Sonia Gernes is a poet, fiction writer, and professor emerita at the University of Notre Dame. She holds an M.A. in Creative Writing and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington and has held Fulbright, Lilly and NEA fellowships. She is the author of a novel, The Way to St. Ives, and five books of poetry, The Mutes of Sleepy Eye, Women at Forty, A Breeze Called the Fremantle Doctor, and What You Hear in the Dark, New and Selected Poems, 2006. She lives in Indiana and is currently at work on a novel.

Professor John Matthias has published twenty books of poetry, translation, criticism and scholarship. His most recent titles include Swimming at Midnight: Selected Shorter Poems (1995), Beltane at Aphelion: Longer Poems (1995), and Pages: New Poems and Cuttings (2000), and Kedging, (2007). Essays on Matthias's work appear in Word Play Place: Essays on the Poetry of John Matthias, edited by Robert Archambeau. Matthias has been awarded numerous grants and prizes including those from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Poetry Society of America, the Columbia University Translation Center and the Swedish Institute. He has been a Fulbright Scholar and Lilly Endowment fellow. His poetry has been translated into some ten languages. For more details, please visit Previewport.

James Walton (A.B. Notre Dame, 1959, Ph.D. Northwestern, 1966) joined the English department in 1963. He has published a novel, Margaret's Book (1989); a collection of poets from Notre Dame, The Space Between (1991); an edition of eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish political correspondence, The King's Business (1997), and essays on British literature (chiefly fiction) from Daniel Defoe to James Joyce.

Bei Dao

Bei Dao was born in Beijing in 1949. 1n 1978, he co-founded the first unofficial literary journal in 1949 called Today (Jintian). Since 1987, Bei Dao has lived and taught in England, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, France, and the United States. His work has been translated into thirty languages, including five poetry volumes in English: Unlock (2000), Landscape Over Zero (1996), Forms of Distance (1994), Old Snow (1992), The August Sleepwalker (1990), as well as the collection of stories, Waves (1990), and the essay collections Midnight's Gate (2005) and Blue House (2000). He has won numerous awards and honors.

Frances Sherwood

Frances Sherwood (Creative Writing – The Novel and Short Story) Raised in Monterey, California, Frances Sherwood attended Howard University on an Agnes and Eugene Meyer scholarship, graduated from Brooklyn College, received her M.A. from Johns Hopkins University where she was a teaching fellow in the Graduate Writing Seminars. She was also a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She is the author of a short story collection, Everything You’ve Heard is True (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) four novels, Vindication (FSG, 1992), Green (FSG, 1995), The Book of Splendor (W.W. Norton, 2002) and Night of Sorrows published by W.W. Norton, April, 2006. Vindication, nominated for The Book Circle Critics Award, was translated into twelve different languages and The Book of Splendor into five. Two paperback editions of Vindication and one of The Book of Splendor have been published. Sherwood has had two stories included in O'Henry Award Collections (1989, 1992) and one story was published in Best American Short Stories (2000). Twenty-four of her short stories have been published in magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, Zoetrope, and TriQuarterly.