Louis Armand is an artist and writer who has lived and worked in Prague since 1994. Publications include Seances (Twisted Spoon Press, 1998), The Viconian Paramour (x-poezie, 1998), Anatomy Lessons (x-poezie, 1999), Erosions (Vagabond Press, 1999), Synopticon (with John Kinsella: Mudlark, 2000), Land Partition (Antigen Press, 2000), Inexorable Weather (forthcoming), The Garden (a volume of experimental prose; 2001), Strange Attractors (Salt, 2003) and Malice in Underland (Textbase, 2003). He is the editor of the literary monthly, the Prague Literary Review.

Joshua Beckman is the author of four books of poetry including the most recent, Your Time Has Come, from Verse Press. A cd of his recent collaborations with the poet Matthew Rohrer, Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty just came out. He lives in Staten Island, New York.

Wayne Chambliss resides in New York City. His work has appeared in jubilat, Fence, The Germ, Drunken Boat, and a number of other literary journals.

Daniel Coudriet has poetry appearing in Verse, Crazyhorse, The Iowa Review, Harvard Review, and elsewhere.  He is currently translating the Argentinean poet Oliverio Girondo.  He and his wife just had a baby boy, Joaquín.

Linh Dinh is the author of two collections of stories, Fake House (Seven Stories Press 2000) and Blood and Soap (Seven Stories Press 2004), and two books of poems, All Around What Empties Out (Tinfish 2003) and American Tatts (Chax 2005). His work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2000, Best American Poetry 2004 and Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the Present, among other places. He is also the editor of the Anthologies Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam and Three Vietnamese Poets.

Thomas Fink is the author of three books of poetry, After Taxes (Marsh Hawk Press, 2004), Gossip (Marsh Hawk, 2001), and Surprise Visit (Domestic Press,1993), A Different Sense of Power: Problems of Community in Late-Twentieth-Century U.S. Poetry (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001), and The Poetry of David Shapiro (FDUP, 1993).  His work has been published in Talisman, Verse, Jacket, Barrow Street, American Letters & Commentary, Confrontation, Sidereality, La Petite Zine, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Contemporary Literature, American Poetry Review, American Book Review, Boston Review, Skanky Possum, Moria, Lit, Rain Taxi, and numerous other journals. He is a professor of English at the City University of New York-LaGuardia

Dobby Gibson's first collection of poems, Polar, won the 2004 Beatrice Hawley Award and will be available in May 2005 from Alice James Books. His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Fence, The Iowa Review, New England Review, Conduit and elsewhere. He lives in Minneapolis on the west bank of the Mississippi River.

Ian Ganassi's poetry, prose and translations have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including The Paris Review, American Letters & Commentary and Denver Quarterly. New poems appear or are forthcoming in The Journal, Elixir and Slake. A translation of Book 4 of Virgil's Aeneid is forthcoming in New England Review.

Chris Glomski is the author of a chapbook, IL LA, published by Noemi Press. A full-length collection of poems entitled Transparencies Lifted from Noon will appear in May 2005 from Meeting Eyes Bindery, an imprint of Spuyten Duyvil Press.  He lives in Chicago, where he teaches at the University of Illinois.

Kate Greenstreet's poems can be found in GutCult, Diagram, can we have our ball back, Conduit, Bird Dog, Pool, Xantippe, and other journals. A chapbook is forthcoming from Etherdome Press in 2005, and her first full-length collection will be out from Ahsahta Press in 2006.

Shafer Hall is the curator for the Frequency Reading Series and is an Associate Editor for Painted Bride Quarterly.  His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Unpleasant Event Schedule, Indiana Review, and others.

Bob Hicok just bought a Duncan Imperial yo-yo.

Christopher Janke's poems have appeared in Harper's, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and other journals. He lives in Turners Falls, Massachusetts with his wife, Emily Brewster, one floor above Suzee's Third St. Laundry, the Laundromat they own.

Paul Foster Johnson's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Aufgabe, PomPom, Fence, Conundrum, Washington Square, and Bird Dog. Quadriga, a chapbook of his collaborations with E. Tracy Grinnell, will soon be published by g-o-n-g press. With fiction writer Sherry Mason, he curates the Experiments and Disorders reading series at Dixon Place, a performing and literary arts space.

By the late 1920s, Daniil Kharms’ antirational verse, nonlinear theatrical performances, and public displays of decadent and illogical behavior earned him (he always dressed like an English dandy with a calabash pipe) the reputation of being a “fool” or a “crazy-man” in Leningrad cultural circles. Soviet authorities, having become increasingly hostile toward the avant-garde in general, deemed Kharms’ writing for children anti-Soviet because of its absurd logic and its refusal to instill materialist Soviet values. In 1931 he was arrested and prosecuted for his involvement in a group of "anti-Soviet children's writers." After serving a short time in exile, he was no longer allowed to perform his work. He found it increasingly difficult to publish even his work for children, which had been his sole source of income, and became evermore destitute over the next decade. He wrote for the desk drawer, for his wife Marina Malich, and for a small group of friends, the "chinari," who met privately to discuss matters of philosophy, music, mathematics, and literature. Kharms lived in debt and hunger for several years until his final arrest on suspicions of treason in the summer of 1941. He was imprisoned in the psychiatric ward at Leningrad Prison No. 1., and died in his cell in February, 1942. His work was saved from the war by loyal friends and hidden until the 1960s when his children’s writing was widely published and scholars began the job of recovering his manuscripts and publishing them in the west.

Aaron Kunin has a book of poems, Folding Ruler Star, forthcoming from Fence Books.

Jennifer L. Knox was born in Lancaster, California—crystal meth capitol of the nation, home to Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and the Space Shuttle. Her first book A Gringo Like Me is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in 2005. Her work has appeared in the anthologies Best American Poetry (2003 and 1997), Great American Prose Poems: from Poe to Present. She is the co-curator of the Pete’s Big Salmon poetry reading series in Brooklyn, NY.

Carolina Maugeri's poems have appeared in GutCult, Typo, and Chicago Review.

Shane McCrae graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop last spring and is currently a student at Harvard Law School. His work has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, American Letters & Commentary, the Hiram Poetry Review, GutCult and others.

Joyelle McSweeney's second book of poetry, The Commandrine and Other Poems, was released this fall from Fence.  She writes regular reviews for the Constant Critic and teaches at the University of Alabama.  She recently co-founded Action Books (www.actionbooks.org), a poetry and translation press.

Stan Mir’s work appears in recent issues of Colorado Review, eratio, Free Verse, and Word for/Word.

Julie Misso is a writer and painter from Buffalo, NY.  An editorial assistant for Slope Editions, her criticism also appears in Verse. 

Jennifer Moxley's third book, Often Capital, was published by Flood Editions in February 2005. She lives and works in Maine.

Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and educated in Armagh and at the Queen's University of Belfast. From 1973 to 1986 he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is now Howard G.B. Clark ’21 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. Between 1999 and 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. Paul Muldoon's main collections of poetry are New Weather (1973), Mules (1977), Why Brownlee Left (1980), Quoof (1983), Meeting The British (1987), Madoc: A Mystery (1990), The Annals of Chile (1994), Hay (1998), Poems 1968-1998 (2001), and Moy Sand and Gravel (2002). A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Paul Muldoon has won the 1994 T.S. Eliot Prize, a 1996 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the 2003 International Griffin Prize, the 2004 American Ireland Fund Literary Award, and the 2004 Shakespeare Prize. He has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as “the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War.”

Gina Myers lives in Brooklyn.  Her recent poems have either appeared or are forthcoming in Magazine Cypress, Carve, Tenemos, and Unpleasant Event Schedule.

Travis Nichols was born and reared in Ames, Iowa.

Nathan Parker's recent poems appear or are forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Colorado Review, Quarterly West, Swink, and others. He lives with his dear wife, Christie, and one-year-old son, Noah, in Alabama.

Lawrence Raab is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Visible Signs: New and Selected Poems (Penguin, 2003).  He teaches literature and writing at Williams College.

Matthew Rohrer is the author of A Hummock in the Malookas, Satellite, Nice Hat. Thanks (with Joshua Beckman), A Green Light, and the audio cd Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (with Joshua Beckman). He lives in Brooklyn and is a poetry editor for Fence Magazine and Fence Books.

Standard Schaefer's most recent book of poetry is Water & Power (Agincourt 2005). He co-edits the New Review of Literature . He lives in San Francisco with two beagles, a woman named Paris, and a baby girl on the way.

Richard Scheiwe is completing his M.F.A. at The New School. Prior to the New School, he attended the University of Chicago and Loyola University. His poetry and reviews have appeared in such places as 96 INC, INK magazine, and Verse. He currently edits Sink Review and lives in Brooklyn.

Barry Schwabsky was born in Paterson, New Jersey, and now lives in London. He is the author of Opera: Poems 1981-2002 (Meritage Press), The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art (Cambridge University Press), and [ways] (with Hong Seung-Hye; Meritage Press/Artsonje Center), among others, and has chapbooks forthcoming this year from Black Square Editions and Seeing Eye Books.

Rob Stanton was born in Bishop Auckland, County Durham in 1977. He is currently living in the small town of Pickering, North Yorkshire. His poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in can we have our ball back?, Great Works, Stride, Shearsman and Salt, while his criticism has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Canadian Literature, Jacket and How2.

Craig Morgan Teicher has poems and reviews appearing in Pleiades, American Letters & Commentary, Boston Review, and The Paris Review. He is a poetry fellow at the Bronx Writer's Center and lives in New York City, where he teaches composition and creative writing.

Thanh Thao was born in 1946 in Quang Ngai and now lives in Hanoi, where he works as a journalist. He participated in the 35th Poetry International Festival of Rotterdam in 2004, where his poems were translated into Dutch. English translations of his poems have appeared in the webzine, Drunken Boat.

Matthew Thorburn's first book is Subject to Change (New Issues, 2004). These poems are from a new manuscript, currently called Like Luck. His website is www.matthewthorburn.com.

Maureen Thorson lives in New York City, where she practices the fine art of hating pigeons. Especially when they make nests in her air conditioner. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Exquisite Corpse, LIT, The Painted Bride Quarterly, and Goodfoot.

Jen Tynes lives in Providence, Rhode Island. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Diagram, can we have our ball back, jubilat, TYPO, The Cultural Society, Indiana Review, Factorial,
Washington Square, and Verse Magazine. She edits horse less press.

Jean Valentine won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her ninth book, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965-2003, won the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. She lives and works in New York City.

Joe Wenderoth grew up near Baltimore.  Wesleyan University Press published his first two books of poems: Disfortune (1995), and It Is If I Speak (2000).  Verse Press published Letters To Wendy’s (2000).   He has two books forthcoming from Verse Press: The Holy Spirit of Life: Essays Written For John Ashcroft’s Secret Self, (Fall 2005) and Agony: A Proposal (non-fiction, Fall 2007).  He is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, where he lives with his wife and daughter.

Dara Wier teaches in the program for poets and writers in Amherst at the University of Massachusetts. Her two new collections are Voyages in English (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2001) and Hat on a Pond (Verse Press, 2002).

Matvei Yankelevich is the editor of the Eastern European Poets Series from Ugly Duckling Presse, and co-edits 6x6. Matvei's translations of Daniil Kharms have appeared in 3rd Bed, The Germ, New American Writing, Open City, PAJ, and Watchword. He is the co-translator of the OBERIU anthology coming out from Northwestern Press in the fall, and of An Invitation For Me to Think, selected poems of Alexander Vvedensky, forthcoming on Green Integer. His own writing has recently appeared in Carve, Fell Swoop, Fulcrum, LIT, Moon City Review, New York Nights, Open City, Torch and Weigh Station; and on-line at can we have our ball back, Shampoo, 3am, and Aught. He teaches Russian Literature at Hunter College in New York.