Jeff Allen was born and raised in Chicago and now lives in New York where he is an Associate Professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York. He is the author of two books: the collection of poems Harbors and Spirits (Asphodel Press, 1999) and the novel Rails Under My Back (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000). Michael Anania’s most recent book is In Natural Light (Moyer Bell). “And Called to Mind” and “In Edges, Then” will appear later this year in Once Again, Flowered from Haybarn Press, an artist’s edition, with original lithographs by Ed Colker. Robert Archambeau edited Word Play Place: Essays on the Poetry of John Matthias (Swallow, 1998). His long poem Citation Suite was published by Wild Honey Press in 1997. He is Director of Creative Writing at Lake Forest College, and has just returned from a year as visiting professor at Lund University, Sweden. Renée Ashley’s collections include Salt (University of Wisconsin Press, Brittingham Prize in Poetry) and The Various Reasons of Light (Avocet Press Inc). She received a 1997-98 Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. Her work is included in the Pushcart Prize XXIV, 2000. Her third volume, The Revisionist’s Dream, will be issued from Avocet Press Inc in 2001. She is Assistant Poetry Coordinator for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. Jennifer Atkinson’s second book of poems, The Drowned City, has won the 2000 Samuel French Morse Prize and is due out this fall. She teaches creative writing and literature at George Mason University in Virgina. Ned Balbo’s first collection, Galileo’s Banquet, was awarded the 1998 Towson University Prize for Literature in honor of a Maryland writer under 40. A recently completed manuscript, House of Song, has been a finalist for the 2000 Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry and for the 1999 Richard Wilbur Award. He has reviewed poetry for Antioch Review, Parabola, and Verse, and teaches at Loyola College in Baltimore. Charles Bernstein’s most recent books include Republics of Reality: 1975-1995, poems from Sun & Moon Press, My Way: Speeches and Poems, from the University of Chicago Press, and, as editor, Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word (Oxford University Press). Bernstein is Director of the Poetics Program at SUNY-Buffalo. Home page at epc.buffalo.edu. Julia Budenz has been writing a poem in five books, The Gardens of Flora Baum, for thirty years. The pieces printed in this issue are taken from Book Five, By the Tree of Knowledge. James Doyle has work forthcoming in Chelsea, The Literary Review, The Ohio Review, and a number of other journals. His book of poetry, The Silk at Her Throat, was published in 1999 by Cedar Hill. William Doreski’s work has recently appeared in Atlanta Review and The Harvard Review. His recent books are Suburban Light (poetry, 1999) and Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors (1999). Roy Fisher was born in 1930 in Birmingham, in the industrial Midlands of England, but now lives further north, in Derbyshire hill country. His poems have been appearing since the mid-1950s. Books currently in print are Interviews Through Time (Shearsman) and The Dow Low Drop (Bloodaxe). John Gery’s recent books include The Enemies of Leisure (poems, Story Line Press, 1995) and American Ghost: Selected Poems (bilingual English/Serbian ed., tr. Biljana D. Obradovic, Raska Skola and Cross Cultural, 1999) as well as the critical work, Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry: Ways of Nothingness (Florida, 1996). His collection, Gallery of Ghosts will appear next year from Story Line. Stuart Greenhouse has had poems appear recently in Ploughshares, Fence, and Phoebe. His poems are forthcoming in Grand Street and Paris Review. He is a doctoral candidate in the creative writing program at the University of Utah. Corrinne Clegg Hales is the author of Underground, Ahsahta Press, and has poems in North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Southern Review and elsewhere. She teaches in the MFA Program at California State University, Fresno. Mark Halperin teaches at Central Wisconsin University. His book of poems, Time As Distance, is due out from New Issues Poetry & Prose, Western Michigan University, in the spring of 2001. Jeremy Hooker is an English poet and critic who teaches at Bath Spa University College. His most recent collection of poems is Our Lady of Europe (1997), and his most recent critical book Writers in a Landscape (1996). “The Seventh Song” is from his forthcoming collection, Adamah. Devin Johnston’s first book of poetry, Telepathy, is forthcoming from Paper Bark Press in the spring of 2001. He has recently published essays in Contemporary Literature and Callaloo, and he co-directs a poetry press called Flood Editions. Catherine Kasper is presently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her poetry, fiction and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Conjunctions, and many others. John Kinsella is the author of 20 books of poetry, including Poems 1980-1994 (Bloodaxe/Dufour), The Hunt (Bloodaxe/Dufour) and most recently Visitants (Bloodaxe/Dufour, 1999). He is also a novelist, playwright, and critic, and co-editor of Stand, international editor of The Kenyon Review and editor of Salt. He is a Fellow of Churchhill Collelge, Cambridge. Susanne Kort is a poet living in Caracas Venezuela. John Latta’s poetry appears or is forthcoming from Chicago Review, Jacket, American Letters & Commentary, The Iowa Review, The Germ, The Paris Review, The Hat, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry International, Sulfur, New American Writing, and elsewhere. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Jeffrey Levine won last year’s Larry Levis Award for a group of poems from the MissouriReview.He has recent work appearing in Ploughshares, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry International, Quarterly West, Many Mountains Moving, North American Review, Yankee Magazine, Crab Orchard Review and Barrow Street, among several others. He is editor of The Tupelo Press, a nonprofit literary press located in Walpole, New Hampshire. Norman Minnick was born inLouisville, Kentucky and received Bachelor’s degree in art from Marian College in Indianapolis where he also co-founded the Broadside Poets. He lives in Miami, Florida and attends Florida International University. Michael Olin-Hitt has published stories in The Nebraska Review, The Georgetown Review and West Wind Review. He is an Associate Professor of English at Mount Union College and lives in Alliance, Ohio. Paul Petrie has published work in many magazines, including The Atlantic, Commonweal, The Formalist, The Harvard Magazine, The Hudson Review, and The New Yorker. Kevin Prufer is the author of Strange Wood, which won the 1997 Winthrop Poetry Series. He is also editor of The New Young American Poets (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000) and Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing. His new poems appear in TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, The Southwest Review, The Southern Review, Boulevard, and The Antioch Review. Frances Richey’s work has appeared in Cream City Review, Willow Springs, Poetry Northwest and Mudfish. She teaches yoga in New York City. Jennie Rathbun lives near Boston. She works in the Reading Room at Houghton Library, a rare book library at Harvard University. “The Ferris Wheel” is her second published story. William Rushton has recently completed a dissertation on the poetry of A.R. Ammons at the University of Virginia. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama, where he teaches seminars in literature in the Honors Program of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Michael Russell’s short stories have appeared in New England Review and Third Coast. He has recently completed a novel, as well as a collection of short stories, and is currently at work on another novel. He lives in the Boston area. E.M. Schorb’s latest collection, Murderer’s Day, won the Verna Emery Poetry Award and was published by Purdue University Press. Recent work, prose and poetry, has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Sewanee Review, The Atlanta Review, The American Scholar, The Yale Review, among many others, here and abroad. He was recently awarded a grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and a Senior Fellowship forLiterature from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jonathan Stolzenberg is a retired physician and psychotherapist with a life-long interest in poetry. He is a graduate of Harvard College and received his M.D. from Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He recently earned his Master’s in Creative Writingfrom Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, where he lives. Stephanie Strickland’s manuscript, V, won the 2000 Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her “Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot” won the 1999 Boston Review prize, and its Web version http://www.wordcircuits.com/gallery/sandsoot/ was chosen for an About.com Best of the Net award. She is the author of True North (1997), TrueNorth hypertext (1998), The Red Virgin: A Poem of Simone Weil (1993), and Give the Body Back (1991). Virgil Suarez is the author of over 15 books of poetry and prose. He teaches creative writing at Florida State University. Peter Swanson lives in Newton, MA, and works at a non-profit company that does educational research and development. He has had recent poems in Faultline and Yankee Magazine. Diane Thiel’s book, Echolocations, has received the 2000 Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize from Story Line Press and will be published in November. Her work appears in Best American Poetry 1999, The Hudson Review, and Poetry. Her writing guide, Writing Your Rhythm, is forthcoming. Anthony Walton is the author of Mississippi: An American Journey and co-editor, with Michael S. Harper, of The Vintage Book of African American Poetry.