Post-Apollo). She currently teaches in Naropa University's Jack Kerouac School, and at Denver University. Excerpts in this issue are from The California Poem, forthcoming from Coffee House (2004).
Julia Story's work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Verse, Painted Bride Quarterly, Good Foot, Salt Hill, and other publications. She lives in Bloomington, IN with her soon-to-be husband and their miniature dachshund.
Lee Upton's fourth book of poetry, Civilian Histories, appeared in 2000 from the University of Georgia Press. Her third book of literary criticism, The Muse of Abandonment, was published by Bucknell University Press. Her poetry has appeared in the Atlantic Monthy, the New Republic, Double Take, the American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Her fourth book of literary criticism, Defensive Measures: The Poetry of Niedecker, Bishop, Gluck, and Carson, is forthcoming from Bucknell University Press.
Jonah Winter writes books. His first book of poems, Maine, won the Slope Editions Book Prize. His second book of poems, Amnesia, won the Field Prize and is due out from Oberlin College Press in Spring 2004. His hobbies include playing music.
Max Winter's poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in First Intensity, Gutcult, Denver Quarterly, and Volt. He has published reviews in The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Newsday, and elsewhere. He is one of the Poetry Editors of Fence.
Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright is a literary translator in the Boston area. She is currently translating a book of poetry from the German by Zafer Senocak for which she received a 2003 NEA translation fellowship.
Mark Yakich's first book of poems, Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross, was a winner of the 2003 National Poetry Series and is forthcoming from Penguin Books in May. For more information: markyakich.com.
Yang Lian is a Chinese poet who was born in Switzerland in 1955 and raised in Beijing. He initially came to public attention in China as one of the young poets who first challenged the strictures of the socialist literary system at the very end of the 1970s and became known as the Obscure Poets. After participating in protests against the Tiananmen Square Massacre in New Zealand, Yang was forced to renounce his Chinese citizenship, taking up New Zealand citizenship instead. He has lived in London since 1993, although he now makes frequent visits to China and has published his collected works there in three substantial volumes. He has also had several books of English translations published, including Where the Sea Stands Still (Bloodaxe, 1999), Notes of a Blissful Ghost (Renditions, 2002), both translated by Brian Holton, and Yi (Green Integer, 2002), translated by Mabel Lee. For more works by Yang online, see: http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/yang.