Contributors

  Seth Abramson, a 1998 graduate of Dartmouth College, is a second-year student at Harvard Law School. A life-long resident of Boston, Seth began writing poetry in the fall of 1998, soon after his immersion into the somewhat stifling world of legal thought and writing. His work has been published or will soon be published in a number of print and on-line poetry journals, including the Melic Review, Savoy Magazine, Tintern Abbey, Eclectica, the Fish Eye Review, and the Southern Ocean Review. Seth recently received an Honorable Mention Award in Suitel0l.com's 1999 National Poetry Month Contest.
  Ammiel Alcalay is a a poet, translator, critic and scholar. He teaches at Queens College in the department of Classical, Middle Eastern & Asian Languages & Cultures. He is the author of After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), and The Cairo Notebooks (Singing Horse Press, 1993). During the war in former Yugoslavia he was a primary source for providing access in the American media to Bosnian voices. He edited and co-translated Zlatko Dizdarevic's Sarajevo: A War Journal (Henry Holt, 1994) and Portraits of Sarajevo (Fromm, 1995). He was responsible for publication of the first survivor's account in English from a victim held in a Serb concentration camp, The Tenth Circle of Hell by Rezak Hukanovic (Basic Books, 1996), which he co-translated and edited. He edited and co-translated a major new anthology of contemporary Middle Eastern Jewish writing, Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing (City Lights, 1996), the first collection of its kind in any language. He has also translated two books by the Cuban poet Jose' Kozer, Projimos / Intimates (Barcelona, 1990), and The Ark Upon the Number (Cross-Cultural Press, 1982). His latest book, Sarajevo Blues, a translation of the Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic, came out from City Lights in 1998. The text included here is an excerpt from Memories of Our Future: Selected Essays, 1982-1999 (preface by Juan Goytisolo), due out in 1999 from City Lights.
  Bill Berkson's latest book is A Copy of the Catalogue (Labyrinth, Vienna, 1999). He is a poet, art critic and professor of art history at the San Francisco Art Institute.
  Robert James Berry was born in Redhill, England in 1960, and was educated in the UK, Ulster and Scotland. Since 1991 he has lectured in English Literature and Language in England, New Zealand, and Malaysia. He currently lives and works in Selangor in West Malaysia. His poems have been published in poetry magazines and journals in the United States, England, Ireland, Scotland, New Zealand, Malaysia, Sweden, and Trinidad. Most recently his poems have been translated into German. He was a prize winner in the NST-Shell Poetry Competition. He is married to Ahila. He loves cats, especially his Siamese, Sheba, classical piano, and poetry.
C.E. Chaffin is a SoCal native and attended UCLA. His poetry collection, Elementary, is available through Amazon.com. He has been widely published on the web and in print. He is editor of The Melic Review and belongs to the Zeugma online poetry workshop.
  Joel E. Chace's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in print in the Seneca Review, the Connecticut Poetry Review, Spinning Jenny, Poetry Motel, No Exit, Pembroke Magazine, Crazy Horse, Kudos (England), and Porto-Franco (Romania), as well as in numerous electronic magazines, including Ninth St. Labs, Recursive Angel, Highbeams, Switched-on-Gutenberg, Kudzu, Pif, the Morpo Review, Snakeskin, and poetpoetzineseven. Northwoods Press, in 1984, published his collection of poems entitled The Harp Beyond the Wall. In 1992 Persephone Press published his second book, Red Ghost, which won the first Persephone Press Book Award and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in that same year. Big Easy Press brought out a collection entitled Court of Ass-Sizes in 1995, which was followed by a full-length collection, Twentieth Century Deaths, from Singular Speech Press (1997). The Melancholy of Yorick and maggnummappuss (nominated for a Pushcart Prize) appeared in 1998, and a bilingual edition of his poetry is being prepared in Romania. Chace presently serves as a poetry editor for the Antietam Review (Hagerstown, Maryland), as well as the electronic magazine 5-TROPE.
Tom Clark was born (1941) and raised in Chicago and attended the universities of Michigan (B.A.) and Cambridge (M.A.). He did postgraduate research on the poetry of Ezra Pound, resulting in a thesis, "The Formal Structure of The Cantos." From England in the 1960s he edited a series of mimeograph magazines featuring a generation of younger poets who would also appear in The Paris Review during his ten-year tenure as poetry editor (1963-1973). His own poetry has appeared in many volumes, from the 1960s (Stones, Air) through such recent books as a poetic life of John Keats (Junkets on a Sad Planet) and a poetic history of the Northwest Coast fur trade (Empire of Skin); his other poetry titles include When Things Get Tough on Easy Street, Paradise Resisted, Disordered Ideas, Fractured Karma, Sleepwalker's Fate, Like Real People and White Thought. He has written many books on sports and popular culture, as well as a number of biographies of writers: The World of Damon Runyon, Late Returns: A Memoir of Ted Berrigan, Jack Kerouac, Robert Creeley and the Genius of the American Common Place, and Charles Olson: Ihe Allegory of a Poet's Life. His works in fiction include a volume of tales, The Last Gas Station, and three novels, Who Is Sylvia?, The Exile of Celine, and The Spell. He has also written literary reviews for many newspapers and journals, including the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle (for which he has served as poetry critic since 1978). He has taught literature at a number of colleges and universities, and since 1986 has been a member of the Core Faculty in Poetics at New College of California.
  Nancy Victoria Davis
  Brad Evans was born in Sydney in 1971. He was placed into various institutions for twenty years, finally escaping in 1997 when poetry became too influential in his life. Some of his poems, related articles and short stories have been recently featured in magazines such as spindrift (Aust), ZineZone (UK), Manifold (UK), Rebellious (Australia), Konfluence (UK), Poetic Voices of America, Angel (UK), New Horizons (Aust), Breakfast All Day (UK), Green Left Weekly (Aust), Community of Poets Anthology (UK), Pearl (US), Five Bells (Australia) and Blue Print (UK). Brad is the founder and editor of Red Lamp, a journal for realist, socialist and humanitarian poetry.
  Norman Fischer is co-abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, where he has practiced for many years. He was ordained as a zen priest in 1980, and teaches Zen regularly in Canada and Mexico, as well as the Bay Area. He has published six volumes of poetry, with a seventh, the narrow roads of japan, a book-length travel poem in the manner of basho, out in fall of 1998 from ex nihilo press, (San Francisco). Fischer is currently at work now on his second prose book, a dharma book for and about young people called taking our places: mentoring young people coming of age. It will be published by Broadway Books in New York in 2000. Norman is married and the father of grown twin sons. He lives with his wife Kathie near Green Gulch Farm Zen Center at Muir Beach.
  Ellen Geist's short fiction has appeared in The American Voice, the Mississippi Valley Review, River Styx, Ishmael Reed's Konch, and other journals. She has completed a novel, Lehigh Parkway, and is at work on another. She has been a resident fellow at Yaddo and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and received a merit fellowship at NYU's graduate program in creative writing.
  Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada. His poetry has been published in America, the Iowa Review, Passages North, the Southern Humanities Review, the 1997 Anthology of Magazine Verse and elsewhere. His latest collection, Casualties: search-and-rescue poems (Coal City, 1995), is profiled in the 1998 Poet's Market.
  Scott C. Holstad has authored nine poetry books. His work has appeared in hundreds of magazines in twenty-six countries and five languages, including journals such as the Minnesota Review, the Hawaii Review, the Wisconson Review, Kiosk, the Chiron Review, Long Shot, Exquisite Corpse, Textual Studies in Canada, Pacific Review, the Poetry Island Review, the Arkansas Review, and the Southern Review.
  Coral Hull was born in Paddington, New South Wales, Australia in 1965. She is a full time writer and a member of The Field Naturalists Club of Victoria and The Australian Society of Authors. She is an animal rights advocate and the director of Animal Watch Australia, an online publishers' directory and resource site on animal rights and vegetarian issues. She completed a Master of Arts Degree at Deakin University in 1994 and a Doctor of Creative Arts Degree at the University of Wollongong in 1998. Her work has been published extensively in literary magazines in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. Her published books are In The Dog Box of Summer in Hot Collation (Penguin Books Australia, 1995), William's Mongrels in The Wild Life (Penguin Books Australia, 1996), Broken Land (Five Islands Press, 1997) and How Do Detectives Make Love? (Penguin Books Australia, 1998).
  JeanPaul Jenack has held a variety of jobs, including school teacher, college professor, TV writer/director, choreographer, street juggler, circus performer and freelance writer. For the past 15 years he has worked as Executive Director of the National Circus Project, a non-profit arts organization based in New York. His poetry and other writings have appeared in over 250 books, magazines and journals, and he has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Slate Council on the Arts for his work as an artist-in-schools. In 1990, he received a congressional commendation for "helping to further the cause of international understanding through his work in the arts (U.S. Congressional Record, 5/23/90). He has poetry recently appearing or forthcoming in print in Anthology, blood & feathers, Cicada, Common Threads, frogpond, Haiku Headlines, Modern Haiku, Nuthouse, Piedmont Literary Review, Point Judith Light, The Wicked and Writer's Cramp, and online in The Animist, Ascent Magazine, The Astrophysicist's Tango Partner Speaks, Aught, Brew-Net, The Bridge, Calliope, Conspire, Dream Forge e-Maga-Weba-Zine, Eclectica, Grape (Grepoetry), Haiku Light, Ink Magazine, Pogonip, The Signpost Freezine, A Writer's Choice Literary Journal, Word Salad and Ygdrasil.
Michael Largo has published a book of poetry, Nails In Soft Wood (Pikadilly Press) and two novels, Southern Comfort (New Earth Books) and most recently, Lies Within (Tropical Press).
  By day, Ross Martin is the Story Editor for 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks, where he develops projects for Spike Lee to direct and executive produce -- most recently, Summer of Sam (July 1999) and The Best Man (October 1999). He will be Associate Producer for a new HBO dramatic series from Spike Lee, set to air in 2000. By night (and weekend) Martin is the Poetry Editor for Nerve (www.nerve.com), the popular online journal of "literate smut." His poems and writings have recently appeared in AGNI, the Kenyon Review, Boulevard, Prairie Schooner, Lit, the Nebraska Review, Brooklyn Bridge Magazine, and Phoebe, among others. He lives in Brooklyn with the painter Jordana Munk, and can be reached via email at Ross@nerve.com.
  Jeremiah McNichols
  Dennis Must is founder-editor of Flying Horse, an alternative literary journal. His plays have been performed Off Off Broadway, and he has published, or forthcoming, work in Red Hen Press' Fiction 2000, Writer's Forum, Salt Hill Journal, Sun Dog: The Southeast Review, Rosebud, Southern Indiana Review, Red Rock Review, Sou'wester, Blue Moon Review, CrossConnect, and many other literary journals and anthologies. He was awarded First Place in the Alsop Review's 1999, Taproot Literary Journal's 1998 and The Oval's 1996 fiction contests. A collection of his short stories, BANJO GREASE (Creative Arts), will be published in spring of 2000. He resides in Massachusetts with his wife and two teenage daughters.
Eileen Myles is a midtown poet. She has written thousands of poems since 1974 when she arrived in New York. Her latest book of poems, School of Fish, won her a Lambda Book Award.
  Wanda Phipps
  Dan Raphael's favorite aspect of poetry is performance, which he does throughout the Northwest, sometimes with musicians. His recent poetry can be found in 5trope, Shattered Wig, Take Out, potepoetzine and the Pacific Northwest Spiritual Poetry Anthology.
  Michael Rothenberg
  Richard Seibert was born in Martinez, California in 1957. He began writing poems in 1973. He cooked at Chez Panisse for fifteen years, and is now a self-employed letterpress printer. He has self-published five books of poems and innumerable broadsides, and is currently working on translations of books III and VI of the Iliad, as well as the lyrics of Anacreon. He can be reached at rwsiii@webbnet.com.
  Sandy Steinman began writing poems, essays, one-act plays and short stories six years ago, after ten years of teaching Fine Art Photography to senior undergraduates at Fairfield University in Connecticut. Four of her short plays have been produced, two at the College of Marin in Kentfield, California and two at Dominican College in San Rafael, California. A short story, "End of Summer" is in a recent issue of Bust Out Stories, where another, "Smell," was included in their last issue. Then and Now, a book of poems and prose, was written and self-published in 1998 along with poet Larry Drake. Steinman's short fiction has also been published in Lines in the Sand, The Writer's Quill, Manx Fiction, and The Pacific Sun.
  Mike Topp is an aristocratic rebel whose high-spirited life has captured the imagination of Europe. He attended Harrow and Cambridge, where he was a good student and a great athlete. A deformed foot has only increased his determination to excel.
  Amy Trussell has been widely published in journals and magazines including Poetry Flash, the Prague Review, Revision, Kick It Over, Juxta, The 33 Review, Mendocino Country Magazine, and Woman of Power. She has also choreographed and performed her poetry with dance at many venues in San Francisco, San Diego, Nashville, and Alabama. She has just completed a book manuscript, Shadows From the Labellum.