Aliki Barnstone‘s Wild With It is forthcoming from The Sheep Meadow Press in early 2002. Her previous collection, Madly in Love (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1997), was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She’s the editor of Voices of Light: Spiritual and Visionary Poems by Women around the World from Ancient Sumeria to Now (Shambhala 2000), and A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now (Schocken/Random House, 1992). A previous issue contained a selection from her study, A Changing Rapture: The Development of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry. She teaches in the International MFA Program at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas.

Marvin Bell, author of seventeen books of poetry and essays, has been called “a maverick” and “an insider who thinks like an outsider.” He is a longtime member of the faculty of the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. Additionally, he has taught for Goddard College and the Universities of Hawaii and Washington. In The Book of the Dead Man (Copper Canyon Press, 1990) and Ardor (Copper Canyon, 1994), Bell originated and developed a poetic form that has come to be known as “Dead Man Poems.” In his latest book, Nightworks: Poems 1962-2000 (Copper Canyon, 2000), he extends the Dead Man concept in 21 poems titled “Sounds of the Resurrected Dead Man’s Footsteps.” Bell lives in Iowa City, Iowa, where he now teaches one semester a year; Sag Harbor, New York; and Port Townsend, Washington. In the year 2000, the State of Iowa named him its first Poet Laureate. He is interviewed in this issue.

John Dempsey was born in Cairo, Egypt and came to the United States in 1979 where he set up residence in Greenwich Village. Mr. Dempsey now makes a living translating papyrus scrolls for such organizations as The Dead Paper Society, The Readers of the Lost Word and The Group for Disembodied Fabrics and Inks. Mr. Dempsey is the author of many short stories and poetry which can not be found anywhere, at all. Currently you will not be able to purchase any of his books nor recordings due to the Bad Writing Act of ’82. This act forced the seizure and extermination of The Mangrove Arts, a collection of poetry, and the cutting edge compilation Instructional Alcoholism: the liquefaction diary, which he produced using a technique known as “The 15th Mind”. This method is indigenous to a remote group of artists found in Tangiers and has not yet been introduced to the world of Western Literature.

Sarah Fox lives in Minneapolis with her daughter Nora and her husband, the poet John Colburn. She is the editor of the letterpress Fuori Editions, and is a 2001 Bush Artist’s Fellow. Her book, The Assembly of the Shades is forthcoming from Salmon Publishing in County Clare, Ireland.

Robert Gibbons‘ third chapbook of prose poems, This Vanishing Architecture, has just been published by Innerer Klang Press. He has work currently online in: http://www.ajprint.net/>The American Journal of Print ; Electric Acorn ; Evergreen Review ; Frank ; Gargoyle   Gargoyle ; In Posse Revew ; Janus Head ; Recursive Angel ; Slow Trains: Slow Trains and Tragos His first online chapbook, Brief History of Erotic Gesture, a collection of prose poems, is part of the current issue of Linnaean Street. He writes a regular column, “Observations,” for www.niederngasse.com, an online magazine out of Switzerland. Robert works at Northeastern University Library in Boston.

James Hoch was born in Camden, New Jersey. He completed his MFA at University of Maryland and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming from The Kenyon Review, Slate, DoubleTake, Agni, Antioch Review, Third Coast, Poetry International, Oklahoma Review, Poet Lore and others. Recently, his work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has won the Anais Nin Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. He has been awarded fellowships and scholarships from St Albans School in Washington. DC, as well as at Bread Loaf and the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia. His chapbook, Holler, appeared in 1996.

George Kalamaras is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne, where he has taught for the past twelve years. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Heart Without End (Leaping Mountain Press, 1986) and Beneath the Breath (Tilton House, 1988). His first full-length collection, The Theory and Function of Mangoes, won the 1998 Four Way Books Intro Series in Poetry Award and was published by Four Way Books in 2000. Among his awards are a 1993 NEA Poetry Fellowship, the 2000 Abiko Quarterly (Japan) Poetry Award, and two writing residencies at the Hambidge Center for the Arts. In 1994 he spent several months in India on a Fulbright Indo-U.S. Advanced Research Fellowship, researching Indian sadhus (Hindu holy men), where he had university affiliations at both Banaras Hindu University and Deccan College (Pune). A long-time practitioner of yogic-meditation, George Kalamaras is also a scholar, whose primary field of research is Indian rhetoric and Western composing theory. He has published a study on Hindu mysticism and Western discourse theory, Reclaiming the Tacit Dimension: Symbolic Form in the Rhetoric of Silence (State University of New York Press, 1994).

Walt McDonald was an Air Force pilot, taught at the Air Force Academy, and is Texas Poet Laureate for 2001. He has published eighteen collections of poems and a book of fiction, including All Occasions (University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), Blessings the Body Gave and The Flying Dutchman (Ohio State, 1998, 1987), Counting Survivors (Pittsburgh, 1995), Night Landings (Harper & Row, 1989), and After the Noise of Saigon (Massachusetts, 1988). Four books won Western Heritage Awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. His poems have been in journals including APR, The Atlantic Monthly, First Things, The Georgia Review, Image, JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association), The Kenyon Review, London Review of Books, The Nation, New York Review of Books, Orion, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, Stand Magazine (UK), and TriQuarterly . Walt is Poet in Residence at Texas Tech University.

Dzvinia Orlowsky is a founding editor of Four Way Books and a contributing editor to Agni and the Marlboro Review. She has taught as Faculty Fellow at the Mt. Holyoke Writers’ Conference, the Boston Center for Adult Education, Emerson College, Gemini Ink, and is currently on the MFA poetry faculty of the Stonecoast Writers’ Conference. Her poems have appeared in a number of magazines including Columbia, Field, Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, and The Massachusetts Review. Her translations and co-translations of contemporary Ukrainian poets appeared in an anthology entitled From Three Worlds: New Writing from the Ukraine published by Zephyr Press in 1996 (Somerville, Massachusetts), as well as in One Hundred Years of Youth: A Bilingual Anthology of 20th Century Ukrainian Poetry which recently won 1st place at the Lviv Book Publishers Forum. In 1992 Minatoby Press published her chapbook entitled Burying Dolls . She is the author of three full-length collections including A Handful of Bees (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1994) Edge of House (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1999) and Except for One Obscene Brushstroke (forthcoming). Dzvinia Orlowsky is a 1998 recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council poetry grant as well as a 1999 recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Professional Development grant.

Paul Perry (www.perrypaul.ie) is a poet and fiction writer. In 1998 he won the Hennessy Prize for Irish Literature. He has been a James Michener Fellow of Creative Writing at The University of Miami, and a C. Glenn Cambor Fellow of Poetry at The University of Houston. His work has appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, and The Best American Poetry 2000, among others. His first book, The Drowning of the Saints , has been described by Fred D’Aguiar as ‘a coalition of imaginative flair and formal discipline. Perry is a prodigiously gifted poet.’ Currently he serves as Writer in Residence in Co. Longford, Ireland. He is editor and co-author of the collaborative novel, Goldsmith’s Ghost, and also serves as Literary Editor to The VirtualWriter.net

Miriam Sagan is the author of over a dozen books. Her poetry includes The Widow’s Coat (Ahsahta Press, 1999), The Art of Love (La Alameda Press, 1994), Pocahontas Discovers America (Adastra, 1993), True Body (Parallax Press, 1991) and Aegean Doorway (Zephyr, 1984). Her novel is Coastal Lives (Center Press, 1991). With Sharon Niederman, she is the editor of New Mexico Poetry Renaissance (Red Crane, 1994. Winner of the Border Regional Library Association Award and Honorable Mention Benjamin Franklin Award), and with Joan Logghe of Another Desert: The Jewish Poetry of New Mexico (Sherman Asher, 1998) (See our review and our feature of Sherman Asher Press.) She and her late husband Robert Winson wrote Dirty Laundry: 100 Days in a Zen Monastery, a joint diary (La Alameda, 1997; New World Library, 1999). She is the author of Unbroken Line: Writing in the Lineage of Poetry (Sherman Asher, 1999) which Robert Creeley called A work of quiet compassion and great heart. She is also the author of four juvenile non-fiction books, and her work has appeared internationally in 200 magazines. Her non-fiction appears in The New Mexican, Albuquerque Journal, New Mexico Magazine, The Santa Fean, Crosswinds, and Sage Magazine. She has taught writing at Santa Fe Community College, Taos Institute of the Arts, Aspen Writer’s Conference, and around the country. She holds a B.A. with honors from Harvard University and a M.A. in Creative Writing from Boston University. She has held residency grants at Yaddo and MacDowell and is a recipient of a grant from The Barbara Deming Foundation/Money for Women.

r.l.swihart was born in Jackson, Michigan, in 1959, and currently lives in Long Beach, California. Educated in Engineering (Univ. of Michigan), Theology (Grace Theological Seminary), Near Eastern Languages/Culture, and Education (UCLA), he teaches math to inner-city Los Angelinos (Thomas Jefferson High School, Los Angeles, CA.). His work has appeared in Little Brown Poetry, Pigs ‘n Poetry, Electric Acorn, Niederngasse, Adirondack Review, In Posse, The Melic Review, and 3rd Muse.

Elaine Terranova is the author of The Dog’s Heart (Orchises, 2001), and two earlier collections of poems, The Cult of the Right Hand, winner of the 1990 Walt Whitman Award, and Damages. Recent poems have appeared in Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, The Crab Orchard Review, Poet Lore. Her poetry has appeared on Philadelphia buses as part of Poetry in Motion. She teaches at the Community College of Philadelphia and is associate editor for poetry of the on-line book review Frigate.She is represented in this issue by new poetry and poems from The Dog’s Heart.