Cornelius Eady is the author of eight books of poetry: Hardheaded Weather, (2008), Brutal Imagination (2001), a National Book Award finalist; The Autobiography of a Jukebox (1997) reissued in 2007; You Don’t Miss Your Water (1995); The Gathering of My Name (1991); Boom, Boom, Boom (1988); Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (1986), winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and Kartunes (1980). He is also co-editor with Toi Derricote of Gathering Ground (2006).

Eady’s work in theater includes the libretto for an opera, “The Running Man,” a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 1999. His play, Brutal Imagination, won Newsday’s Oppenheimer Award in 2002.

He has received the Prairie Schooner Strousse Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. In 2008 he, along with Cave Canem co-founder, Toi Derricotte, was presented the Elizabeth Kray Award.

Born in Rochester, New York, Eady has taught poetry at SUNY Stony Brook, Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, The Writer’s Voice, the 92nd Street Y, The College of William and Mary, Sweet Briar, and American University. In 1996 Eady and poet Toi Derricote founded Cave Canem, a non-profit organization for black poets. Eady is Associate Professor of English at Notre Dame.

Joyelle McSweeney is the author of two hybrid novels: Nylund, the Sarcographer (2007), a baroque noir from Tarpaulin Sky Press; and Flet (2007), a science fiction from Fence. She is also the author of two collections of poetry: The Commandrine and Other Poems (FenceBooks, 2004) and The Red Bird, which inaugurated the Fence Modern Poets Series in 2002. She also writes frequent poetry reviews for The Boston Review, Rain Taxi, and elsewhere, and is currently at work on a translation of the Aeneid as well as hybrid prose works.

With Johannes Göransson, McSweeney is the co-founder of Action Books and Action, Yes, a press and web journal for international writing and hybrid forms. With Göransson, she was a lead artist on The Widow Party, a collaborative multimedia performance piece created and performed during Returning from One Place to Another: A Poets’ Theater Showcase at Links Hall in Chicago in May, 2008.

Associate Professor Orlando Ricardo Menes’s poems have appeared in several prominent anthologies, as well as literary magazines like Ploughshares, The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Chelsea, Callaloo, Indiana Review, River Styx, Epoch, Spoon River Poetry Review, New Letters, Crab Orchard Review, and Green Mountains Review. Besides his own poems, he has published numerous translations of such poets as the Argentine Alfonsina Storni and the Cuban José Kozer.His third poetry collection, Furia, was published in 2005 by Milkweed Editions. Professor Menes is also the author of Rumba atop the Stones, published in 2001 by Peepal Tree Press (Leeds, England), in addition to being the editor of Renaming Ecstasy: Latino Writings on the Sacred (Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2004) and the forthcoming The Open Light: Poets from Notre Dame, 1991-2008 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).

Professor William O'Rourke is the author of The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left (1972) and Signs of the Literary Times: Essays, Reviews, Profiles 1970-1992 (1993), Campaign America '96: The View From the Couch (1997), and novels The Meekness of Isaac (1974), Idle Hands (1981), Criminal Tendencies (1987), and Notts (1996). He is the editor of On the Job: Fiction about Work by Contemporary American Writers (1977). O'Rourke wrote a weekly political column for the Chicago Sun-Times from 2001-2005 and has been awarded two NEAs and a New York State Council on the Arts CAPS grant. He was the first James Thurber Writer-in-Residence at the Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio. His most recent book is On Having a Heart Attack: A Medical Memoir (2006). His blog is available at theviewfromthecouch.com.

Valerie Sayers is the author of five novels: Who Do You Love and Brain Fever, both named "Notable Books of the Year" by the New York Times Book Review; Due East, which also appeared in five foreign editions; How I Got Him Back; and The Distance Between Us. A film, Due East, was based on Due East and How I Got Him Back. She has received a Pushcart Prize for fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship and has served on two NEA literature panels. Her stories, essays, and reviews appear widely, and have been cited as "Notable" and "Distinguished" by, among others, Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays.

Incorporating narrative forms of all kinds-from comic books, travelogues, journalism or code to Hong Kong action movies or science reports-Tomasula's writing has been called a 'reinvention of the novel,' combining an 'attention to society in the tradition of Orwell, attention to language in the tradition of Beckett, and the humor of a Coover or Pynchon.' His writing often crosses visual, as well as written genres, drawing on science and the arts to take up themes of how we represent what we think we know, and how these representations shape our lives. His short fiction has been published widely, and most recently in McSweeney's, The Denver Quarterly, Fiction International, and The Iowa Review where he received the Iowa Prize for the most distinguished work published in any genre.

Recent essays on body art, literature and culture can be found in Data Made Flesh (Routledge), Musing the Mosaic (SUNY), Leonardo (M.I.T.), and numerous other magazines. He holds a doctorate in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago and directs in the program for writers at the University of Notre Dame.

Associate Professional Specialist Matthew F. Benedict received his B.A. from U Mass/Amherst and his M.F.A. from the University of Notre Dame where he is also on the editorial board of The Notre Dame Review. He has had short fiction published in Potpourri, Byline, RE:AL, Hamline Journal, and Sgrafitto, and the anthology Freedom's Just Another Word. He has written a short story collection and is at work on a novel.

John Wilkinson's most recent books of poetry include Contrivances (2003), Lake Shore Drive (2006) and Down to Earth (2008). A reissue program of his earlier work began with Proud Flesh (1986/2005). His poetry is represented in the Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2001), and his critical writing has appeared in Cambridge Quarterly, Critical Quarterly, and Chicago Review. A collection of his essays was published in 2007 as The Lyric Touch: Essays on the poetry of excess. John Wilkinson also has a professional and academic background in mental health. He has been Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard University, Fulbright Distinguished Scholar at the Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, and during 2007-8 was the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Fellow at The National Humanities Center.

"The Brain's Tent," essay in Boston Review