Patricia Brody's poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Western Humanities Review and Paris Review, among others, and she has received two Academy of American Poets awards (2002 and 2003). She lives in New York.

Denver Butson is the author of Triptych (The Commoner Press, 1999), Mechanical Birds (St. Andrews College Press, 2001), illegible address (Luquer Street Press, 2003), Grace: For All the Children (in collaboration with visual artist Pietro Costa and photographer Cedric N. Chatterley, bilingual Italian/English publication, 2003), and Blood Works (in collaboration with Pietro Costa, Rapheal Fodde Editions, 2003). His poem "Tuesday 9:00 AM" was chosen by Billy Collins to be part of POETRY 180, a Library of Congress program for U.S. high schools, and an anthology on Random House, 2003). In 1999, Joyce Carol Oates nominated one of his pieces for a Pushcart Prize. Butson runs poetry and fiction workshops and coaches individual writers for WritersWriting.com.

Robert Klein Engler lives in Chicago and New Orleans. He holds degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana and The University of Chicago Divinity School. He was a department chair for many years at the City Colleges of Chicago. He now teaches at Roosevelt University. His poems and stories have appeared in Borderlands, Hyphen, Christopher Street, The James White Review, American Letters and Commentary, Kansas Quarterly, and many other magazines and journals. He was the recipient of Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards for his poem "Flower Festival at Genzano," which appeared in Whetstone and "Three Poems for Kabbalah," which appeared in Fish Stories, II.

Paul Espel is a poet and playwright whose poems have appeared in Yankee Magazine, Big City Lit and Green Fuse, among others. He has been a Pushcart nominee. Espel won the national New Voices award for playwriting. His plays have been done in New York and around the country.

Andrew Glaze's last book Someone Will Go On Owing, was chosen book of the year by SBA, and he recently won the Rossley literary award out of Boston. A New Yorker originally from Alabama, he currently lives in Miami. His latest book, Remembering Thunder will be in bookstores iin September.

Shelley Hainer curated a monthly poetry series for the five years Nexus Gallery thrived in the East Village. As the Director of Community Affairs at Waterside Plaza from 1990 through 1998, she edited and published The Watersider, a community newspaper. Hainer writes poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Her photographs have been included in group shows and a solo exhibition.  

Kythe Heller received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College in 2002 and now teaches at Sarah Lawrence and at Hofstra University. Her poems have been published in The Southern Review, Lyric, Pandora, and other journals.

Michelle Herman is the author of a collection of novellas, A New and Glorious Life, the novel Missing, and the forthcoming memoir, The Middle of Everything. New novellas are in the current (winter 2004) issues of Gingko Tree Review and At Length. She teaches in the M.F.A. program at the Ohio State University.

Ian Kahn graduated cum laude from the Columbia University Literature and Writing Program (1997), where he received the Quarto Magazine Award for Literary Excellence.

Sybil Kollar's work has appeared in numerous literary magazines including The American Voice, Chelsea, Columbia, The Literary Review, and Rattapallax and in anthologies including A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women. She has 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 and has been awarded writing residencies in Germany and Scotland. Her chapbook In Rooms We Come and Go was published by Somers Rocks Press and Water Speaking to Stone, a collection of her verse, is forthcoming in 2004.

Deena Linett's poems appear in Two Rivers Review, the Southern Review, and Rattapallax. Her most recent book is Rare Earths (BOA Editions, Ltd. 2001). She is Professor of English at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

Michael Morical writes and teaches ESL in Brooklyn, New York. His first book of poems, Gypsy Home, is in progress. His poems have appeared in Rattapallax, The New York Quarterly and other magazines.

Stella Padnos is a graduate student in creative writing at the City College of New York, where she won last year's Raymond Patterson Poetry Prize. A semifinalist for the 2000 Lyric Recovery award, she is a resident of the writers' colony of Brooklyn.

Margaret Peters Schwed did her graduate work at the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought. A former English teacher, she has written reviews for the New York Times Book Review and the Wall Street Journal. Her work has appeared in recent or upcoming issues of The River Oak Review, The Manhattan Literary Review, Raritan, and Rattapallax. She lives in New York and is completing a first book of poems.

Mary Austin Speaker is a poetry editor for the Indiana Review. She received the Lynda Hull Fellowship from Indiana University in 2003. Her work has appeared in anthologies, broadsides, and Rattapallax #10.

Stephen Stepanchev was the first poet laureate of Queens, NYC (1997-2000) and taught creative writing at Queens College from 1949 to 1985. He has published a major critique of American poetry American Poetry Since 1945 and ten collections of poems. His work appears regularly in such venues as The New Yorker and Poetry magazines.